Sex Blogger Community

Maybe Maimed - repost request on Eden Fantasys Linking practices

2010-05-27T01:31:00.002Z

NOTE: This post is stirring a lot of individuals. Eden Fantasys has responded by stating that all of their javascript code is according to web standard. However, they have imposed what they deem "martial law" on their forum and the closing of contributor accounts with great rapidity. Many individuals that write as sex bloggers review for a variety of sex toy companies. For those of you with less technical expertise, the basics are easy to understand. Turn off javascript and try to follow links. If you can't, then a search spider or "bot" can't either. Links are technically non-existent. Use this information to evaluate all companies that you may consider questionable.
-DBD

This entry was originally published at my other blog. I’m cross-posting it here in order to make sure it gets copied to more servers, as some people have suggested I’ll face a cease and desist order for publishing it in the first place. Please help distribute this important information by freely copying and republishing this post under the conditions of my CC-BY-NC-ND license: provide me with attribution and a (real) back link, and you are free to republish an unaltered version of this post wherever you like. Thanks.
A few nights ago, I received an email from Editor of EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine, Judy Cole, asking me to modify this Kink On Tap brief I published that cites Lorna D. Keach’s writing. Judy asked me to “provide attribution and a link back to” SexIs Magazine. An ordinary enough request soon proved extraordinarily unethical when I discovered that EdenFantasys has invested a staggering amount of time and money to develop and implement a technology platform that actively denies others the courtesy of link reciprocity, a courtesy on which the ethical Internet is based.
While what they’re doing may not be illegal, EdenFantasys has proven itself to me to be an unethical and unworthy partner, in business or otherwise. Its actions are blatantly hypocritical, as I intend to show in detail in this post. Taking willful and self-serving advantage of those not technically savvy is a form of inexcusable oppression, and none of us should tolerate it from companies who purport to be well-intentioned resources for a community of sex-positive individuals.
For busy or non-technical readers, see the next section, Executive Summary, to quickly understand what EdenFantasys is doing, why it’s unethical, and how it affects you whether you’re a customer, a contributor, or a syndication partner. For the technical reader, the Technical Details section should provide ample evidence in the form of a walkthrough and sample code describing the unethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques EdenFantasys, aka. Web Merchants, Inc., is engaged in. For anyone who wants to read further, I provide an Editorial section in which I share some thoughts about what you can do to help combat these practices and bring transparency and trust—not the sabotage of trust EdenFantasys enacts—to the market.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Internet sex toy retailer Web Merchants, Inc., which bills itself as the “sex shop you can trust” and does business under the name EdenFantasys, has implemented technology on their websites that actively interferes with contributors’ content, intercepts outgoing links, and alters republished content so that links in the original work are redirected to themselves. Using techniques widely acknowledged as unethical by Internet professionals and that are arguably in violation of major search engines’ policies, EdenFantasys’s publishing platform has effectively outsourced the task of “link farming” (a questionable Search Engine Marketing [SEM] technique) to sites with which they have “an ongoing relationship,” such as AlterNet.org, other large news hubs, and individual bloggers’ blogs.
Articles published on EdenFantasys websites, such as the “community” website SexIs Magazine, contain HTML crafted to look like links, but aren’t. When visited by a typical human user, a program written in JavaScript and included as part of the web pages is automatically downloaded and intercepts clicks on these “link-like” elements, fetching their intended destination from the server and redirecting users there. Due to the careful and deliberate implementation, the browser’s status bar is made to appear as though the link is legitimate, and that a destination is provided as expected.
For non-human visitors, including automated search engine indexing programs such as Googlebot, the “link” remains non-functional, making the article a search engine’s dead-end or “orphan” page whose only functional links are those whose destination is EdenFantasys’s own web presence. This makes EdenFantasys’ website(s) a self-referential black hole that provides no reciprocity for contributors who author content, nor for any website ostensibly “linked” to from article content. At the same time, EdenFantasys editors actively solicit inbound links from individuals and organizations through “link exchanges” and incentive programs such as “awards” and “free” sex toys, as well as syndicating SexIs Magazine content such that the content is programmatically altered in order to create multiple (real) inbound links to EdenFantasys’s websites after republication on their partner’s media channels.

How EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have an impact on you

Regardless of who you are, EdenFantasys’s unethical practices have a negative impact on you and, indeed, on the Internet as a whole.

See for yourself: First, log out of any and all EdenFantasys websites or, preferably, use a different browser, or even a proxy service such as the Tor network for greater anonymity. Due to EdenFantasys’s technology, you cannot trust that what you are seeing on your screen is what someone else will see on theirs. Next, temporarily disable JavaScript (read instructions for your browser) and then try clicking on the links in SexIs Magazine articles. If clicking the intended off-site “links” doesn’t work, you know that your article’s links are being hidden from Google and that your content is being used for shady practices. In contrast, with JavaScript still disabled, navigate to another website (such as this blog), try clicking on the links, and note that the links still work as intended. Here’s another verifiable example from the EdenFantasys site showing that many other parts of Web Merchants, Inc. pages, not merely SexIs Magazine, are affected as well: With JavaScript disabled, visit the EdenFantasys company page on Aslan Leather (note, for the sake of comparison, the link in this sentence will work, even with JavaScript off). Try clicking on the link in the “Contact Information” section in the lower-right hand column of the page (shown in the screenshot, below). This “link” should take you to the Aslan Leather homepage but in fact it does not. So much for that “link exchange.”

(Click to enlarge.)

If you’re an EdenFantasys employee, people will demand answers from you regarding the unethical practices of your (hopefully former) employer. While you are working for EdenFantasys, you’re seriously soiling your reputation in the eyes of ethical Internet professionals. Ignorance is no excuse for the lack of ethics on the programmers’ part, and it’s a shoddy one for everyone else; you should be aware of your company’s business practices because you represent them and they, in turn, represent you.
If you’re a partner or contributor (reviewer, affiliate, blogger), while you’re providing EdenFantasys with inbound links or writing articles for them and thereby propping them up higher in search results, EdenFantasys is not returning the favor to you (when they are supposed to be doing so). Moreover, they’re attaching your handle, pseudonym, or real name directly to all of their link farming (i.e., spamming) efforts. They look like they’re linking to you and they look like their content is syndicated fairly, but they’re actually playing dirty. They’re going the extra mile to ensure search engines like Google do not recognize the links in articles you write. They’re trying remarkably hard to make certain that all roads lead to EdenFantasys, but none lead outside of it; no matter what the “link,” search engines see it as stemming from and leading to EdenFantasys. The technically savvy executives of Web Merchants, Inc. are using you without giving you a fair return on your efforts. Moreover, EdenFantasys is doing this in a way that preys upon people’s lack of technical knowledge—potentially your own as well as your readership’s. Do you want to keep doing business with people like that?
If you’re a customer, you’re monetarily supporting a company that essentially amounts to a glorified yet subtle spammer. If you hate spam, you should hate the unethical practices that lead to spam’s perpetual reappearance, including the practices of companies like Web Merchants, Inc. EdenFantasys’s unethical practices may not be illegal, but they are unabashedly a hair’s width away from it, just like many spammers’. If you want to keep companies honest and transparent, if you really want a “sex shop you can trust,” this is relevant to you because EdenFantasys is not it. If you want to purchase from a retailer that truly strives to offer a welcoming, trustworthy community for those interested in sex positivity and sexuality, pay close attention and take action. For ideas about what you can do, please see the “What you can do” section, below.
If you’ve never heard about EdenFantasys before, but you care about a fair and equal-opportunity Internet, this is relevant to you because what EdenFantasys is doing takes advantage of non-tech-savvy people in order to slant the odds of winning the search engine game in their favor. They could have done this fairly, and I personally believe that they would have succeeded. Their sites are user-friendly, well-designed, and solidly implemented. However, they chose to behave maliciously by not providing credit where credit is due, failing to follow through on agreements with their own community members and contributors, and sneakily utilizing other publishers’ web presences to play a very sad zero-sum game that they need not have entered in the first place. In the Internet I want, nobody takes malicious advantage of those less skilled than they are because their own skill should speak for itself. Isn’t that the Internet and, indeed, the future you want, too?

TECHNICAL DETAILS

What follows is a technical exploration of the way the EdenFantasys technology works. It is my best-effort evaluation of the process in as much detail as I can manage within strict self-imposed time constraints. If any of this information is incorrect, I’d welcome any and all clarifications provided by the EdenFantasys CTO and technical team in an appropriately transparent, public, and ethical manner. (You’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to leave a comment.)
Although I’m unconvinced that EdenFantasys understands this, it is the case that honesty is the best policy—especially on the Internet, where everyone has the power of “View source.”

The “EF Framework” for obfuscating links

Article content written by contributors on SexIs Magazine pages is published after all links are replaced with a element bearing the class of linklike and a unique id attribute value. This apparently happens across any and all content published by Web Merchants, Inc.’s content management system, but I’ll be focusing on Lorna D. Keach’s post entitled SexFeed:Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts for the sake of example.
These fake links look like this in HTML:

And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video, female consumers make up 56% of video sales.

This originally published HTML is what visitors without JavaScript enabled (and what search engine indexers) see when they access the page. Note that the is not a real link, even though it is made to look like one. (See Figure 1; click it to enlarge.)
Figure 1:

In a typical user’s browser, when this page is loaded, a JavaScript program is executed that mutates these “linklike” elements into elements, retaining the “linklike” class and the unique id attribute values. However, no value is provided in the href (link destination) attribute of the element. See Figure 2.
Figure 2:

The JavaScript program is downloaded in two parts from the endpoint at http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx. The first part, retrieved in this example by accessing the URI at

http://cdn3.edenfantasys.com/Scripts/Handler/jsget.ashx?i=jq132_cnf_jdm12_cks_cm_ujsn_udm_stt_err_jsdm_stul_ael_lls_ganl_jqac_jtv_smg_assf_agrsh&v_14927484.12.0

, loads the popular jQuery JavaScript framework as well as custom code called the “EF Framework”.
The EF Framework contains code called the DBLinkHandler, an object that parses the “linklike” elements (called “pseudolinks” in the EF Framework code) and retrieves the real destination. The entirety of the DBLinkHandler object is shown in code listing 1, below. Note the code contains a function called handle that performs the mutation of the “linklike” elements (seen primarily on lines 8 through 16) and, based on the prefix of each elements’ id attribute value, two key functions (BuildUrlForElement and GetUrlByUrlID, whose signatures are on lines 48 and 68, respectively) interact to set up the browser navigation after responding to clicks on the fake links.

var DBLinkHandler = {
    pseudoLinkPrefix: "EFLink_",
    generatedAHrefPrefix: "ArtLink_",
    targetBlankClass: "target_blank",
    jsLinksCssLinkLikeClass: "linklike",
    handle: function () {
        var pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.each(function () {
            var psLink = $(this);
            var cssClass = $.trim(psLink.attr("class"));
            var target = "";
            var id = psLink.attr("id").replace(DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
            var href = $("").attr({
                id: id,
                href: ""
            }).html(psLink.html());
            if (psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                href.attr({
                    target: "_blank"
                });
                cssClass = $.trim(cssClass.replace(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass, ""))
            }
            if (cssClass != "") {
                href.attr({
                    "class": cssClass
                })
            }
            psLink.before(href).remove()
        });
        var pseudolinksAHrefs = $("a[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksAHrefs.live("mouseup", function (event) {
            DBLinkHandler.ArtLinkClick(this)
        });
        pseudolinksSpans = $("span[id^='" + DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix + "']");
        pseudolinksSpans.live("click", function (event) {
            if (event.button != 0) {
                return
            }
            var psLink = $(this);
            var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.pseudoLinkPrefix);
            if (!psLink.hasClass(DBLinkHandler.targetBlankClass)) {
                RedirectTo(url)
            } else {
                OpenNewWindow(url)
            }
        })
    },
    BuildUrlForElement: function (psLink, prefix) {
        var psLink = $(psLink);
        var sufix = psLink.attr("id").toString().substring(prefix.length);
        var id = (sufix.indexOf("_") != -1) ? sufix.substring(0, sufix.indexOf("_")) : sufix;
        var url = DBLinkHandler.GetUrlByUrlID(id);
        if (url == "") {
            url = EF.Constants.Links.Url
        }
        var end = sufix.substring(sufix.indexOf("_") + 1);
        var anchor = "";
        if (end.indexOf("_") != -1) {
            anchor = "#" + end.substring(0, end.lastIndexOf("_"))
        }
        url += anchor;
        return url
    },
    ArtLinkClick: function (psLink) {
        var url = DBLinkHandler.BuildUrlForElement(psLink, DBLinkHandler.generatedAHrefPrefix);
        $(psLink).attr("href", url)
    },
    GetUrlByUrlID: function (UrlID) {
        var url = "";
        UrlRequest = $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "/LinkLanguage/AjaxLinkHandling.aspx",
            dataType: "json",
            async: false,
            data: {
                urlid: UrlID
            },
            cache: false,
            success: function (data) {
                if (data.status == "Success") {
                    url = data.url;
                    return url
                }
            },
            error: function (xhtmlObj, status, error) {}
        });
        return url
    }
};

