Go Further with the Sex Blogger Community

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Age Poll

Following the recent discussion regarding Age, here's a poll


How old are you?
16 - 24
25 - 29
30 - 34
35 - 39
40 - 44
45 - 49
50 - 54
55 - 59
60 - 64
65+
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Known Issues for Blogger in Beta

I've been asked by several bloggers whether to switch over to Blogger Beta. Perhaps I'll switch once they take the beta designation off of it.

Blogger has blog covering known issues in Blogger Beta which may be helpful. It covers bugs and missing features in the new version of Blogger (currently in beta) that affect a significant number of users.

To report a bug that is not mentioned, contact Blogger Support.

blogger.com, blogspot

Is Sex Blogging Only For the Young?

One of my readers posted the following:

While I appreciate that blogging is something younger people gravitate to, there's something a bit disconcerting that so much of this revolves around the young -- where are the folks in their late 40's-50's?? Are they just out living their lives with no time to sit in front of their computers? Or does it have something to do with declining sex drives/lack of interest . . . or heaven knows what?

Now, I do know there are bloggers out there like Dirty Talking Girl and Clayton Holiday who are no longer 20- or 30-something. But a quick perusal among the members of this community will show that a majority are well under 40. Not only that, but if you scout other sex and relationship bloggers "out there," it becomes obvious that few of them are spending any appreciable time chronicling sex, much less "alternative" relationships. There's A Perfect Marriage if you want hot monogamy, and of course a whole discussion forum devoted to hotwifery, though again, the age of most of its members is well below 40 from my casual observation.

So I ask myself: is it that the best sex writing is being done by the nubile? Or are older perverts like myself in the minority because our contemporaries are peacefully monogamous? Or have they simply given up? If it's not a crisis of energy, could it be that older perverts have to limit their activities, and are too busy boinking to blog?

The good news from my perspective and that of other older bloggers is that polyamorous perversity is alive and well at all ages. Last night I attended a discussion sponsored by Polyamorous NYC by Barbara Foster, Michael Foster and Letha Hadady, authors of Three In Love: Menages a Trois from Ancient to Modern Times. While the topic might have suggested a young trio of sluts, the Fosters and their long-time girlfriend, Ms. Hadady, were clearly among the member pool for AARP. I found this so refreshing, not only because of my own advanced years (careful readers will note that my first book appeared in 1776 just prior to the American Revolution), but because they showed that sexual deviance isn't restricted to the young.

You wouldn't know that from the preponderance of erotic imagery, either. When was the last time you saw a hot photograph of an older couple coupling?

While I would never presume to limit the membership of this group, or prescribe what topics should be covered in the various blogs, I would encourage everyone to re-examine their ideas about who's frisky and at what age sex no longer is important. Gloria Steinem revealed recently that at 73, she's glad the "combat" surrounding sex was behind her and she could concentrate on being friends with men. But if the comments on my blog are any indication, others are far from giving up the battle of the sexes anytime soon, at least if it ends up in sex.

My own writing derives directly from the efforts my wife and I have been making over the past year to "scrape the barnacles off our love life," a process that has found resonance with others no longer young. Just young at heart. So the next time you feel tempted to focus on that hot young stud or sexually-ambiguous Suicide Girl, ask yourself whether that gray-haired woman you saw on the bus today might be going to a rendezvous with her significant other, and will head home later to share the steamy details with her husband who's watching a porn DVD of Dave Cummings proving once again he can get it up and deliver the money shot.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

On use of others' images.

I frequently find my images used by bloggers, and on other websites. While that's not really a big thing, it does bother me when the image isn't credited as mine or better yet, linked to one of my sites.

Mostly folks who make pictures of all sorts are happy to let others use them as it's both flattering and can bring in traffic. Usually there will be an exception for commercial sites, as we generally aren't happy with other people making money from our work.

Here's a guide for dealing with artists that create original art:

1) Ask permission to use copyrighted work. Usually you know where it's coming from and can find the author. And usually we're more than happy to allow use with credit.

2) Assume all art work is copyrighted. Original film, drawings or notes are pretty good evidence if it comes to a lawsuit. Copyright holders can notify the ISPs of infringement and under law, the ISP is obligated to shut down the site even before infringement is proved. This is a huge hassle for everyone. But I have done it when my work was stolen for a commercial porn site once.

3) If the author says no, go look for something else. There are images all over the place and someone's probably made something better anyway. And that artist is probably a nicer person.

4) If you can't contact the artist, the first choice would be a link to the place where the picture came from. The second choice would be a prominent credit very near the picture, or a website URL so the artist is getting some traffic for the work.

