| LED Digest 2132: Affiliate Advertising Networks |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. April 5, 2006 Issue #2132 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Recommended Affiliate Ad Groups? ==-- ~ Peter D'Aprix "I need something as simple as the Google situation..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== HTML Structure Validation ==-- ~ Martha Retallick "The best reason for using a validator is to make sure that your site conforms to Web Standards." ~ Tom Aman "Your coding only works because browsers are *very* forgiving.." --== Protecting Images ==-- <Moderator Comment> ~ Beth Earle "...show a little kindness and give people the benefit of the doubt, if you can." ~ Amy D. Moore "I wanted to make sure other LEDers didn't follow this path." ~ Brett Dorron "The link in Robert Bass's post is to a fraudulent page of stolen images." ~ Mark Whitman "It's useless to stress out or waste time trying to protect against image theft." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Googling Tom Foolery ==-- ~ John Smart ========== NEW =================================== From: Peter D'Aprix Subject: Recommendations on good advertising affiliate groups? I am currently playing host to "get paid per click" Google AdSense "classified" style text ads on my site www.gourmetvoyageurs.com. I am currently redesigning the site moving all the navigation from the left of the page to the top of the page leaving the side "tower" space clear to accommodate a "tower" ad or bunch of small box ads stacked on top of each other. But I don't know who to go to to sign onto such ads. I need something as simple as the Google situation where I just paste in some code that links to whoever is producing the ads for site display. Does anyone have any recommendations with a happy track record? Many thanks. Peter D'Aprix - Visual Communications http://peterdaprix.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Martha Retallick Subject: HTML validation > Can anyone share a *good* reason why I should care whether an HTML > validator likes my use of quotes around multi-word attributes only? - Mark Whitman, LED 2130 The best reason for using a validator is to make sure that your site conforms to Web Standards. A website that is designed to meet Web Standards is one that conforms to the Internet's internationally accepted "rules of the road." And, you may be asking, what happens when you use Web Standards? Six things, and they're all good: 1. Your site becomes available to a wider variety of devices than just a computer, such as Internet-enabled cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). 2. Your pages download and display faster, which means that your visitors will be more willing to stick around and see what you have to say. 3. Your site becomes accessible to blind and low-vision users. 4. You're using less bandwidth. And since your web host charges you based on the amount of bandwidth you use, the less you use, the less you pay. 5. It's easier and faster to maintain a Web Standards-based site. That's because these sites are built so that structure and presentation are separated. Which means that if you want to change how your site's headlines look, all you need to do is change one file, and the headlines are automatically updated to your new style. 6. Ever wanted to print out a page, only to have it come out with some of the text missing? With a Web Standards-based site, every page can be a printer-friendly page. No more hunting for that little "printer-friendly" icon! In short, both you and your website visitors will enjoy many benefits if your site conforms to Web Standards. Martha Retallick Western Sky Communications Web/Graphic Design & Consulting http://www.westernskycommunications.com -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Tom Aman Subject: HTML validation Mark, Your coding only works because browsers are *very* forgiving and will try to do their best, even with incorrect HTML. It means that they will guess at the intent of the coding. Too many people do not realize that the whole hypertext / HTML system was based around the server (in this case, the HTML source) being made as correct as possible and the client (browser) being as forgiving as possible. The idea behind this was this to give the surfer as few bad experiences as possible. The hidden benefit is that correctly coded HTML will be parsed more quickly by the browser since it avoids having to execute the extra code that is invoked to handle exceptions to good HTML. Basically, when a parser sees a keyword such as "type", it first looks for the "=", then, finding that, it will look for the first non-space character following that "=". If that character is a single or double quote, it will take the value as being everything from the character following up to and including the last character before the closing and matching single or double quote - a very simple scan. If that character is not a quote, then it *assumes* the value intended is everything from that first non-space character up to the character before the next space. Weird things can happen if a typo puts something really unexpected within that grouping. The correct use of quotation marks is one of the key elements of coding good HTML. To leave them out forces the parser into performing extra operations to determine the intent, not only to find the beginning of the value, but also to decide when it has reached the end. Consider, in your coding, if you miss a space (i.e a typo results in type=textname=item), not only will the browser get your intent wrong but, since you would ignore validation warning of missing quotes, a validator will not help you find it. If you *always* use quotes, then the missing space is less likely to cause problems since a browser would still be able to get your intent correctly, also a decent