Once the mutation is performed and all the content “links” are in the state shown in Figure 2, above, an event listener has been bound to the anchors that captures a click event. This is done using prototypal extension, aka. classic prototypal inheritance, in another part of the code, the live function on line 2,280 of the (de-minimized) jsget.ashx program, as shown in code listing 2, here:

        live: function (G, F) {
            var E = o.event.proxy(F);
            E.guid += this.selector + G;
            o(document).bind(i(G, this.selector), this.selector, E);
            return this
        },

At this point, clicking on one of the “pseudolinks” triggers the EF Framework to call code set up by the GetUrlByUrlID function from within the DBLinkHandler object, initiating an XMLHttpRequest (XHR) connection to the AjaxLinkHandling.aspx server-side application. The request is an HTTP POST containing only one parameter, called urlid, and its value matches a substring from within the id value of the “pseudolinks.” In this example, the id attribute contains a value of EFLink_68034_fe64d2, which means that the unique ID POST’ed to the server is 68034. This is shown in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3:

The response from the server, shown in Figure 4, is also simple. If successful, the intended destination is retrieved by the GetUrlByUrlID object’s success function (on line 79 of Code Listing 1, above) and the user is redirected to that web address, as if the link was a real one all along. The real destination, in this case to CNN.com, is thereby only revealed after the XHR request returns a successful reply.
Figure 4:

All of this obfuscation effectively blinds machines such as the Googlebot who are not JavaScript-capable from seeing and following these links. It deliberately provides no increased Pagerank for the link destination (as a real link would normally do) despite being “linked to” from EdenFantasys’s SexIs Magazine article. While the intended destination in this example link was at CNN.com, it could just as easily have been—and is, in other examples—links to the blogs of EdenFantasys community members and, indeed, everyone else linked to from a SexIs Magazine article or potentially any website operated by Web Merchants, Inc. that makes use of this technology.

The EdenFantasys Outsourced Link-Farm

In addition to creating a self-referential black hole with no gracefully degrading outgoing links, EdenFantasys also actively performs link-stuffing through its syndicated content “relationships,” underhandedly creating an outsourced and distributed link-farm, just like a spammer. The difference is that this spammer (Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys) is cleverly crowd-sourcing high-value, high-quality content from its own “community.”
Articles published at SexIs Magazine are syndicated in full to other large hub sites, such as AlterNet.org. Continuing with the above example post by Lorna D. Keach, Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female Porn Addicts, we can see that this content was republished on AlterNet.org shortly after original publication through EdenFantasys’ website on May 3^rd at http://www.alternet.org/story/146774/christian_anti-porn_activists_now_targeting_female_. However, a closer look at the HTML code of the republication shows that each and every link contained within the article points to the same destination: the same article published on SexIs Magazine, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5:

Naturally, these syndicated links provided to third-party sites by EdenFantasys are real and function as expected to both human visitors and to search engines indexing the content. The result is “natural,” high-value links to the EdenFantasys website from these third-party sites; EdenFantasys doesn’t merely scrounge pagerank from harvesting the sheer number of incoming links, but as each link’s anchor text is different, they are setting themselves up to match more keywords in search engine results, keywords that the original author likely did not intend to direct to them. Offering search engines the implication that EdenFantasys.com contains the content described in the anchor text, when in fact EdenFantasys merely acts as an intermediary to the information, is very shady, to say the least.
In addition to syndication, EdenFantasys employs human editors to do community outreach. These editors follow up with publishers, including individual bloggers (such as myself), and request that any references to published material provide attribution and a link back to us, to use the words of Judy Cole, Editor of SexIs Magazine in an email she sent to me (see below), and presumably many others. EdenFantasys has also been known to request “link exchanges,” and offer incentive programs that encouraged bloggers to add the EdenFantasys website to their blogroll or sidebar in order to help raise both parties search engine ranking, when in fact EdenFantasys is not actually providing reciprocity.
More information about EdenFantasys’s unethical practices, which are not limited to technical subterfuge, can be obtained via AAGBlog.com.

EDITORIAL

It is unsurprising that the distributed, subtle, and carefully crafted way EdenFantasys has managed to crowd-source links has (presumably) remained unpenalized by search engines like Google. It is similarly unsurprising that nontechnical users such as the contributors to SexIs Magazine would be unaware of these deceptive practices, or that they are complicit in promoting them.
This is no mistake on the part of EdenFantasys, nor is it a one-off occurrence. The amount of work necessary to implement the elaborate system I’ve described is also not even remotely feasible for a rogue programmer to accomplish, far less accomplish covertly. No, this is the result of a calculated and decidedly underhanded strategy that originated from the direction of top executives at Web Merchants, Inc. aka EdenFantasys.
It is unfortunate that technically privileged people would be so willing to take advantage of the technically uneducated, particularly under the guise of providing a trusted place for the community which they claim to serve. These practices are exactly the ones that “the sex shop you can trust” should in no way support, far less be actively engaged in. And yet, here is unmistakable evidence that EdenFantasys is doing literally everything it can not only to bolster its own web presence at the cost of others’, but to hide this fact from its understandably non-tech-savvy contributors.
On a personal note, I am angered that I would be contacted by the Editor of SexIs Magazine, and asked to properly “attribute” and provide a link to them when it is precisely that reciprocity which SexIs Magazine would clearly deny me (and everyone else) in return. It was this request originally received over email from Judy Cole, that sparked my investigation outlined above and enabled me to uncover this hypocrisy. The email I received from Judy Cole is republished, in full, here:

From: Judy Cole
Subject: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 17, 2010 2:42:00 PM PDT
To: kinkontap+viewermail@gmail.com
Cc: Laurel
Hello Emma and maymay,
I am the Editor of the online adult magazine SexIs (http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/). You recently picked up and re-posted a story of ours by Lorna Keach that Alternet had already picked up:
http://kinkontap.com/?s=alternet
We were hoping that you might provide attribution and a link back to us, citing us as the original source (as is done on Alternet, with whom we have an ongoing relationship), should you pick up something of ours to re-post in the future.
If you would be interested in having us send you updates on stories that might be of interest, I would be happy to arrange for a member of our editorial staff to do so. (Like your site, by the way. TBK is one of our regular contributors.)
Thanks and Best Regards,
Judy Cole
Editor, SexIs

Judy’s email probably intended to reference the new Kink On Tap briefs that my co-host Emma and I publish, not a search result page on the Kink On Tap website. Specifically, she was talking about this brief: http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676. I said as much in my reply to Judy:

Hi Judy,
The URL in your email doesn’t actually link to a post. We pick up many stories from AlterNet, as well as a number from SexIs, because we follow both those sources, among others. So, did you mean this following entry?
http://KinkOnTap.com/?p=676
If so, you should know that we write briefs as we find them and provide links to where we found them. We purposefully do not republish or re-post significant portions of stories and we limit our briefs to short summaries in deference to the source. In regards to the brief in question, we do provide attribution to Lorna Keach, and our publication process provides links automatically to, again, the source where we found the article. :) As I’m sure you understand, this is the nature of the Internet. Its distribution capability is remarkable, isn’t it?
Also, while we’d absolutely be thrilled to have you send us updates on stories that might be of interest, we would prefer that you do so in the same way the rest of our community does: by contributing to the community links feed. You can find detailed instructions for the many ways you can do that on our wiki:
http://wiki.kinkontap.com/wiki/Community_links_feed
Congratulations on the continued success of SexIs.
Cheers,
-maymay

At the time when I wrote the email replying to Judy, I was perturbed but could not put my finger on why. Her email upset me because she seemed to be suggesting that our briefs are wholesale “re-posts,” when in fact Emma and I have thoroughly discussed attribution policies and, as mentioned in my reply, settled on a number of practices including a length limit, automated back linking (yes, with real links, go see some Kink On Tap briefs for yourself), and clearly demarcating quotes from the source article in our editorializing to ensure we play fair. Clearly, my somewhat snarky reply betrays my annoyance.
In any event, this exchange prompted me to take a closer look at the Kink On Tap brief I wrote, at the original article, and at the cross-post on AlterNet.org. I never would have imagined that EdenFantasys’s technical subterfuge would be as pervasive as it has proven to be. It’s so deeply embedded in the EdenFantasys publishing platform that I’m willing to give Judy the benefit of the doubt regarding this hypocrisy because she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a search query and a permalink (something any laymen blogger would grok). This is apparent from her reply to my response:

From: Judy Cole
Subject: Re: Repost mis-attributed
Date: May 18, 2010 4:57:59 AM PDT
[…redundant email headers clipped…]
Funny, the URL in my email opens the same link as the one you sent me when I click on it.
Maybe if you pick up one of our stories in future, you could just say something like “so and so wrote for SexIs.” ?
As it stands, it looks as if Lorna wrote the piece for Alternet. Thanks.
Judy

That is the end of our email exchange, and will be for good, unless and until EdenFantasys changes its ways. I will from this point forward endeavor never to publish links to any web property that I know to be owned by Web Merchants, Inc., including EdenFantasys.com. I will also do my best to avoid citing any and all SexIs Magazine articles from here on out, and I encourage everyone who has an interest in seeing honesty on the Internet to follow my lead here.
As some of my friends are currently contributors to SexIs Magazine, I would like all of you to know that I sincerely hope you immediately sever all ties with any and all Web Merchants, Inc. properties, suppliers, and business partners, especially because you are friends and I think your work is too important to be sullied by such a disreputable company. Similarly, I hope you encourage your friends to do the same. I understand that the economy is rough and that some of you may have business contracts bearing legal penalties for breaking them, but I urge you to nevertheless consider looking at this as a cost-benefit analysis: the sooner you break up with EdenFantasys, the happier everyone on the Internet, including you, will be (and besides, you can loose just as much of your reputation, money, and pagerank while being happy as you can being sad).

What you can do

If you are an EdenFantasys reviewer, a SexIs Magazine contributor, or have any other arrangement with Web Merchants, Inc., write to Judy Cole and demand that content you produce for SexIs Magazine adheres to ethical Internet publication standards. Sever business ties with this company immediately upon receipt of any non-response, or any response that does not adequately address every concern raised in this blog post. (Feel free to leave comments on this post with technical questions, and I’ll do my best to help you sort out any l33t answers.)
EdenFantasys wants to stack the deck in Google. They do this by misusing your content and harvesting your links. To combat this effort, immediately remove any and all links to EdenFantasys websites and web presences from your websites. Furthermore, do not—I repeat—do not publish new links to EdenFantasys websites, not even in direct reference to this post. Instead, provide enough information, as I have done, so visitors to your blog posts can find their website themselves. In lieu of links to EdenFantasys, link to other bloggers’ posts about this issue. (Such posts will probably be mentioned in the comments section of this post.)
Boycott EdenFantasys: the technical prowess their website displays does provide a useful shopping experience for some people. However, that in no way obligates you to purchase from their website. If you enjoy using their interface, use it to get information about products you’re interested in, but then go buy those products elsewhere, perhaps from the manufacturers directly.
- On the recommendation of my friend Dr. Charlie Glickman, I suggest Good Vibrations.
- On the recommendation of my friend Shanna Katz, I also recommend Fascinations.
Watch for “improved” technical subterfuge from Web Merchants, Inc. As a professional web developer, I can identify several things EdenFantasys could do to make their unethical practices even harder to spot, and harder to stop. If you have any technical knowledge at all, even if you’re “just” a savvy blogger, you can keep a close watch on EdenFantasys and, if you notice anything that doesn’t sit well with you, speak up about it like I did. Get a professional programmer to look into things for you if you need help; yes, you can make a difference just by remaining vigilant as long as you share what you know and act honestly, and transparently.

If you have additional ideas or recommendations regarding how more people can help keep sex toy retailers honest, please suggest them in the comments.
Update: To report website spamming or any kind of fraud to Google, use the authenticated Spam Report tool.
Update: Google provides much more information about why the kinds of practices EdenFantasys is engaged in degrade the overall web experience for you and me. Read Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages at the Google Webmaster Tools help site for additional SEO information. Using Google’s terminology, EdenFantasys’s unethical technology is a very skilled mix of social engineering and “sneaky JavaScript redirects.”

Advertising and Charities

2010-01-22T17:24:00.000Z

Although somewhat inactive, SBC still gets some traffic and may one day grow again. I've gotten requests for advertising. I'm thinking about this with the goal of directing the funds specifically to charities that are focused in a sexual way. Except for battered women, I don't know of any.

Any suggestions?

Templates and Images

2009-12-23T01:29:00.000Z

All of us in the blogger community have eventually decided to upgrade our initial template. The new template may come from one source or another. Today I found that several images that were original to a template and hosted by "Imageshack" now were replaced by a banner from them saying not to "hotlink" the images. I've also seen the same thing happen with "Photobucket" (That was pretty funny because it was an "inactive account" banner, and made it look as if the blog was closed.)