There are a lot of costs that go into making the art that we show. In the case of a recent specific picture that was used without permission, I traveled from Maryland to Pennsylvania and hired a far too expensive hotel room. Plus film and associated photo costs.

I sell my photography, but don't mind lending small scans out to folks. I do resent having it snatched without any compensation or even a credit and most photographers I know feel about the same way.

-Don

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Really Simple Syndication

Really Simple Syndication or RSS for Short is a way of getting your favourite content 'delivered' to you regularly, it changes the web from a place where you hunt for content to a place where your favourite websites push content (Or notification of new content) out to your RSS enabled reader.

I'm going to look at this from two points of view.

1) The Content provider (i.e. YOU)

(Apologies if this is not the same for Blogger Beta, I do not have the ability to provide this information at this time)

This allows regular readers to be notified regularly of new content from yourself, sometimes within minutes of you posting the content.

In Blogger go into your settings and then find the 'Site Feed' Tab

'Publish Site Feed' must be set to Yes

Descriptions is set as you require, a setting of short will give the RSS reader a brief snapshot of your latest post, they can then go to your new post, Full will allow the RSS reader to read the whole posting in their RSS reader.

Below that is then the address for the feed, e.g. the SBC feed is at http://sexbloggercomm.blogspot.com/atom.xml

You can then add a footer at the bottom of each RSS notification.

Click on 'Save settings' All done, Web Browsers that recognise RSS feeds will notify your readers that this services is available.

2) The Reader

You will either need a Web Browser that can use RSS feeds correctly or an RSS reader. My personal preference is an RSS reader and the one I use on the Mac is Newsfire http://www.newsfirerss.com/, this is not a free product but is one I heartily recommend due to it's ease of use, ability to search all feeds and to create Smart Feeds. The $19 I spent on it has been more than paid for in the amount of time I've saved catching up with my favourite websites.

RSS allows me to pull down the content from literally hundreds of websites each hour, I see far more of the web than I used to and I'm far less likely to miss a story / article. With Newsfire I can set up smart feeds to pull any articles with phrases I'm interested in.

E.g. I'm a big football (real football, not your american rubbish) fan and I can have a smart feed that picks up anything that contains the words / phrases 'Football', "Premiership" or "Football club" and all matching articles will be displayed in the smart feed.

If you wish to help others read your page when it alters look at providing RS, if you wish to get more out of the web then look into RSS as a way to look at all of your relevant content.

Many New Arrivals

We now have 27 members, rapid growth I'm sure you'll all agree.

We received some good publicity from Adult Blog Hub and various people's Blogs so thanks for that.

A reminder that if you wish to join but have not done so already, please email me directly, comments do not always make it clear how to contact you back, and I need an email address to invite you.

Mel is working on the next review of a resource, if anyone else wishes to review a resource and how it can help bloggers please feel free to pop it up here.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

A small tutorial,.......Getting and installing AVGFree

With the last post fresh in mind, I thought I'd share this. It's a small tutorial I actually wrote for my dad this week, to update his existing install of AVGFree 7.1.

The install is for an older WinOS machine running 98se or WinME, but probably works on XP as well. If it's usefull to any of you, then please leave it up, if not, cool if ya dump it to.:)Please feel free to edit for your own needs.

TUTORIAL

ok, so they don't allow direct linking, but not too many clicks this. Print this out, follow the steps and all should be well...or reasonable.....either way, this worked for me on 98se.

1st off, this is the base link, go here to get the free stuff without too much hassle..

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1

From here you can read the fancy web page and get the fuzzy warm feeling that this is a legit upgrade. Don't screw with the links in the middle of the page at this point. We go from here to the side bar on the left, please note the side bar on the left of the page.

2nd off, skip all the promotional nonsense, and click on the "downloads" option on the sidebar mentioned above, that will give you a screen that has 3 options in the middle of your browser.....the top option should be "Installation files & documentation", with 2 more underneath, being updates and virus removal tools in that order. The top one is what we want to click on.

3rd now, If you clicked on "Installation files & documentation you should be at a screen trying to sell you an anti-malware and internet security package. Scroll down. In the middle of the page is a brief description of how to update 7.1free to 7.5 free, and just below that, a link to the free download for windows, and farther down, the same package for linux.

Download the free windows version, it about 14.5 meg, to a safe directory like dloads or something, and then shut down all apps........browse to it and run the install.

When prompted, select repair, very important, and let it run.

You will then have to reboot, AVG will be dead when it comes up, least it was in my case, and you'll have to tell it to look for updates. Updates will run as normal, install themselves, and all should go well......:)