Tips, Tools and Tutorials for Making Money with Adult Themed Blogs | Adult Blog Builder

If, like me, you’re wondering just what allowing someone to register on your blog means exactly, read on. It took me awhile to finally phrase my search question in such a way that I was able to obtain the correct answer I was seeking. Search Engine returns for “What, exactly, are the benefits of registering on a blog site?” didn’t prove at all useful, but that’s the basic answer I was wanting to obtain. Eventually I figured out I needed to be asking about the “subscriber role” which resulted in my getting a link on WordPress.org that discusses all of the user roles and their respective capabilities. This is one of those times that knowing the proper keywords to use was absolutely necessary to obtain useful links!

According to the Codex WordPress article: “WordPress has five pre-defined Roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. Each Role is allowed to perform a set of tasks called Capabilities. There are many Capabilities including publish_posts, moderate_comments, and edit_users. The default Capabilities are pre-assigned to each Role.”

The article then proceeds to describe each of the five pre-defined Roles and lists exactly what each role allows the user to do on your blog. Scrolling on down to the Subscriber Role capabilities offers one word: Read.  OK, so they are capable of reading the blog if they sign up as a subscriber, but so can anyone who doesn’t register (providing you don’t have a registration requirement for blog access that is).  Originally I thought it might notify them of new posts, but subscribing doesn’t send them any emails, as it’s not an opt-in newsletter type of registration. It also has nothing to do with adding the RSS feed to their reader.

Working my way down the article and I’m eventually rewarded with a description of Read Capability.  Short version explanation: they are allowed access to the administration panel/user profile/ page only. They can setup their profile page and that’s the extent of what registering permits them to do as a subscriber to your blog.  So what’s the purpose of that?  Well,  if you so choose, registering can be a requirement before a reader is allowed to add a comment.  Legit readers will find it faster and easier to add comments if they have registered. But, depending on your discussion page settings, it could allow a spammer to sneak in under your spam controls.

I’d personally be careful about allowing comments from anyone with a previously approved comment to bypass your personal inspection before appearing live on your blog.  I prefer to either disallow subscriber abilities altogether if it really isn’t a blog needing or wanting reader contribution, or at the very minimum, that no comment appears without my approval.

Another excellent article you might want to reference is Gary Cao’s Ultimate Guide to Roles and Capabilities that he posted to his  WPHardcore blog in April, 2010.  Lots of additional information there about capability plugins and adding custom abilities to the various role levels.

Got a nice email from Max Mullenweg over at WordPress.org letting me know about what to expect in this newest WordPress 2.9 release, plus some hints at what they’re working on for WordPress 3.o. 

Says Max:

I wanted to let you know that 2.9 is available for download, in fact hopefully you already saw a notice about it in your dashboard and clicked the update button. If not you can download it here: Download WordPress 2.9

It’s had over half a million downloads already, and counting!

What are people so excited about?  Some of the headline features are global undo/trash, built-in image editor, batch upgrades, plugin compatibility checker, and easier embeds.  You can read all about it and watch a handy intro video here: WordPress 2.9 intro video

Have some eggnog for me,

Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org

P.S. Version 3.0 will have a new default theme, better upgrades, dynamic image resizing, and more. See you next year!

Thanks Max, and Happy Holidays to you as well!

Free for Bloggers and Webmasters! Oh how I love free stuff. But beware! Some free stuff can cost you big time! I’m all for people getting and retaining credit for their hard work, especially for themes that are freely shared amongst the masses … BUT I also want to know just what is being served up off of my server. Themes and shareware that comes with a disclaimer stating I can only use the them so long as I  “don’t touch this encrypted code” giving so-and-so credit that is loaded into the footer.php file of my possible new theme is going to be de-coded before it ever graces one of my sites. I’m not going to be happy to find out I’m throwing around ads to casinos, launching popups, relaying hacking / tracking information, or installing malware viruses just because I want to use the pretty free theme.  And it should concern you as well.

Not sure yet what I’m talking about? Read on.

After you download a batch of free template themes, or even some shareware files are doing this too, go into them one by one, and open the footer.php with something like Wordpad, Notepad or Dreamweaver.  If you see encoded files or rather scripts where you can’t see or modify the source then you’ll want to get that decoded. These encrypted files can be identified by the starting line which is like: eval(gzinflate(str_rot13(base64_decode. Then it goes on with a mass of random numbers, letters and characters like ‘FZi3ksTWEVJ/hZnITwDvV’ and so on.

You can use the method outlined here on Proxyutza.com to create a little script in three steps that will let you decode and actually see what has been included in that free theme or shareware file before you upload it to your site.