Flicker so far, has been reliable for me. Which photo hosting services have you had trouble with and which would you recommend for photos on your blog?

Reputable Affiliate Programs

2009-06-05T18:17:00.002Z

Hey folks; sorry I haven't posted here in a while. My wife and I are considering augmenting our blog with advertising but have NO IDEA how to find reputable affiliate programs. I have a few questions in this regard.

Is there a (less-biased) service that compares adult-affiliate programs?
Can anyone recommend any that has worked well for them?

We have modest (but respectable) traffic. Any help would be much appreciated.

Hello

2009-01-14T09:42:00.001Z

Hello all. Like Betty Rocket I was invited by DBD. I look forward to writing more. In the meantime I'll be reading everyone else's posts.

~ Sienna

Authors

2009-01-09T01:25:00.003Z

Having been involved with Eden Fantasys for some time, I've gotten to know several other reviewers. I've made the decision to extend invitations to many reviewers, bloggers that I know and anyone that shows any interest in writing on SBC at ANY point in the future.

If you used to be an author of SBC and would like to be so again, please let me know. I believe the decision to remove authors had a negative effect on SBC and I want to recreate the vibrant blog that it once was. Feel free to contact and inform others.

Color Me Flattered!

2009-01-08T21:42:00.002Z

Hello all, my name is Betty Rocket. DBD was kind enough to extend me an invite to participate in this fantastic blog, and I couldn't be happier!

Look for more things from me, coming soon.

Anything I can do in the interim, just ask! I can be contacted at betty.rocket@yahoo.com

B

SBC - Looking for New Authors!

2008-11-12T01:00:00.002Z

There have been more comments on SBC recently then in the past. Most of these comments are from people that I do not believe were part of SBC when it was formed. This is a community blog, and community resource. If you consider yourself a sex blogger (not just porn) and would like to write on SBC, then please send an email to SBCBlog@gmail.com.

Pretty much anything about sex, the adult community, sex related news and blogging is an appropriate topic. This is not a place to promote your blog, and posts that do so will be edited or removed.

At this point in time, SBC does not participate in a link exchange. However, it there is an author that wishes to take responsibility for updating a blogroll and ensuring that all links were sex bloggers, I believe it would be a vibrant addition to SBC.

What's Next for the Adult Entertainment Industry?

2008-10-26T20:25:00.003Z

I agree that adult bloggers need to have an open discussion about the state of the market today. It seems that free speech notwithstanding, "adult content" is getting a bum rap: many people I have spoken with about this think that the general repressed mindset is the real culprit, just look at the increase of filtering software available today with search engines bowing to the pressure and making it adult content the new "spam."

Although I am a new adult webmaster, I am quite disappointed in the quantity and quality of what's being presented: whether you are talking soft or hard core. While users with children should restrict access to the adult content that's intended for adult eyes only, the real question is: when adults search using keywords of "sex" or "porn" are they only looking for explicit photos or erotic stories? Isn't there more to adult content than this?

It seems that the adult social networking concept may be the saving grace: combining the ability for user generated content along with content provided by the webmaster. But in my opinion I think that the time may be right to step this concept up a level to an independent browser platform like Flock for instance.

I would like to get some input on this idea. Thanks to all.

Sexism within sex Bloggers

2008-06-29T10:11:00.002Z

OK, the title is sensationistic.

There is not sexism within sex bloggers, however a blog which features pictures of women drags the reader in far more easily than one which does not.

I have no desire to fill my pages with pictures as my thing is writing.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Thoughts on SBC- Stagnant

2008-06-18T14:15:00.003Z

SBC seems to have become stagnant. I have not put a counter on the site to see how often anyone is still visiting, but I know that advertisers still want to participate in a link exchange regularly.

When this blog was first set up, there was quite a bit of interest and quite a bit of people that had interesting thoughts about sex or blogging related to sex. It was a useful resource for many because of the issues that were posted over time.

I know that we are all still thinking about sex. What's up? Have people found other useful venues such as forums or yahoo groups? Were people offended by a prior decision to remove non-contributing members? I have heard that some people choose not to read because of that decision.

What would make this site more interesting and vibrant to you?
Do you want an extensive blogroll of sex blogs?
Do you want open membership that is not actually listed on the website so you can write easily?
I'm not as committed to fancy websites as someone like AlexSuze- I have other things going in my life. But I do like SBC as a group project.

That means the question needs answered- what's not working, and what should change so that sex bloggers come here as a general resource.

Internet Identification

2008-04-18T01:40:00.002Z

My kids are growing older and more capable on the internet. I want to keep my name "DevilBlueDress" but essentially make it unsearchable. I've locked certain blogs and online communities. I've changed my blogger ID to "DBD."

I'm looking for advice- especially on the technical side of the little things that I need to do so that I don't show up *easily* in a Goggle search. Has anyone gone through this before?
Thanks.

Spam and Comment Moderation

2008-04-18T01:38:00.003Z

Grumble. SBC has become a target for Spam attacks again. In order to keep the blog clean of complete crap, I'm turning comment moderation on. I'm on my computer at least every other day, so it shouldn't be much of an issue. Sorry about this folks.

Blogger

2008-03-08T19:18:00.001Z

Is anyone else having errors with Blogger.

My own blog appears to be MIA.

Anyone?

Think facebook but for people with fetishes....

2008-02-27T03:10:00.007Z

I don't know about you guys, but I have a lot of difficulty with
current bdsm 'community' websites. I put the word 'community' in
quotations because it feels like everything but. The Bondage and ALT's
of this world just feel like huge companies trying to get as many people and as much
money as possible. I also hated the fact that you can't actually do
anything unless you pay a lot of money. I couldn't deal with the
mentality of the actual site let alone the people who came along with
it looking for a quick lay. Sorry, but I won't travel 10000km across
the world to bow down to a guy I've never met and call him Master, all
for a one night stand, sorry, not going to happen. All I wanted was a
place to keep in touch with my kinky friends.

I use facebook, which I love, but I love it for my vanilla life.
It's great for my work friends, school friends, vanilla friends and
family but for the bdsm world, it just didn't work. Facebook, although
great, wasn't made for kinky perverts like me. I came across a site
(http://fetlife.com) that was able to "satisfy my needs". The creator
(johnbaku) is an actual cool guy, sent a message as soon as i signed
up and made me feel comfortable. This site is an ACTUAL community,
it's like facebook with fetishes... I keep up with my friends, know
what they're up to through the mini feed, look at their pictures they
uploaded, i can even write on their wall. AND it's free!!! (just a
bonus in this poor student's life).

Basically i just wanted to share this site with you because I'm sure
i'm not the only one who had problems finding an actual community for
the bdsm world instead of some mass dating site where I was just a
number in their meat market. Fetlife is an ACTUAL bdsm community where
the atmosphere is comfortable and friendly.

→ http://fetlife.com

Video Advice

2008-01-08T17:00:00.001Z

Hello friends and fellow writers,

My wife and I have been writing and posting pictures on bedroom-closet.com for over three months now. As everyone who writes erotic blogs knows, it's liberating. We love it. We made the decision recently to begin posting some short videos because we believe they'll compliment and enhance our content. We have the equipment and the material. We're having trouble with a host.

PornoTube.com let us create an account and pretends to accept our videos, but they never appear
YouPorn.com also pretends to accept our videos with no result as well. They never appear.

Customer service for both websites does not return email so we're stumped. We'd love to have videos hosted at the above sites but can't get in contact with anyone, and can't find another host that will allow us to post our videos for free and link back to our site.

Any suggestions or assistance anyone can offer us would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
- A and S

Google AdSense - For Adult Sites?

2007-12-28T14:00:00.000Z

To my surprise, Google Adsense approved my original blog. I applied expecting to be rejected because some of my posts are adult in nature, but I guess I was rather tame in the end.

What kinds of advertising sites are out there for adult sites? I'm looking for something like Google Adsense that is geared towards adult blogs. If you know of any, please give me the details in comments.

Photo Resources

2007-12-09T23:00:00.000Z

I'm not able to take sexy photos for the Blog unfortunately.

I was just wondering if anyone knew a resource where I could source some for free, Especially as the Blog is run for free.

Maybe I can showcase some work and provide some benefit for them also.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Looking for more Information on BDSM Relationships

2007-11-10T22:10:00.000Z

As I explore my own sexuality I find there is more and more I don't know. Although far from submissive all the time or in real life, I am at times quite submissive. A Switch. I would love to read more about the dynamics of BDSM from the relationship side or the Dom side. Can anyone recommend any good books or blogs? I already read 24.7 and PixiePie but those are both written from the submissive side.

Violet Blue: My erotica is not your child porn

2007-10-18T14:26:00.000Z

In today's San Francisco Chronicle column, Violet Blue has advice about what to do when your blog's content has been hijacked by a spam blog, which offered her content as child porn bait:

[ . . ]

Adorkable Grrl didn't just write a blog post and send e-mails; she also sent a cease and desist to the offending Web site, and asked for my advice. Being no stranger to having my content reposted without permission, or having my RSS feeds pilfered, I did a quick public records (whois) lookup for the URL offering her content as child porn bait, and discovered that the site was registered in India, but hosted by American company GoDaddy. I sent Adorkable Grrl the information, telling her to take extreme measures:

"Along with the e-mail cease and desist, send them a physical, registered mail copy of the notice of action. Also tell them that their false affiliation with your content brings to your attention their advertisement of pornographic material that is in direct violation of U.S. child pornography laws, and that you are left with no choice but to forward their information to the following entities:
1) Reporting Child Pornography. Provides contact details of field offices of the FBI in major cities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.
2) CyberTip Line — NCMEC. Handles calls and online reports of sexual exploitation of children.
3) Adult Sites Against Child Pornography. Nonprofit organization that works with the United States Customs Service and the FBI in enforcing anti-child-pornography laws. Includes their goals, FAQs, press releases, details of members, and a facility to report suspected sites.
Tell GoDaddy. I'm sure once GoDaddy finds out (and is aware you're reporting them to the FBI), they'll yank the site altogether. How awful; these people are truly horrifying."

[. . .]

Blog, spam, violet blue

Tits for Our Troops

2007-10-16T14:11:00.000Z

We have been running a weekly feature on our blog called Tits for Troops. Each week we post six to eight pictures of contributor breasts and well wishes to our troops (click here for an example). Everything seemed to be going well until recently the number of comments dropped off. We chalked it up to lurking more than anything else. Then, we got this e-mail.

Question, I am Marine in Iraq and while looking for I guess porn for troops, I saw that you had tits for troops. I was able to google your site to get an e-mail address. The site is blocked from the internet, even our personal internet we pay for in our rooms are blocked. Is there a way to sign up for anything or is everything on your website? If you have time and you reply could you also send a reply to my regular email address which is Mxxxxxxx@hotmail.com I sent the email from my work one to prove to you that I am in Iraq. I appreciate your time.
Cpl K,
OSP/Alpha Company

Since our blog is blocked for most of the guys and gals this feature is designed for, how should we go about fixing it? We were thinking of a news letter type of thing, but we don’t know what kind of effort that. We are open to suggestions and recommendations from anyone on how to do a news letter or way to fix the blocking problem.

Ken & Jen

MySpace - It's Not Just For Kids

2007-10-13T13:05:00.000Z

I have an update on my MySpace article. Click on this link to read the original article. After two failed attempts, I finally have a working MySpace page. While that one image that I had talked about in my previous article violated MySpace's Terms of Service, it turns out that it is likely that my account was phished ... twice. I woke up two mornings in a row to find my MySpace page had turned into ether. The message was that my account did not exist, and that it had been deleted. I had no explanation s to how or why. Nothing in e-mail. Turns out MySpace didn't delete my account due to content problems. Most likely, I had been phished.

MySpace apparently has a big problem with phishers. Why MySpace doesn't fix its weaknesses and bugs is beyond me. I've never had a problem with a computer virus or phishing mainly because I have a Mac and I don't fall for the usual phishing lines. Apparently, one way phishers get into MySpace pages by abusing the HTML in comments. I learned that to prevent this from happening, I had to disable HTML in comments so that no one could leave graphics in my comments on either the page itself or my MySpace blog. I was also told to change my password. So far, my latest and hopefully last MySpace page is alive and well. Phishers be damned!

Anyway, I think that sex writers could get a lot of mileage out of MySpace. I'm using it to meet other erotica, romance, horror, and bizarro writers and publishers. The image MySpace has as being only for teenagers is very wrong. Within only a couple of weeks, I've successfully networked with other writers, magazines, and publishers. Because of MySpace, I now have a new writing gig, writing an interview with a Scottish punk/metal band for Kink Magazine. I've heard of Kink. I had never seen their MySpace page before. I've become very close MS friends with an erotic romance writer from my publishing house, and she's helping me set up a brand new web site for my erotic and romantic writings. I've wanted a good web site location for awhile now, but I had not looked all that hard. This one is made for erotic romance writers.

Aside of finding some great networking opportunties, I'm enjoying futzing with the layout of my page. There are scads of web sites full of fun MySpace layouts and comments graphics. You can design your page to reflect your interests or your line of work. There are lots of sexy layouts for sex writers. One way I network is to post a "hello" on the pages of people at the top of my "friends" list. If they allow graphics, I post something sexy, magical, or funny. I do this on Mondays, Wednesdays (Hump Day), and Fridays/weekends. It's a lot of work, but it's working out well for me. My name is out there. I change my layout often, and I am going to frequently change my password to keep the phishers at bay. I've had a sexy devil layout, a Halloween layout, and a fantasy layout. Right now, I have an ocean layout with the sound of the ocean as my background music for the page.

Warning: MySpace is addictive. ;)

I think that sex writers might be able to find MySpace useful. We might have to be a bit careful with our content, which is something I will look at in future posts about MySpace. However, I think that MySpace could help sex writers find other writers and even magazines and publishers. I'm new to MySpace, so these are my initial thoughts.

ICE campaign - "In Case of Emergency"

2007-10-11T18:22:00.000Z

Intro: I actually live in the heart of Earthquake country, and I've seen this popping up a few times. This is a subject that is dear to my heart and well written here. Although not strictly about Sex Bloggers. It's about people, and well worth passing on. If their are objections, I'll remove it.

ICE campaign - "In Case of Emergency"
We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody, other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends.

If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn't know who to call. Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency? Hence this " ICE" (In Case of Emergency) Campaign

The concept of "ICE" is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name "ICE" ( In Case Of Emergency).

The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but they didn't know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose. In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as "ICE".

For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc.
Be sure it's in your kid's cell phones also.....

Plagiarism

2007-10-01T23:21:00.001Z

I've recently found a blog which has copied some of my content.

I've 'Contacted' the Abuse contact through the form, but my protests seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

I thought that Alex and Suze had an area to tackle this sort of thing, but my mind's paying tricks.

How has anyone else dealt with someone stealing their content?

A New face At SBC

2007-10-01T20:12:00.000Z

After a great deal of deliberation I have decided to step aside as primary administrator of SBC. Real life commitments and new demands on my online time mean that I can’t give this site the attention it deserves.

Effective immediately I am handing over the administration of SBC to Devil. If you’re not familiar with her work you can find her here.

I hope you will all join me in welcoming her to the position as primary administrator of SBC and give her all the support you can in the future.

Mr Gently retains the position of secondary admin.

Alex

Sex Bloggers, Explicit Content Warnings, and TOS Violations

2007-09-27T14:33:00.000Z

I just opened a MySpace page because my erotic writer colleagues told me I needed one. I opened it for advertising purposes, without which I might not get as many readers. The MySpace page has a blog, and I've been writing to that as well. I'm already addicted to MySpace, uploading sexy pictures and friending people. I even friended William Shatner, Jenna Jameson, Madonna, and the electronica artist DJ BT. Okay, so those MySpace pages are run by their handlers. I can dream, can't I?

I haven't even posted for a week and I've already seen a "terms of service" violation.

I found the sexiest, buff dude MySpace comments graphic. I'd like to show it to you. The problem is that MySpace spanked me for violating "terms of service", and instead of that hot, buff guy, you see a square with "terms of service violation" written on it.

The only way I can show you the picture is to tell you to go to this link. The image is the second one down; the one that says "God's Angel".

I don't even know why it's a TOS violation. I checked my e-mail and there aren't any warnings giving me a spanking. Is it because the image says "God"? Is it because the buff guy is naked and holding his jewels in his hands, and you can see pubic hair? One of my MySpace writer friends, Tess, posted a pic of four buff guys in my comments, and that stayed up. So why are four buff guys allowed to stay up, but one buff guy with wings gets the ax?

The odd thing is that I can't post that picture to MySpace friend's comments sections, but I can post it to MySpace blog sections. Why is the picture a violation in one area but not another? I think it may be a copyright violation, as in the artist who created the graphic didn't give permission for it to be forwarded. That makes no sense, though, since I can post the graphic to my MySpace blog, but not to MySpace friends comments. I have no clue why it's a violation.

I haven't had to deal with TOS violations in years. I used to post to AOL, and I was a master at avoiding TOS violations when people who hated my point of view tried to get me banned by abusing TOS. TOS abuse is when you try to ban someone whose opinions you don't like, or if you just flat out don't like that person. What was funny was that when the people on those AOL forums who hated me tried to TOS me because they claimed I was "harassing" them, THEY ended up getting TOS notices. Three notices and you're banned from posting for two weeks, from what I remember. These people didn't know the difference between harassment and opposing points of view. The message boards weren't their personal platform for them to air their views without rebuttal posts from those who don't agree with them. I remember when I ran my own message board on AOL about family law issues. The people who hated me continuously wrote to AOL admin, saying that I was writing hate speech, and they demanded that my board be shut down. They had their own board, and they complained that I was harassing them when I was only presenting a different point of view - one that they didn't like. In retaliation, they tried to get AOL to cancel my account and shut down my message board. They were quite vicious about it, calling me names, saying they wanted to find out where I lived, etc. In reality, they were violating AOL terms of service by flaming and trolling me on their own message board and on mine. What actually happened was that THEY were banned from posting for two weeks, and THEIR board was shut down. Dealing with TOS on AOL was like playing chess. It was a game, and you had to play by the rules in order to win. The problem is that the rules change all the time, and the rules differ everywhere you go. It's like posting in a carnival Fun House.

The logic behind a terms of service violation is never clear. It hasn't been as long as I've been online. And that affects sex bloggers, who have to deal with "explicit content" warnings.

So, why this image violated MySpace's TOS is beyond me. I won't post it anymore, obviously. Tess says she has images worse than that on her page, and they go through just fine. I don't get it. How can I avoid violating TOS when I don't know why I violated it in the first place?

My experiences with TOS violations (or the lack thereof, for me at any rate), made me think about Blogger boinking sex bloggers with "explicit content" advisory warnings. Who does that to sex bloggers? I don't think the sex blogger ever learns who went all Church Lady on their blogs. I've seen a couple of sex blogs with those "explicit content - choose the red pill or the blue pill" kinds of pages that come up before you get to their blog. How many bloggers have had to deal with content complaints in the past? I haven't had to deal with that at Typepad, where my blog is located. I was surprised by the MySpace image that was deemed a Terms of Service violation. I have no clue why it got spanked.

What are your experiences? Have any sex bloggers seen attacks on sex blogs based on supposed TOS violations?

The Perils of Advertising

2007-09-25T11:52:00.001Z

About six months ago we updated our PCs to the latest protection suite from one of the well-known vendors. The manufacturer of the software is irrelevant, both of the top two providers of such “Total Protection” software have similar facilities built in. IE7 has a phishing filter and pop-up blocker, and I’m sure that there are various built-in functions and plugins from other browser vendors and anti-virus firms/projects.

Actually there’s a point if anyone wants to write an informed article on PC security/AV protection software, or can point at some unbiased sources of information on the subject, that would be most welcome. As adult bloggers we all visit many sites with less than savoury content, pop-ups and what have you, so being protected is vital.

One of the features of our new protection software is a site advisor that indicates if a site is a known spammer, links to dubious sites, contains content that tries to breach browser security etc. It is flagging up more and more sites, blogs and listings … but not because the sites themselves are fundamentally dangerous, or the owners up to no good. The problem is advertising.

When you sign up for banner ads either directly from a company or from an ad broker you don’t have a huge amount of control over what you display. You can choose not to take adult adverts, but as an adult blogger you’re hardly likely to exclude that are you? Indeed you may choose only to take adult ads as they are in keeping with the theme of your site.

You can’t really blame (most) of the ad brokers either. They have to take ads based on what their advertisers are willing to provide. Dependent on where the actual content is served from they may not be able to screen the ad content for problems and/or follow every click-through link and check for rogue content.

However you have to be aware that if one of the monitoring firms crawls your site and finds you display an ad with perhaps a dodgy pop-up, or link to a site that tries to drop a Trojan on your reader’s site, you will be marked as a “problem” site. If we visit a site that’s carried iffy content a balloon pops up to warn us. On searches sites are red-flagged, so we simply don’t visit them, and on previously friendly sites, even if they aren’t flagged before we enter them the banner ads are starting to cause Trojan warnings to pop up.

So, think very carefully before you take advertising on your site.

Transferring Content to a New Host

2007-09-24T19:54:00.001Z

OK so I'm yet again thinking about moving from Blogger. Can anyone with the technical know-how please help me understand how I can transfer my existing content on blogger to another host? How easy is it? Is there a magic button ;)? Is there any advantage in starting afresh? Advice, comments, speculation and stories all equally appreciated! Thanks, Imelda x

Sex In The Virtual World - Computer Games

2007-09-23T16:03:00.000Z

Everyone probably already knows about the nude patches for The Sims. You can also pull the bed out from under your Sims with a cheat code if you can convince your horny Sims to get some nooky in bed. I remember reading of some MMORPGs having problems with groups being oriented towards sex play.

Now, someone playing the online game Second Life has filed suit against another player - for copying a sex bed, which violates copyright. According to an article about the case, "Kevin Alderman operates Eros LLC, a maker of 'adult' items such as the SexGen bed, a piece of virtual furniture that allows Second Life users to simulate more than 150 sex acts. The bed retails for 12,000 Linden dollars ($46). The 'John Doe' lawsuit accuses Volkov Catteneo of unlawfully copying the SexGen bed and selling it on for approximately 4,000 Linden dollars. The beds are sold as 'no-copy' objects, which means that avatars can use them but should not be able to copy them. Alderman has insisted that he does not know how a version of the SexGen bed which can be copied became available."

I have heard of Second Life, but I had no interest in playing it. I prefer to play God when I play with my Sims. I set them on fire. Electrocute them. Drown them. Get them into love triangles. Have them live with people they hate. All in all, good, honest fun.

The only reason the Second Life/SexGen bed caught my attention is because your avatar can engage in 150 different sex acts. Wow. 150? That beats the Kama Sutra. I looked at the Second Life site to get a better grip on what kinds of sex acts can be done on this bed. I found one bed that has 14 cuddle and 13 sex animations - whatever that means.

I found more.

One bed going for L$999 (I think that's virtual money) has 62 cuddle and sex animations, including doggy, 69, blowjob, missionary, taste, ride, and cowgirl.

Another bed included various positions for sex, bondage, and cuddling.

I'm going to take a second look at this game, if you can really do all that stuff. Does anyone who is reading play Second Life? If you do, can you give more information about how the SexGen bed works, and what else is fun about the game? Is it a live game, where you get to create an avatar? I know that I'd have to spend my own money if I play Second Life. I read another article about a man who "married" a woman who played the game with him, and his real-life wife is not happy about it. I found the real wife posting on an Internet forum, and that marriage is in serious trouble because her husband spends too much time with his virtual "wife" and ignores his real wife. Everyone hates on online games, don't they?

SBC Rules V3

2007-09-23T15:10:00.000Z

I’ve re-written the rules for SBC, they are essentially the same as before, just freshened up a little. I’ve dropped the term “member” because I believe that all sex/adult bloggers who blog (rather than those who create blogs for purely commercial gain) are all part of this site.

Sex Blogger Community Rules

Definitions

SBC: The Sex Blogger Community Site, its content, its contributors (those who post or simply comment)

Resource: A webpage or website which provides a service to Sex Bloggers; This can be to help promote their webpage, improve their blog in some way or assist in problem solving.

1) The Purpose of SBC

To provide a forum for the advancement of adult blogging across all blog platforms.

2) Administration

Administration will be provided by a nominated moderator/primary administrator and at least one other person. The role of the primary administrator will be the day to day maintenance of the blog, whereas the secondary administrator(s) will to provide backup in cases where the primary admin is temporarily unable to discharge their duties.

Currently (23 September 2007) The Primary administrator is Alex (alex@alexsuze.com) The, secondary administrator is Mr Genly (MisterGently@gmail.com).

3) Non-Commercial Status

SBC is a non-profit entity.

SBC will not host advertisements unless it becomes necessary to host on a service that requires payment. In such an event a treasurer will be appointed and charged with the handling of advertisement fees, payments to third parties and accounting/reporting on these transactions.

4) Suitability of Resources

SBC will not promote resources that carry a high ratio of advertising to content. The Moderators decision on this will be final, but all submissions will be judged on both their merits and their benefits to bloggers. Where appropriate discussion about inclusion of such sites will be held on the SBC site.

5) Linking

A member of SBC may not post a link to their own blog, that of another blogger or to a non blog site unless the link points to information relevant and useful to bloggers and consistent with the aims of the community.

Links back to SBC are welcomed, using the link code on the sidebar of the blog.

6) Contributions

Any blogger may contribute to or comment on SBC. Unless comment spam makes it impossible, comments will be open to all for the foreseeable future.
If you wish to contribute a post contact the primary administrator (See Section 2)

7) Behavioural Standards

SBC is a place for civilised discussion and informed opinion. Anyone posting or commenting on the posts on the SBC site should exercise restraint and good manners. Inflammatory, derogatory or abusive behaviour will not be tolerated and may result in the perpetrator being prohibited from contributing to SBC in any way in the future.