I haven’t always checked what’s in some of the themes I’ve mentioned in the past, but I will be diligent about doing so from here on out. Be especially cautious about downloads on sites that aren’t the “original” site for the theme. It is easy enough to setup a “free template” site and host a bunch of themes that the guy has added his nasty encoded scripts into.  Just one theme tonight we looked at using contained a multiple scenario of malicious malware installs, casino popups, and other timed ads. What a load of rubbish! So protect yourself, your clients and your server … find out what’s in those encoded footers before installing them!

If you’ve been looking for a wordpress template that would be perfect for a video or film related blog, this Film-Reel template from ThemeLab should do the trick!

Film Reel is a basic black and grey color scheme with 2 columns, and the sidebar is on the left side of the design.

View the Demo | Download Film-Reel

From the forums and Adult Webmaster Industry board “Klixxx” comes this tutorial article by Tiffany Garden about using RSS feeds to build your network of blogs.

By Tiffany Garden, October 2008 | Klixxx Webmaster Magazine

So, you’re starting your blog empire, but you just realized that means a heck of a lot of writing. Now many people do end up outsourcing their daily updates and just take care of things on the backend, but for those of you that would rather do everything yourself, there is a simple and elegant solution to filling up your blogs with plenty of content – RSS feeds.

RSS is a protocal that stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but this article isn’t going to get into the nuts and bolts of how RSS works. Instead, this one is going to cover exactly where to find great RSS feeds to use as search engine fodder.

There are a few things that really make or break a RSS feed. If you aren’t going to be doing any of your own updates, finding ones with consistent updates is very important. Some sponsors are really on the ball with this, but the vast majority of them keep it going for awhile and then get bored. This is probably because getting blog traffic is a long term type of strategy, and it can take some time to see a return on investment.

The next thing you want to look for is well written text that is long enough to keep the search engines happy. Some RSS feeds are literally nothing more than glorified gallery descriptions – you get one short line with a crappy thumb and that’s about it. Now, it’s possible that you have accidentally stumbled onto the actual gallery RSS, but chances are the sponsor doesn’t really know what blog feeds require.

The longer the better, usually, but in general you are looking for 50-100 words. The last thing you want to look for are eye catching thumbs. Your text will get the visitors there via the search engines, but good pictures will keep them there and clicking though to your sponsors.

There are so many different RSS parsers that it would be impossible to cover them all, both free and paid. If you’re using WordPress there is a world full of plugins that you can try out – the one I personally have used is Feed WordPress. There are stand alone scripts (Blogs Organizer) and hosted scripts and any other type of script you can think of – the main thing to do is just try them out and see which one works for you. The best kind have some sort of rewriting function so that you can swap out enough words to make the feed post unique to your blog. That way, you can actually get ranked instead of competing with everyone else that is using that feed. Now you just sit back and let the script handle it.

If you’re in a smaller niche that either doesn’t have RSS feeds at all, or they are just crappy ones, there is another solution – you can make your own. Now there are two scripts that I know of offhand for this – one free and hosted, the other paid. The one I use most often is the paid script called Gallery Scraper. This allows you to input a list of hosted galleries, it generates the screenshots for you, and then you just put in the text. You do need an RSS parser for the actual feeds, but the amount of time saved by these pre setup galleries is just mind blowing.

The other script that will do this is Gallery2Blog. It is not quite as elegant as Gallery Scraper, but it is free and hosted elsewhere. Like Gallery Scraper, it will generate the screenshots for you from a list of hosted galleries, and all you need to do is put in the text. This one also requires a separate RSS parser.

Although high quality handwritten blogs do very well, it is very hard to build up a huge network of those. The time and/or money sink is just gigantic, and sometimes you don’t have much luck with a particular niche. So making a combination network of both handwritten and RSS fed blogs is one way to really build yourself up without much of an outlay. With theRSS automated, you’ll have plenty of traffic generation to feed your handwritten blogs, along with income coming in from these.

Whether or not you want to actively promote your RSS blogs is up to you – the thing that I did was just make niche directories that I could dump all of my RSS blogs into. I did make my handwritten ones prominent in these directories, but the hubs like this also make it easy to keep track of just how many blogs you have per niche.

So whether you’re a diehard blogger looking for ways to expand your network painlessly, or you’re a blog newbie looking for some advice, hopefully you have found plenty of useful tips and ideas! Now get to blogging.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but when I saw this list of WIDGETS available at WordPress it was like Christmas all over again! Whoo-hoo! More new blog toys!! I didn’t even get past the B listings before I had to download 4 of them! And I actually installed and activated the BDP Comments Widget so that I could show a snippet of commentary and not just the author and post title that you get with the recent comments widget all ready bundled up into WordPress. I think it looks pretty snazzy on my sidebar now!