8) Contributors

As stated previously, anyone can contribute to SBC, but only recent contributors, those who have provided posts within the last two months will appear on the sidebar. After this time they will be removed as contributors to the blog. However should they wish to contribute a post they should contact the primary administrator (see Section 2) and request to be invited to become a member of the blog again.

Blogger Play and Private Images

2007-09-20T16:37:00.000Z

Blogger Buzz says:

"Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

A caveat: we use many techniques, including Google’s SafeSearch technology, to keep the images clean. Nevertheless, on rare occasions an image that you may find vulgar or obscene will slip through our algorithmic filters. Google does not pre-screen the images that appear in Blogger Play, nor is it responsible for their content. To report a terms of service violation, you may fill out this contact form."

This is actually a pretty cool stream of images. You can click "show info" and see which blog it comes from as well. For the sex blogger, it raises some interesting questions though. "SafeSearch" doesn't address privacy concerns, or the borderline images. Do images that are uploaded to private blogs go through this image stream as well? (I'm going to try to run a test with a friend soon, but haven't had the chance yet.)

As a reminder, Blogger already consolidates all pictures loaded into Picassa albums. If you make a mistake a load an HNT with your face, then you might want to remember to go to the album to delete it there as well.

In the meantime, it's another case of use caution with blogger.

Blogger Content Warning

2007-09-15T16:34:00.000Z

It appears that Blogger have started to take notice of readers “Flagging” blogs and placing warning/disclaimer messages on some blogs to allow readers to choose whether to read or exit a particular blog.

The warning above was displayed when I followed a link from a listing site while mooching around. What was behind the warning was not so much offensive, just a site peddling the same old trashy content ripped off from other blogs that you’ll find all over Blogger. So Blogger aren’t tackling what I would consider to be Splogs, but are prepared to slap a warning on your site.

Has anyone in the real adult blog world (as opposed to the *yawn* would-be commercial side of blogging) had their blog given the disclaimer page?

NB: the message header is in German because I think Blooger is a bit screwy today and is displaying part of its text in German and some in English. Das ist nicht güt. :P

Blogstormz- The Secret Brain...

2007-09-12T01:36:00.000Z

There have been a few discussions lately about Blogstormz turning into an ad site. It reminded me of the Artful Dodger. The blogger that started Blogstormz. He stopped blogging some time ago. I unexpectedly found a link to his site today and followed it. He had deliberately left the blog up with the purpose of it NOT becoming hijacked and becoming an ad site. I know that deleted blogs become spam/ads almost immediately.

It didn't work.

His template is still up. It initially loaded with the original post. It still has the comments that were relevant, but the post has been replaced with ads. What's up with that? Does anyone have any ideas how to protect a site or a blog if the blogger wants to leave or go on an extended time period without posting. Any ideas about how long a blog can go without new posts before it may get hijacked? Any solutions besides "Get off blogger..."

The Artful Dodger's [Edit: link removed as the site may link to pages designed to compromise PC security] last dated post was November 2006. I don't know when it became ads.

Contributors

2007-09-10T21:10:00.000Z

The question has been asked, “Why have I been removed from the sidebar/list of contributors?”

The answer is that I feel that the sidebar should reflect those who have recently contributed to this blog. Those removed had not contributed posts for at least two months and in some cases had never contributed a post.

Anyone can comment on this blog, and if they wish to post they simply have to drop me an email for a fresh invitation.

I outlined this change in my post here.

Google Analytics

2007-09-08T22:14:00.000Z

I don't know how many of you use site which track how many visitors you've had, but some also provide more in depth information.

The Two site I previously used were

http://extremetracking.com Which I've used for a year and a half.

http://www.mybloglog.com/ which gave me more information on where my visitors were coming from and going to.

I recently came across Google Analytics which gives similar information to mybloglog.

https://www.google.com/analytics/home/

Obviously people may have some reservations with giving Google even more of their information, but it does provide excellent information.

State Of The Community

2007-09-08T21:18:00.000Z

I hope everyone is returning invigorated from their respective summer breaks. The Sex blog world seems to have become a little stagnant of late with yet more blogs disappearing or grinding to a halt and contributions to SBC being a thin on the ground too.
Nil Desperandum.

You may have noticed that Blogstormz has disappeared from the sidebar of this blog. It’s been turned into an advertising/faux search site. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find sites on which to promote your blog. Most of the directories are flooded with commercial sites or simply don’t provide any traffic.

I don’t know about you guys but I’m getting fed up of stumbling across sites pretending to be blogs which are actually just posts listing links to porn sites. So if any of you have any new ideas … :)

Blogger Security Threat

2007-08-30T20:03:00.000Z

Over the past few days we (AlexSuze.com) have been receiving an unusually high number of emails trying to get us to click a link claiming to be on YouTube.

Obviously we didn’t click as the link was unsolicited and actually to a web server identified only by an IP address. We just deleted the emails as we do with the hundreds of other spam emails we get through each day.

However it is becoming apparent that the emails are part of a spam campaign that now affects Blogger blogs too. The hackers seem to be able to use the email posting facility on Blogger to insert dubious content on blogs. Visitors following links in this content are taken to a site which attempts to load one or more (Windows) exploits in an attempt to hijack the PC and turn it into part of the criminal’s Botnet.

Blogger has yet to give an analysis of the threat or what to do about it.

Please ensure you do the following

Check your PC is fully up-to-date with all Windows patches.
Make sure you have up-to-date anti-virus software.
Delete all spam mail immediately and never click on links in email unless you know the sender is trustworthy, no matter how much you are tempted to view a promised funny/interesting YouTube video.

And just to be on the safe side, if you don’t need “post by email”, turn it off for now. It’s only speculation that this is the infection route but it’s best to leave as few “doors” open as possible when there are security threats about.

As the exact attack vector is still unclear you would also do well to change your password, let’s face it changing your password from time to time is good practice anyway.

Lots of information can be found here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6970368.stm.

Absolutely sod all information can be found here http://www.blogger.com nice one Blogger!

Getting There

2007-08-11T21:17:00.000Z

As you know I’m slowly getting round to the task of whipping this blog into a better shape, trying to brighten things up and rationalise where I can.

I want the sidebar to be a resource for bloggers in future so it’ll need regular maintenance. To that end I’ve tidied up the sidebar a bit. I’ve updated the link-back code button as the old one would only work with Blogger Blogs, it now works from anywhere. I’ve also removed any links that don’t work or lead to dead sites.

I’ve added a link to “The Eye of Venus”, if there are any more sites that act as worthwhile directories for adult blogger’s work please let me know and I’ll add them. Lately most of the ones I’ve come across are flooded with commercial porn sites and provide little of no traffic.

If you spot any bad links or erroneous posts please let me know alex@alexsuze.com.

Eye of Venus - sex blog directory

2007-08-09T16:30:00.000Z

There is a brand new directory for Sex blogs that just went online! Eye of Venus.

"Born out of a desire to have a source for "quality" erotic blogs that truly lives up to its name, "Eye of Venus" was created as a repository of intelligent, entertaining, literate and photographic blogs dealing with the myriad facets of sex. Blogs submitted will be selected by merit, using our own rigorous and possibly quirky criteria. Our aim is to provide a service that highlights the best of erotic writing and visuals on the web, and to keep our standards consistently high.

Here is where we are forced to admit to a certain level of intellectual snobbery. This directory was created by sex bloggers, for sex bloggers tired of finding their work lost in a morass of "sex blogs" featuring badly-lit tits, asses and money shots (charming though they are, in their own way). We intend to keep this directory selective, and are approaching you as we feel you represent the quality we are looking for. We would very much appreciate your support in our quest to promote world domination of the superior sex blog."

The place looks interesting and has a directories of "Literate and Visual Blogs. I plan to explore some of the links that they have found!

Video Hosting

2007-08-06T20:25:00.001Z

We’ve started quite a bit of video recently. At the moment it’s all on YouTube.com, which is OK, but we are having problems uploading from time to time. Plus there’s the upload size/duration limit.

We’ve tried Google video, which seems quicker on upload and more reliable. It even has an unlimited upload size if you use the desktop version of the uploader instead of the web based one. My only gripe so far with Google Video is that the stats seem broken at the moment. More often than not the only video we have uploaded shows several hundred views one day then nothing for days on end, then the numbers reappear again.

Anyone else got any suggestions/experience of about free video hosting sites?

Joyscape.com -> Joy-Scape.com

2007-07-22T07:45:00.000Z

If you’re a regular reader you’ll remember this post: "Joyscape – Another One Bites The Dust?"

Well SBC received this comment last night:

“joy-scape.com is indeed gone, but some enthousiast [sic] have started a new community for adult bloggers called joy-scape.com

The main reason for joyscape.com to disappear is that the partners are separated and the Main owner didn't profit in the huge amounts of data bloggers generated.

The new joy-scape.com offers a standard 50mb webspace, 40 templates and some more features, it can be checked at the frontpage.

Peter”

Fiddlin' About

2007-07-20T21:48:00.000Z

I'm fiddling with the template on this blog folks, so don't be surprised things shuffle around over the next few days.

Attention FeedBurner Fans

2007-07-12T14:04:00.000Z

from Blogger Buzz:

FeedBurner users - we just added a feature for you. Matt's post on the FeedBurner blog explains it more fully, but in short, you can now specify a URL to which Blogger will redirect your feed's traffic. This means you'll no longer have some subscribers getting your Blogger-hosted feed while others get your FeedBurner feed, and your subscriber count should (as a result) be more accurate.

To enable this functionality, visit your blog's Settings | Site Feed page, and enter your feed's address in the "Post Feed Redirect URL" field.

Enjoy!

Note: this feature isn't limited to FeedBurner alone - you can use any feed-mashing service (like Pipes) with it.

Blogger and Adult Blogs

2007-07-09T08:14:00.001Z

How true is it that Blogger will delete adult blogs? Is this a rumour or should we start thinking about moving to an alternative as has been discussed in a previous post? I will be seriously pissed off if blogger deletes my blog, even if I do have some back-ups in word, as I will lose the comments etc.

I like blogger a lot; I find it incredibly easy to use, something I don't experience with wordpress despite it's popularity. But should I make a back-up now by transferring my content to another platform? How easy is this? Can I just suck my blog from blogger to an alternative? Will this harm the blogger original?

And what about alternatives designed specifically for adult blogs such as sensualwriter and thumbblogger, are these any good?

All experiences, thoughts and opinions would be gratefully appreciated from this novice blogger, thanks!

The Only Constant Is Change

2007-07-08T18:26:00.000Z

Thanks to those of you who commented on the presentation of this blog. Whether this place stays as it is, or becomes a Wiki or Forum your views are valued and received with thanks.
I’d now like to make another suggestion.

Rather than have the sidebar full of people who undoubtedly have an interest in the topics discussed here, I’d like to reduce the members down to those who have been recent contributors to the actual posts on the blog. That is, I am considering revoking membership to those who have not contributed for perhaps a couple of months.

Anyone can comment on the blog, the last thing I want is for it to be member-only, but keeping the actual list of contributors small will tidy up the sidebar a little and provide focus. If anyone wants to be a member, so they can contribute I’d have no problem with re-inviting them of course.

What do y’all think?

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

2007-07-02T20:46:00.000Z

Lorelle VanFossen, who writes here Lorelle on Wordpress, did a great series of posts on protecting your work, finding out if your content has been stolen and the growing trends in content theft:

Update: Lorelle also points to a large roundup article in Smashing Magazine. Smashing Magazine is primarily a design magazine, but this article was too comprehensive to pass up:

Copyright Explained: I May Copy It, Right?

Presentation of SBC

2007-06-26T14:58:00.000Z

Early in the life of this blog I proffered the opinion that while adequately presented as a blog the information held within SBC could be more easily accessible as perhaps a forum, or similar format.

Frankly I’m still of that opinion. As one post is added at the top of the blog others become submerged in the archives. This causes pertinent and useful information to become inaccessible to newer readers/members who might not be aware of its existence.

So I pose the question again. Is it not more appropriate to present SBC as a knowledgebase of some kind? Thus allowing multiple threads to be easily searchable and obvious to a user entering the site.

I’d love to know your views on the subject.

Re-posts

2007-06-25T20:40:00.000Z

How do feel about reposts?

I have a list of my favourite posts on the sidebar, but would it be poor form to pick up some of the others that aren't listed?

What's your own policy?

Alternatives To Blogger

2007-06-24T14:20:00.000Z

The vast majority of bloggers begin with Blogger. This is a two-edged sword because while there are huge numbers of bloggers on the system, a read-made community to explore, there are restrictions with content, formatting and expandability.

There are other blogging platforms, some who’s authors will host the blog for you (like on Blogger, what I’ve referred to as vendor hosting below), some who require you to have a server on which to host the software and some allowing you to do both.

Each has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, each aimed at a slightly different type of blogger. Most are free, as are themes and skins, but some aren’t.

b2Evolution

Main Site/Info: http://b2evolution.net/
Download: http://b2evolution.net/download/
Documentation: http://b2evolution.net/about/features.html (features page)
Vendor Hosting: N/A
Templates: http://skins.b2evolution.net/
Further Information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B2evolution
Programming/DB Environment:

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 4.1 (or higher?)

bBlob

Unfortunately the site http://www.bblog.org/, that I have as the source of this SW no longer resolves, if anyone knows if it still exists perhaps they could email me.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 4.1 (or higher?)

Blojsom

All Blojsom info can be access from this wiki : http://wiki.blojsom.com/wiki/display/blojsom3/About+blojsom

Programming/DB Environment: Java/Flat Files

Blosxom

The Blosxom web site is currently inaccessible (http://www.blosxom.com/) this may be another vendor/project that’s fallen by the wayside.

Programming/DB Environment: Perl/Data Files

Ellis Lab (Formerly PMachine Pro)

No longer under development, but you can get a free download from http://ellislab.com/.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 4.1 (or higher?)

Expression Engine (Ellis Lab)

This is an interesting one see http://expressionengine.com/ for details. The basic system is free, but I don’t know how basic that is :). The rest of the system has to be paid for.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 4.1 (or higher?)

MoveableType

Start here http://www.movabletype.org/ for al MoveableType info. I don’t know too much about this one so if anyone has any experience of it …

Programming/DB Environment: Perl/Several DBs, incl. MySQL, Berkeley, Postgres

Nucleus

I tried Nucleaus once, but couldn’t get along with it. From the version I saw it’s more of a Content Management System than a straight piece of blogging SW. Now that may be exactly what you want and I believe it has a very loyal following. See here for further rinfo http://nucleuscms.org/

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 4.1 (or higher?)
Trivia note: There’s a disclaimer in the FAQ section of their site because “At least one [unnamed] terrorist organisation” has chosen Nucleus for its website. As they point out there’s little any GNU/GPL software provider can do about who uses their SW.

Pivot

See here for details http://www.pivotlog.net/. Pivot is free and does not require a database to run, like Blosxom and Blojsom.

Programming/DB Environment: PHP4.0.6/Flat Files

Serendipity

I’ve never used this but here’s the site http://www.s9y.org/.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL or Postgress with PHP

SPIP

Details here http://www.spip.net/en . The system uses PHP 3 and MySQL. Worryingly your server must understand the .php3 as being a PHP file which is odd as it’s been deprocated for years and can cause compatibility/security issues. Asside from that the site’s logo is a cute flying squirrel :D.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL with PHP 3

Text Pattern

Details available here http://www.textpattern.com/.

Programming/DB Environment: MySQL 3.23 and above with PHP 4.3 and above

WordPress

We use WP and we love it. The system can be used as a basic piece of blogging software or you can tweak it with widgets or custom code (if you host it yourself).

Main site/Info: http://wordpress.org/
Download: http://wordpress.org/download/
Documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
Vendor Hosting: http://wordpress.com/
Templates: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
Further Information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

If you are thinking of paying for your own site ensure that your host supports the correct Programming/DB Environment as listed above.

If anyone knows of any more or has any information about these systems supplemental to that which I’ve covered pleas let me know and I’ll add it to this post.

Personally I believe that Blogger or WordPress hosted by WordPress is a good place to start, especially if you have limited technical knowledge, but as you mature as a blogger you may wish to consider the alternatives. That’s not to say you should switch away from blogger but it’s always best to be aware of the alternatives.

In addition to those systems listed above there are of course the new Vlogging sites (YouTube for example allows Vlogging), but that’s another post …

Blogger template loads with errors

2007-06-23T20:53:00.001Z

I have been trying to make some changes to my template with the new "drag & drop" features, but now the template loads with errors and there's no way to add a new page element. Has anyone else had this problem, and if so, how did you fix it/report it to Blogger?

Joyscape – Another One Bites The Dust?

2007-06-23T13:06:00.000Z

Has anyone any idea what happened to Joyscape? The site has effectively disappeared, a few days ago you could still see some sections but now IE refuses to show anything at all.

Across the Web people are asking the same question. So far, nobody’s answered.

I've emailed them but I'm not hopeful of a reply.

Blog Admin

2007-06-06T04:37:00.000Z

Couple of quick questions.
1. Has anyone found a substitute for blogrolling? It seems to be completely useless these days.
2. Any resources for instructions on customizing the new blogger templates? My usual technique of searching for key text doesn't work very well. (Besides Wordpress...)
3. Any thoughts on locking/unlocking site counters. Ethics of browsing other peoples site counters? I've occasionally found some very cool sites by browsing the to/from links from site counters.

Thanks!

EDIT: How do people keep their blogrolls up to date? Spent over an hour just clicking through all of them, and several have changed since then.

Potentially Dangerous Site

2007-06-02T06:52:00.000Z

I received this email on Friday 01 June 2007 at 13:41 GMT:

Dear bloghub member,

Many have asked about uploading their site photo to your listing
at bloghub.com .

As of today, we have finally fixed the upload photo problem.
Login to your account @ bloghub.com and upload your photo if you have not do so.

Some secret to share with you.
Lsting with a photo get twice more traffic than one without any photo.

We hope your blog will get more traffic from our directory.

Have a nice weekend.

Btw, join me and other fellow members at our public forum at www.bloggerhub.com . See you there.

Regards,
jayzee
admin

Need cheap web hosting, shoutcast, dedicated server or web design ?
Reply to this mail if you have any question or visit www.mxhub.com for our latest offers.

No longer with bloghub? Reply and we will remove you from our directory completely.

I thought it suspicious as I have never registered with this site.

When I clicked on the link to the site the error above was reported by McAfee. I did not of course allow the script to run. I would also advise anyone receiving this email not to click the “unsubscribe” link as my experience of such sites tells me that they may also contain suspicious scripting.
I would be very wary of this site and not advise anyone to go near it.

Tips for avoiding dangerous sites:

Don’t follow links on unsolicited emails, in fact don’t follow any link unless you trust the source of the email or web page its on.
Don’t try to “unsubscribe” by following links, this a) just confirms to spammers that your email address is a valid one and b) often takes you to a page with a software bomb on it.
Watch out for bad English or inconsistencies in the text. E.g. “Dear bloghub member” – “Login to your account @ bloghub.com”, but the site URL is “bloggerhub.com”. The first sentence too reads very badly too.

I have checked the email and it came from a sever in Texas at 72.36.253.130. So I'm assuming it orginated in the US. (helo=devil.xtardns.com)

WHOIS tells me that the registration is anonymous:

Domain Name: BLOGGERHUB.COM
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.enom.com
Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
Name Server: NS1.XTARDNS.COM
Name Server: NS2.XTARDNS.COM
Name Server: NS7.XTARDNS.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 15-mar-2007
Creation Date: 10-dec-2004
Expiration Date: 10-dec-2007

Sex Audia ... Is there anybody there?

2007-05-16T16:43:00.000Z

A couple of months ago we registered with Sex Audia and dutifully placed a link to the site on our sidebar. We requested that we be added to the list of sites on Sex Audia, and waited, and waited and waited. We emailed, and waited, emailed again, waited a little more and gave up.

Does anyone have an email address at Sex Audia other than that listed on the site we could use to contact these people? Or should we just give up?

Am I the Only One Unable to Log In to Adult Blog Hub?

2007-05-09T12:40:00.000Z

OK, I joined Adult Blog Hub and hope to become a posting demon like Tara Tainton. But my problem is that I can't log in. I've been working with the tech support people, and no luck. They, of course, can log in just fine. They tell me "it's your computer, asshole, it won't accept cookies." Well, that's not true. I have re-set my browser to accept third party cookies, have lowered my security setting to the lowest, and purged the cache of old cookies. Nada. When I log in, the screen simply blots out my password and waits for me to enter it again, staying in that "loop" without end.

And this is the only site I can't log into. Anyone else having this problem and any solutions that worked for you?

Backing Up Blogger Blogs

2007-04-18T22:43:00.000Z

When we actively used Blogger we did what we do now, keep a copy of all posts in Word, which is where we write anyway. It’s just a question of being methodical, some might say anal, about it LOL.

As for transferring to Word Press or another platform … although the migration tool used to work, we tried just after the new Blogger appeared and found that the tool simply didn’t function any more. It may have been the volume of posts, or it may just have been changes in the way the Blogger menus work. Word Press appears to extract the posts by navigating the menus in Blogger, so when the menus weren’t what it expected it threw a tantrum and refused to migrate posts. That’s not to say they (Word Press) haven’t fixed it now though. Has anyone else tried recently?

If you have an existing blog and simply want to back it up you could simply browse each of the archives (monthly archives) and Save (As) the web page to your own PC from your browser’s File menu. A bit laborious if you have a large blog but once you’re up to date, just save the previous month’s on the first of the month and away you go.

Alternatively you could use a tool like this http://www.httrack.com/ that will crawl a site and back it up for you via http. If anyone has tried this or any other tool I’d be interested in their experiences, good or bad.

Backing Up Posts & Moving From Blogger

2007-04-17T14:32:00.000Z

I have two questions for you geeks out there. Take your hands off your genitals and pay attention!

First, is there some way to back-up posts besides doing so manually for every one? You can download your template now, but what about my 250 posts?

Second, I'm exploring hosting my own site with domain name, but blanche at the thought of migrating all those posts. Can it be done, or is just better to start over and link to the new site from the old site?

Condoms and the Pill Both?

2007-04-11T17:36:00.000Z

I notice that some of you both require word verification AND moderate comments before posting them. I require verification, but don't moderate. Isn't using both a bit of overkill? Just wondering.

Be Careful How You Spread The Word!

2007-04-06T07:24:00.000Z

A word of warning to all you bloggers out there. Be careful who you subscribe to. We took onboard a new feed a few weeks ago and immediately started to receive an unprecedented amount of spam email and comments on our site.

Most of the spam was being generated to entice to commercial adult sites and we were getting hundreds of hits per day.

After a few days we decided to remove the link to them from our sidebar and guess what…the spam surge has now stopped completely.

So take care and be aware that this kind of thing happens and that removing the link can in some instances cure the problem.

It’s a pity that some feed sites attract the spammers, we’ve been listed on most of the sites on our sidebar for months, even years, with no problems whatsoever. So don’t let this one incident put you off promoting your blog, just be vigilant.

Creating a Banner

2007-03-31T15:22:00.000Z

I would like to create a banner for my Blogger blog site. Does anyone have the proper pixel dimensions for doig this in PhotoShop? I am no expert, but can probably fiddle around with it.

Break – Break

2007-03-30T21:16:00.000Z

Where to split a post? Well first of all, do you have to? Or perhaps the better question is why do you feel that you have to?

Years ago Stephen King was one of the first people to look to the Internet to publish a work, online and in several instalments. That must have been over a decade ago now. I heard about the idea at the time and thought it interesting, but never heard what became of the project. My personal view of Stephen King is that while many of his stories are classics and deservedly popular because of it, his works can be over long and because of that sometimes unfulfilling.
The state of the author’s bank balance however would tend to indicate that hundreds of thousands, no millions of people disagree. LOL. I think the most obvious answer about where to split a post is the simplest, wherever you feel it is necessary to do so.

In the case of blogs that are primarily journals then a day is a day, or maybe a catch-up after a few days absence. OK if you’ve been away for a while and the events of the intervening period are a little too much for your readers to take in at one sitting then perhaps you could split the post or defer the rest until later. But on the whole I think blogs work well as diaries, recording thoughts and events while they’re fresh and clear in ones mind.

When it comes to fictional pieces the question is a little less clear-cut but personally I feel that the worst mistake you can make is to try and stick to a formula. Ideas have a natural span, a lifetime on the page that you as the author will recognise. If you want to leave ‘em wanting more so to speak then create a cliff-hanger by all means, though not at the expense of a story’s flow.

If a piece is too long for someone to read, be that because they are busy, find the subject matter heavy going or for any other reason, that shouldn’t make you consider making the next piece shorter. In chasing the readers you can easily edit a story until it has lost its original power and meaning. At that point you have ceased to write for yourself and your readers …so who are you writing for?

BREAK!

2007-03-29T23:01:00.000Z

You know the time, you've written a post, but you think it may be too long.

Now of course if there's a natural break in the middle, you can split it, but what other things make you split a post, how many words is too many? Maybe you don't even think about it.

The New Blogger- Little Stuff

2007-03-22T16:31:00.000Z

Have you noticed the little changes about the New Blogger?
- I used to have word verification turned on. It's not on anymore. Perhaps this has contributed to the sudden upswing in Spam.
- The recent posts archive will only list the last 10 posts. Has anyone found a hack to make it continue to go backwards?
- It's more difficult to get individual URL's for older posts although not impossible.
- The search engine is differently designed and (IMO) more difficult to find exactly what you are looking for without looking at the entire blog post.