This is going to be a short post, I have Widgets C thru Z to check out yet!   ttyl 

As often happens, I was looking for something else entirely when I came across a relatively new plugin for WordPress (released Oct. 2008) … a LINK DIRECTORY PLUGIN! I kid you not! I have so been hoping someone would code a decent directory plugin and it looks like my prayers have finally been answered.

WordPress Link Directory is a link directory plugin from Sean Bluestone, and made for WordPress. It allows you to create a directory of links and you can even allow other webmasters to add their link to your site. The plugin can check for reciprocal links and even check the Pagerank of the other site. The WordPress directory plugin will then accept or refuse the link based on criteria you specify.

The main features are:

• Automatically checks for reciprocal links on pages specified by Pagerank.
• Displays the Pagerank of all sites in the directory.
• Option to display more detailed information on each link.
• Available in several languages.
• Option to notify the admin when a new link is submitted.
• Integrates seemlessly with WordPress and adopts whichever theme you’re using.

You can view a DEMO here, and DOWNLOAD the directory plugin here. Sean also offers a pro version with additional features, but requires you to fill out a short survery that he gets a little commission off of before unlocking the pro version for a free download. Visit Sean Bluestone’s site for more information on the pro version.

Add Webcam to WordPress

Add a live webcam broadcast to your WordPress sidebar, or to any blog for that matter, with this free webcam broadcaster from AnyWebCam.com. ANYwebcam.com LIVE! lets your friends see your real time webcam broadcast on your WordPress blog page. To get started simply join ANYwebcam.com for FREE and download the Webcam broadcaster. You will then be presented with the code to place in your WordPress blog… it’s that simple!

The broadcaster also works on quite a few of the social websites including Friendster, MySpace, HI5, Blogger, Xanga and more. Visit AnyWebCam.com to open your free account.

As most of you probably already know, the release of WordPress 2.7 has been delayed. There is a 2.6.5 version available that addresses some security issues. And please take care when searching for WordPress downloads so that you do not end up on a fake WordPress site. Wordpresz.org looks like the WordPress site but isn’t.

This is just the first of what could be a run on fake sites that take advantage of your misspellings and spoofs the official WordPress site. Pay close attention to what site URL you are actually on after clicking any links, or type out manually http://www.wordpress.org/ and double check the URL before downloading anything from the official WordPress sites.

If you upgraded WordPress to 2.6.4, you are running a fake version. There is no WordPress 2.6.4. The latest version is 2.6.5. The version of WordPress you download has malicious code in the download that opens a backdoor to your blog.

Automattic is looking at ways to keep users informed and warned about these blog hack attempts, but paying attention to details is your best defense. Just check first and know what you are downloading, and from where, before risking your blog.

After I setup a new wordpress blog, one of the first things I make sure to do is to setup what they call “pretty permalinks”. Why use them? Because they help with how your links display which can affect your blog’s overall search engine optimization techniques.

When you first install WordPress, the permalinks default to something that looks like this:

http://adultblogbuilder.com/?p=123

But we want to have the links look like this:

http://adultblogbuilder.com/wordpress/create-pretty-permalinks

So how do you do this?

1. Go to your site via FTP and temporarily chmod your .htaccess to 777. Now login to your Admin panel and activate pretty-permalinks by clicking on Settings and then Permalinks. Now select “custom structure” and type: /%category%/%postname%/

Click “Save Changes”

You’ll get a message back saying your permalink structure has been updated. If you don’t get that message, you: 1. don’t have an .htaccess page and/or 2. you didn’t chmod it to 777

After a successful update of the permalink structure, return to the domain via ftp and chmod the .htaccess back to 644. Congratulations! You’re all done with creating pretty permalinks!

If you want to know more, or have to do some troubleshooting, you can read more about the Permalinks here: Using WordPress Permalinks

Now this neat little tool probably isn’t one you’ll want for blogs where you’re selling products/sites to surfers, but it is a nice one to add to a blog like this one that offers up resources, tutorials, information, etc to other bloggers. It’s a plugin that displays your plugins. It shows what you have active, and inactive, on that particular blog, and it will automatically update the page as you delete, deactivate, or add more plugins to your blog.

I know I’m often checking the view source on some blogs to try and figure out how something is being handled that isn’t a part of the normal wordpress installation. If a plugins in use page were available, it’d sure save me some detective work! I like the idea of being able to display the plugins that I use on a page for my readers, it is just one more way of providing more blogging information for you to check out and possibly make use of.

So take a look at what I’m using, and pick up a few plugins that you might like to try out on your own blogs.

I was surfing the net and as usual, one link led to another, and I came across a really nice blog design that is just perfect for any of you who are about to setup a gossip and/or celebrity type blog.

Gossip City was created by Design Disease, and while it isn’t specific to the Adult Blogging world, it certainly fits a celebrity niche.

Gossip City WordPress Theme

 You can demo the theme, download the zip file, and read the release notes here: Gossip City Theme.