What else have people noticed?

What To Do About Spammers

2007-03-06T13:41:00.000Z

I have noticed a sudden upswing in SPAM from people with false Blogger IDs. They leave a comment that starts out nice ("great blog, I will come back often"), then launch into some bullshit about marketing shit to Eskimos. Other than comment moderation, is there any answer to this? I reported one site to Blogger, but zippo back from them.

Profile Trouble!

2007-02-25T16:02:00.000Z

Hey everyone, I need some help. I hope this is appropriate for this blog. If not, let me know.

Anyway, I created a Blogger profile a while ago (let's call it profile A), so i could comment on a friend's blog that was set up to allow comments by Blogger members only.

Then, Blogger switched to their new Google system.

After that, I made my Blogger profile for our current blog, Married Exploits.

Then the other day I tried to log into Profile A, but it wouldn't let me and told me to use a Gmail account or set one up. So i put in the Gmail account I use for our blog, and Profile A got merged into my blog account, because I wasn't entirely clear on what was happening.

I realized it last night before i fell asleep, suddenly. That if my "real-life" friend clicked on my Profile A name in her comments, she would now be taken to Odysseus's profile page! People in real life don't know my identity as Odysseus so this is a problem!

The problem is that because of the profile migration, I cannot now delete my comments posted on my friend's blog. That would be the easiest solution, but you have to log in as the original user to delete comments, and that user (Profile A) has been swallowed by the new Blogger.

For now, I took all the information about our blog and everything off of my profile page for now. So if anyone clicks to view my profile, it just shows my picture and email.

Ideally though I would like to put a bunch of information about my sexblogging identity in that profile.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this?

Banner Creation

2007-02-24T16:07:00.000Z

I need to create some new Banners, and maybe a few icons.

I need a main banner for my Blog
A smaller Banner for lists (e.g. Liclist and Cunning Linquists
I'd also like to create a few icons.

I'm working on a Mac and have tried the Gimp, but it seems overly complicated for what I need.

I'm willing to work with anything that's free or something that's low cost.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Advertising On Blogs

2007-02-14T21:07:00.000Z

While I would not like to see SBC turn into a blog consisting only of polls, Mr Gently does raise a very valid point about advertising on blogs. The way I see it there are five types of blogs.

The blog with no revenue generating aspirations. No ads, no commercial agenda.

The free-hosted blog whose author has decided that they can earn a little extra money on the side with a few adverts.

The hosted blog whose author uses revenue to pay for hosting.

Blogs intended to be a source of real income for the author.

Blogs designed to publicise an author’s off-line works.

There are variations on this and each blog evolves over time, but I think that about sums it up. With the exception of scraper blogs (see here and here), which fall into category iv), all of the above can be what I would regard as acceptable reading material.

The problem occurs when a blog author overloads the reader with ads, and/or places them intrusively on the page. Because of the relatively low income rate from most ad brokers it must be tempting to plaster your blog with flashing banners and annoy the crap out of your readers with pop-ups/pop-unders. You run the risk of alienating any readers you have already attracted and putting off new ones.

Personally when I find a site with too many ads I usually move on without reading, if the site has pop-up ads I almost invariably never visit again.

An example of this is Clicksor. We have stopped using that advertiser because the income, even at our respectable traffic levels, was very low. Their in-context advertising, which parsed your pages and inserted what it thought were relevant ads on keywords, was both irritating and slowed down the loading of our site. But they do provide an adult-blog-friendly source of income.

Although you can specify what type of adverts you are willing to host you’ll probably elect to accept all ads for maximum earning potential, but beware. Despite being provided by a third party your site will be associated in the minds of your readers with the ad content. Even as an adult blog this might not be what you want, after all you cannot see every page load and be aware of every ad an ad broker serves to your site.

As always it’s a question of balance and personal choice. If you work hard on your blog why shouldn’t you get a little cash in return? But beware of changing the nature of your site for what does amount to very little money.

Template Changes

2007-02-14T21:04:00.000Z

Don't be surprised if the template changes a little over the next couple of days. I'm shuffling round the furniture in here :)

Adsense

2007-02-12T20:22:00.000Z

Alex, please delete if this is not appropriate.

Blogger offers Adsense on both Classic and 'New' Blogger

My Quick poll focuses on Adsense.

POLL REMOVED

And in Comments, what do you think of blogs that use Adsense.

I'm also assuming that you'd need hundreds of thousands of clickthroughs to add up to a significant amount of cash.

I've always been curious

Cooperative Blogging

2007-02-10T23:07:00.000Z

I think it’s worth pointing something out before I launch into this post. This is a general post, not directed at any one blog or blogger. It has been written due to another recurrence of a problem which I have seen on several occasions since I started blogging. This is a post about avoiding problems and trying to ensure that harmony prevails in what can often be a very fraught and emotional environment – the adult blog.

I run an adult blog with Suze, my long-term partner. We agreed when we set up the site that everything that went into it, every image, every word must be approved by both of us. This is not too onerous as we are very like minded, and have similar terms of reference. We tend to write separately and then review each other’s work and suggest, usually minor, changes.

This is an ideal situation for cooperative blogging. A collaboration between two people who can communicate face-to-face. Should disagreements arise we discuss the issue and come to a compromise.

Where a blog has multiple authors, often separated by geography and culture, it is not so easy to resolve problems when they arise. A project may start with the best of intentions but tensions within and outside the blog and its members can lead to contributors feeling they can no longer continue to do so, or even be a part of the project.

As I said at the beginning this is based on my experience of eight cooperative writing projects (both adult and non-adult) that I have been involved in since we started blogging two years ago. The following is what I hope will be useful guidance to anyone wishing to start a blog with multiple contributors.

Define your blog’s purpose

This isn’t as grand as it sounds. Even one line, if succinct will guide your contributors towards a cohesive, well-written and therefore readable blog that can be a source of pride for all involved. But don’t be scared to describe your vision of the project in detail, though more than a few paragraphs might be overkill, stifling creativity.

Nominate administrators

I am involved in one project (non-adult) whose creator rather naively set every contributor up as an admin. About four months in, one of the contributors decided, for reasons unknown, to delete the blog without reference to the other contributors. So, while I would always advise at least two admins on any blog (in case of unforeseen circumstances, illness, vacations etc), chose your deputy admin carefully.

Specify who can contribute

Are you going to allow anyone to contribute who asks to join, just those bloggers known to you, or a small group decided on at the beginning by you?

Who owns the blog and its posts?

Make this plain from the start. Regardless of whether the posts relate to one another, or are stand-alone, it is vital to make it clear if the author retains copyright, or if the blog is the property of all, or nobody. Perhaps choose a licence of the Creative Commons variety. But make it plain.

What happens when someone leaves the blog?

If someone leaves the blog they may request the removal of posts. For whatever reason they leave, make it plain at the outset if they can take their posts with them. This is obviously tied into the question of author ownership of content. Personally I feel that if an author feels that their association with a project is no longer appropriate then an admin should respect their wishes and remove the posts when requested, in most instances. This can be detrimental to other contributors, especially if the posts relate or cross-link. Stating your intentions in such circumstances at the outset will save heartache later.

Get contributors to agree to your “rules”

Finally, get every contributor to agree to these terms by email. Send them a statement of intent based on the above and any other thoughts you have on the project. Get them to reply, stating explicitly that they agree to those tenets. An email may not be as binding as a signed agreement, but it will help should problems arise.

Don’t let any of the above put you off collaborative blogging, just take these points into consideration when embarking on such a venture.

And if anyone else has general suggestions, not related to specific blogs, please add them in the comments.

Hosting

2007-02-03T21:29:00.001Z

Blogger is currently disappointing me a lot, new blogger seems to be a huge improvement in every way, apart from reliability.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've tried to look at a blog (not even my own) do some admin, or post and blogger has not responded correctly.

With this in mind, I'm looking around for somewhere else to host GentlyGently.

Some of the options I've looked into are:

Wordpress Hosted
Buy some webspace and install Wordpress
Buy some webspace with blogging built in.

If anyone doesn't mind sharing, can I ask the following questions?

Where do you host your Blog?

How do you find it?

Did you previously use another service? of so, what was it and why did you leave?

Thanks in Advance for any responses.

I Like the New Blogger

2007-01-29T21:40:00.000Z

This may be a minority opinion, but so far, I like the new version of Blogger.

I should point out that I have only the one blog under this identity, so there were no complexities like those Devilinabluedress experienced. And I have no other contributors to manage, either. But before I moved forward with the switch, I did the following:

First of all, I backed up the text portions and embedded links to all my posts before switching over.

Second, I made a back-up copy of my template with its links, etc.

The advantages of the new Blogger are:

1.) Simplicity. I can manage my posts more easily. Since I have 30+ posts in the queue, I like being able to view my posts by "draft" or "published."

2.) Detail. I have some older posts that I probably won't ever publish, but I keep them around anyway. The new Blogger lets me label them as "Pending" without my having to look at them and say "is this the one I don't want to put up?"

The new postings publish almost instantaneously, none of that delay while it kicked in-- or having to choose between re-pub of the whole thing or just the index.

Never did figure out which choice to make, so would just vary it.

I also experienced some lost posts when Blogger would freeze during re-publishing, so that's no longer a problem.

Your mileage may vary, but if you aren't complicated, then maybe you will have as easy a time as I did.

BETA Blogger WARNING

2007-01-26T21:29:00.000Z

I tried to switch Devil over a few weeks back and was rejected. Today when I logged in I got a new message about switching over, so I held my breath and hit OK.

BETA Blogger did EXACTLY what I thought that it was going to do. I'm glad I prepared for it.

It merged all of my Devil blogs with a separate and previously secret blog that was listed under the same gmail account ID. It's called StarCatcher. It was a locked BETA blog. All of the profile information for Devil has been replaced by StarCatcher profile information- including the picture. All of the blogs including Starcatcher are now listed on my dashboard.

So if you have a second identity under the same email account- BE WARNED - before you switch to BETA.

I'd like to see this message spread, so if you feel like posting this on individual blogs, go ahead.

Change to new Templates

2007-01-25T21:26:00.000Z

Well, I've done this as well and it was almost as easy as the change to New Blogger.

First thing I did was took a copy of my template

The second thing I did was to take a second copy of my template and just keep the parts I had added, things like the blogrolling, stats links, button links, that kind of thing.

I clicked to change template type and selected a template very similar to my previous one, then before I completely switched, I tested the preview.

At this point I was very surprised that it looked like all of my changes had been kept in the new template, and I can only surmise that this happened because as far as I could, I followed the standard already in place in the template.

I told Blogger to complete the change in template at this point, and went to have a look at the new template configuration options.

I like the idea of the new Page Elements, however I don't know if it's been built to work with IE only because I had a lot of problems placing elements in the right place, it was very bizzare and led to lots of saving of changes and refreshing the page.

Fonts and Colours is even better, it gives you a representation of changes in Colours and Fonts, it's a Shame that the colour doesn't change automatically in the view at the bottom, you're required to save the change and manually refresh the view, but still a huge improvement on the old manual coding system

And beyond all of this, you can still hand code the HTML if you want.

Moving to Blogger

2007-01-25T20:15:00.000Z

The main worry I had about changing to New Blogger, was that I'd have to redo my Template.

I'm no web programmer, so the idea of putting it all back together worried me as I'm not exactly brimming over with spare time at the moment.

I went for it though, and clicked the button, after confirming my google account, it did the change and presented me with a new screen.

The new Dashboard is similar to the old one, and my Template survived.

I'm pleasantly surprised that it was so smooth and caused no problems, but I suppose that's why it's out of Beta.

One problem Alex and I did find was that even though I was removed as an Admin of SBC, I must still have been designated as the owner, so it was upgraded also. Just bear that in mind and I would suggest (And I'd guess that Alex would concur) that if you are a mod of a shared blog, make sure that someone who's an admin, but not the owner upgrades before the owner then any possible problem with admins should be covered.

Hopefully tomorrow, I may have time to move to the new Template Standards, does anyone have any advice?

Meebo Me

2007-01-20T01:42:00.000Z

Has anyone tried meebo me? It appears to be a widget you embed in your blog that enables you to see who is viewing it and also chat with visitors. Anyone?

bella

The Same Old Carry On

2007-01-18T20:34:00.000Z

As Mr G has announced I am now moderator of the Sex Blogger Community. As far as the blog is concerned this means “business as usual”, unless of course any of you have any suggestions that you feel might improve things around here :)

This is a community and I believe it should stay as such. A perfect example is Mr G’s previous post about the “iNotepad” software, it’s on-topic, being 100% relevant to bloggers, succinct, impartial and informative.

So all that’s left to add is to say a huge thank you to Mr Gently for starting this community in the first place and for his stewardship over the last four months.

iNotepad (Mac Software)

2007-01-17T20:00:00.000Z

I don't know if this is allowed, or should be in a resources section? Alex feel free to delete this post.

I recently found a product called iNotepad completely by accident for the Mac, it was on a coverdisk on a Mac magazine and the description sounded promising.

When I first started Blogging, I typed straight into the blogger box and hit 'Publish Post' and there you go. Longer posts soon needed something different and I retreated to the tried and trusted Microsoft Word. I never felt comfortable for some reason using that, it didn't seem to flow very well, allow multiple pieces to be worked on very well and I didn't seem to have a workflow system.

iNotepad gives me the workflow system I needed, I can create folders, file things away and manipulate how things sit a lot more easily. It will publish straight to HTML if you want and it will encrypt your writings if you want. It has many, many tricks up its sleeve

Now granted I haven't been posting much recently, but it doesn't mean that I've not been writing snippets and iNotepad has made writing so much easier for me.

The only thing it doesn't do for me is spell check, but I can always run it through Word before I post it if I want. EDIT, I've just found that it spell checks as you type.

It allows you to create 20 'Notes' and/or folders in the free version, registering it will only cost about £8 though.

I recommend people to look into it if they think it will help.(And I have no connection to the product at all.)

http://www.vojousoftware.com/

Change in Moderator

2007-01-15T19:12:00.000Z

Unfortunately, Real life is imposing on my time quite heavily at the moment and I currently do not have much time to invest in SBC (or GentlyGently for that matter.) I don't see this changing for the next three months at least.

For this reason, I have asked Alex to become the Moderator. This is a permanent change, not a temporary one. I'd like to thank Alex for taking this on amongst all of the other things he does. I'm sure he will take SBC far beyond my own capability.

I'll still be actively participating in SBC, and hope to learn more over time.

Switching to Beta Blogger with Multiple Blogs

2007-01-03T00:09:00.000Z

That was easy. Clicked "Switch Now." The result- "We can not switch you now because some of your blogs can not be converted at this time."

There was no option for switching some blogs at a later time. It was an all or nothing option. There wasn't a lot of information about exactly what the problem was.

1. It could be a fairly large blog with pictures- the main Devil blog.
2. The number of three column blogs that I have.
3. The fact that I also have a Beta blog under the same gmail id.

Guess I'll wait until they fix more...

Switching to Beta (New) Blogger

2006-12-27T23:12:00.000Z

I've Finally been invited to switch to Beta.

I was hoping to do this Blog by Blog, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be possible.

If it was just my own Blog, I'd probably set a few hours aside and make the Switch, but with SBC, I want to make sure that nothing's left to chance.

For me and anyone else who hasn't made the change yet, does anyone have any advice?

Anything they did beforehand?
Anything that went wrong?
Anything they got right?
Anything they got wrong?
Anything about Templates?

I'll obviously take backups of everything I can, I assume the transition is a no brainer, but just need a little reassurance.

Thanks

A Merry Christmas and Good Luck

2006-12-20T20:48:00.000Z

Dear Everyone

I thought I'd take the option and write a public post, to share with every other sex blogger, to more or less announce my retirement from this site. The reasons are numerous, things ranging from being approached like I was a thief from one member (and that issue not being dealt with by the moderator/admin of this 'community'), to being unlinked by other members on this site, out of the blue as it were (not due to any conflict or anything like that), and I don't see it as community like behavior. I'm no huge fan of hypocrisy, but that's what I see and it's something I have no interest in being a part of.

I like my sex straight up, and that's how I like my human behavior as well; whether we're online or not isn't the point, we're all adults. More recently I was emailed by a member of this community, and told that my new page had technical issues and 'sorry, but they were unable to read it.' Well, to them I say that so far many other visitors haven't had any problems with the setup, and if it's just another excuse, that I have no time for it. As far as I know there are many other blogs that have a black background with white text, and I haven't seen that person complain about those sites.

Frankly I haven't seen so much clique behavior in my life, and I couldn't give a shit about because I write for myself, and I submit writing to other places, and I've never depended on a sex-blogging community in order to post stuff, or to be validated in any kind of way, but that's how it can seem, where a 'adult' blogger needs to be officially verified by some group of people like that group hold the Pope by the balls, as it were.

One thing that has disappointed me in the last year and a bit, is how insular some sex bloggers can be, how cliquey they can be, and there were more days where I felt like a new kid in a kindergarten setup.

As far as I'm concerned the World Wide Web is big enough for all of us, but my final request to be removed from this community relates to things that I don't have time for, hypocrisy being one of those things, and I can't say I have received any 'community' benefits from my association. I've had a member spit the dummy at me, despite any apologies, to address me as though I am a thief of sorts only to have the moderator of this site avoid any type of mediation; rather spineless if you ask me. I've had the moderator give me excuse upon excuse, more often than not ignoring any issue I've raised away from here, only to email me to bitch about the setup of my webpage.

Have a Merry Christmas.

Anastasia

Switching with team blogs and getting out of beta (Blogger Buzz)

2006-12-13T20:58:00.000Z

Just before the weekend we added the final piece to the transition from old Blogger to the new Blogger in beta: members of team blogs can now switch to the new Blogger. This is the last step before we take the new Blogger out of beta.

Team blogs move when the blog’s original creator moves to the new Blogger. When that happens, team blog members will also have to move to the new Blogger in order to post. Team blog members don’t have to wait, though! If you move to the new Blogger, team blogs you didn’t create will still show up on your beta Dashboard. You’ll be able to post with them as before, though they won’t have the new features of the new Blogger. We wrote a help article to explain this all in a bit more depth.

At this point, the pieces are in place:

The new Blogger is feature complete
All new accounts are created on the new version
Known issues on the new Blogger are few and getting fewer
(Almost*) all users are able to move their blogs to the new Blogger

This all means that we’ll be removing the “beta” from the new Blogger very soon! At that time, we’ll begin the process of requiring that users of old Blogger move to new Blogger.

* = From time to time we may limit switching in order to keep old and new Blogger functioning smoothly. Also, users with particularly large blogs may not switch right now. This latter restriction will be gradually lifted.

Beta Blogs becomes the Standard

2006-12-13T18:28:00.000Z

Beta Blogger is going to soon become the standard Blogger. According to Blogger, almost all known problems with Beta have been resolved and they will soon start requiring all Blogs to switch over to the new version of Blogger.

This requires the use of a Google account and log in. You will log in based on your Google account (frequently an email.) It is currently unclear how individuals with multiple blogs with distinct avatars/identities will be treated.

Currently those individuals with a beta blog and a non-beta blog can no longer sign in for comments on beta blogs with there non-beta id. They are being forced to sign in with their Google or beta id.

Anyone have more information on this?

Problems with Photo Sharing

2006-12-06T17:23:00.000Z

The mirror to the posting below about being a thoughtful photo user is the problem of image hosting for sex bloggers. This AM I received a note from Photobucket saying that my account had been cancelled for "violating the terms of service." No cure period, no recourse, no reply when I asked how I could fix the problem. Of course, their terms of service are so broad and general that almost any photograph of a suggestive nature, and certainly anything with nudity violates the terms.

Now, why not just hot-link to images as the other post suggests with click-through to make sure anyone who likes the photo can access it? Well, because links change. And because some photos I find are in a gray area: clearly they belong to someone, but they are from another blog who hasn't acknowledged their usage, or someplace far from where I could find the owner to ask their permission.

So the practical question is: how can I host orphan photos that won't get my account canceled?

Age Poll

2006-11-23T20:45:00.000Z

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

Known Issues for Blogger in Beta

2006-11-16T22:25:00.000Z

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?

2006-11-16T14:46:00.000Z

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.

On use of others' images.

2006-11-15T01:51:00.000Z

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

Really Simple Syndication

2006-11-08T23:32:00.000Z

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

2006-11-08T23:20:00.000Z

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.

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

2006-11-01T23:59:00.000Z

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......:)

The Potential Perils of Video Clips

2006-10-31T20:08:00.000Z

Here's a story worth reading. While this deals with video clips and the software you're occasionally asked to download to view them it applies to all software you download from the Web. So whether you're a consumer or vendor (via your blog) of such files, think carefully before downloading anything. And if in any doubt, don't.

Offline Writers

2006-10-30T06:32:00.000Z

I currently write my fiction posts in Word before posting them through the Blogger browser interface, I am aware however of Blogging Clients and / or Offline Clients.

I woud like to start using one, it would make adding pictures, links and the links easier, plus there's less chance of losing a post.

I'd still compose fiction in word, but would post through a Client.

I've found:

Macjournal
Marsedit
Qumana
and Ecto

What do people use, I'm on a Mac, but what's out there for both?

An Explanation for the blogger Problems

2006-10-29T00:07:00.000Z

Original Article here: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&newsID=16299

Google's Blogger service has suffered availability problems recently, continuing a series of mishaps that began several weeks ago.

Between Wednesday of last week and Thursday of this week, Blogger suffered several outages and periods of sluggish performance, along with some planned downtime for maintenance, according to the Blogger Status site, where Google lets users know about Blogger system issues.

Blogger's persistent woes have prompted industry analysts and users to urge the company to strengthen the service's security and infrastructure, and to tighten up its administration policies.

The problems of the past week prompted a Blogger official to post an apologetic note to users on Thursday on Blogger Buzz, the service's official blog.

"It’s been a Murphy-esque cavalcade of power failures, file server trouble, and wonky network hardware, and I hope you’ll believe me when I say that the Blogger staff are even more sick of it than you are," the note reads.

To improve the situation in the short term, Google is upgrading Blogger's hardware and stepping up its system monitoring. Part of Blogger's availability problems stem from the fact that the service runs on essentially the same infrastructure it had when Google bought its parent company Pyra Labs in early 2003. Despite upgrades and expansions "we’ve more than out-grown it," the post reads. "The new version is ground-up more scalable and less error-prone."

Long-term, Google is testing a new version of Blogger that runs on a more stable platform with "Google-quality reliability", the post reads. That new version, which is in a limited public test, hasn't been affected by the recent availability problems, although it did crash on 1 October.

In tune with the upcoming Halloween celebration, October has been a hair-raising month for Blogger and its Blogspot hosting platform. Last week, a Google employee mistakenly posted information to Blogger Buzz that she had intended to publish in her personal blog.

Two weeks ago, Blogger suffered an outage that kept both Blogger.com and the Blogspot hosting service offline for two hours, along with the many official Google blogs hosted on that platform. Google said a "network malfunction" caused the outage.

Earlier this month, a hacker broke into Google's main official blog, which is hosted on Blogger. The intruder posted a false message saying that the company had decided to cancel a joint click-to-call advertising project with eBay. Although Google patched the hole, the message caused much confusion among many Google watchers.

In March, Google staffers deleted the main official Google blog by mistake and someone unaffiliated with the company briefly took control of the web address.

Testing Your Template

2006-10-28T20:56:00.000Z

If you use one of the standard Blogger templates you’re probably blissfully unaware of the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle differences between the browsers available.

Start using a third party template, or making anything other than minor alterations to your standard Blogger-issue framework and things can get a little hairy.

The fact is that there are standards for how a browser should render your page on the client PC’s display, but the specifications are, in part, open to interpretation. Add to this each browser vendor’s drive to differentiate itself from the competition by adding new features and it can get horribly complex.

Despite the popularity of Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still the most used browser in use out there. Apple’s Safari brings up the rear of the “big three”. So if you’re a Firefox fan you really should test your template design on IE too, and if you happen to have a Mac lying around, on Safari.

If you don’t, your readers might see your site badly formatted, or worse still, not at all.

Is it a push towards Beta

2006-10-28T19:58:00.000Z

I know it's not just me.

Blogger has been Abysmal this week, especially over the last couple of days.

But is it just the current version of Blogger, or is the Beta suffering also

Enquiring minds need to know.

ADMIN: FAQ

2006-10-28T06:28:00.000Z

I'm putting together an FAQ for SBC.

Some of the Topics I plan to cover are:

What is SBC
What do I have to do on SBC
How do I join
Linking to SBC
Rules

I'm going to put this all in a post and link to it from the Sidebar.

Is there anything else I should cover?

Tutorials?

2006-10-28T01:53:00.000Z

I've seen in a couple of comments, the idea of a "tutorial" section, a place to link to sites that explain how to intergrate video or audio, be it utube...podcasting...etc....should we consider a link list to this?

Just an idea.....:)

Just Imagine!

2006-10-26T12:43:00.000Z

I surfed about and came across this article that details new regulations in China where bloggers are to register their blogs with their real names. Of course there are loopholes, but last year there was a case where a blog (from China) was prevented from being viewed on the web in general (on Google for example).

We spend a considerable amount of time gathering information for our blogs, there's the time spent writing as well (after stumbling upon a creative stimulus that makes us think, 'uh huh, I'll explore this today), and really, when push comes to shove, this entire medium can be so fragile.

I haven't fully backed up anything that's in my blog, and I'm uncertain if there's a way that all text can be backed up (without the pc keeling over in the process). But if it all went pear shaped tomorrow?

If a government decided to streamline certain modes of expression and content/genres, then all they'd have to do is limit access or clamp down on the blogs.

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