validator would be able to catch the error so you could correct it, thereby guaranteeing a correct result. The second problem with leaving out quotes is that there is no guarantee that all browsers will handle it correctly or that future version of existing browsers will continue to handle it correctly. There was a time, in the early days of the Internet, when quotes were often not used and browsers would handle it OK anyway. Thus an anchor such as <.a xhref=/somedirectory/my page.html>... would get the correct page Browsers would interpret is as intended http://host/somedirectory/my page.html. Now, a reference coded in that manner would be interpreted by a modern browser as http://host/somedirectory/my Obviously, that would result in a "404 Not Found" error for the surfer. So, the main reason you should care what an HTML validator says about your HTML is to ensure your pages will *always* be interpreted correctly by current and future browsers. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic --------- <Moderator Comment> Greetings resourceful LEDers, As you can imagine, there has been a flood of successful "thefts" of Robert's images. Instead of publishing all 75 of them, I'm going to select the ones I received first and the ones with interesting tidbits of information to add. Posts I won't publish may find their way into a special issue somewhere, if the content warrants it. One thing I'd like to mention: there are some really creative ways to copy images from web sites! Everything from digging for direct image URLs, to drag and dropping images to the desktop, to accessing cached files, there are lots and lots of ways to do it. I think LEDers hit on about all of them. One poster even had a plugin for her browser that allowed right-clicks for sites that try to dissallow them. The moral of this story may be just what Viggie Bala said in issue 2130, "Protecting images in web pages is next to impossible." Best wishes, Adam -------------------- From: Beth Ann Earle Subject: Image theft > Here is a page from my site, try to > copy or download these images... - Robert Bass, LED 2131 Wow. Neither I nor or our creative director have ever seen anything like this before. We fooled around with it for quite a while and couldn't figure out a way to copy any of the images on my computer. It seemed very, very effective. But then, Heather (the very creative creative director) opened the page on her computer and noticed that the "Protected by WebLockPro.com" notice flickered and figured that it was the sort of thing that kept going on and off. She has two screens on her machine and very fast hands. After a couple tries, Heather was able to save the image (it's attached to this email as proof for Adam) simply by hitting print-screen in the browser and then hitting paste with lightning speed. So, while it's effective for the everyday user, it's still not an impenetrable solution. And the use of WebLockPro brought up another concern, as well -- I couldn't copy and paste the URL from the address box in IE to send to our creative director, and as long as the bobspix.html page was in a browser (even in the background), I couldn't copy and paste anything from today's LED (which was already up in a window before I opened the bobspix page) or from another web browser that I opened a different site in or from an existing Word document that I opened after opening the bobspix page (this was true whether I had tried to copy an image from bobspix first or not). I realized that my copy-and-paste problems were because of how my computer was interacting with the bobspix page, but a regular, everyday, normal person probably wouldn't. They'd think that there was something wrong with their computer and probably reboot or call their long-suffering daughter for help, and that doesn't seem very fair. One possible solution might be to put a note in the warning box that comes up when you right-click anywhere on the page and let people know that they have to close the bobspix page before being able to paste anything again. Of course, some people might say that copyright infringers deserve a little frustration and anguish, but I don't think that the regular, everyday, normal person who tries to copy an image from a page really understands copyright rules (they may think, for example, that it's truly acceptable to copy an image if they just want to keep it on their desktop). And from long, hard, embarrassing experience, I've learned it's always better to show a little kindness and give people the benefit of the doubt, if you can. Yours in all that is LEDly, Beth Earle www.pilotfishseo.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Amy D. Moore Subject: Steal These Images - No Problem Robert Bass wrote, in LED issue 2131, to tell us about some software he purchased which "protects" his images. I didn't really want to continue this thread, but Mr. Bass's software does not protect him and I wanted to make sure other LEDers didn't follow this path. This "software" is a JavaScript which encrypts the HTML in a page then decrypts it. If you scroll down and over in the source code you can see it. It is not uncommon for people who dabble in web stuff to use tools like this, and it is just fine to do that - but it is a false sense of security. Here are some of the holes in this method: 1) Firefox can still right click and read the image properties which is how I instantly "stole" this image and am now delivering it in my blog: http://dalehwest.com/soupstone/?p=210 2) Plugins like WebDeveloper in Firefox will list all the image assets on a page for you. 3) Even if you use IE, your computer had to bring the image into its cache so anyone, on any browser, can look at the URL of the images. Robert's pictures have file names which are easy to understand so they are easy to find in your cache. 4) Of course, the [PrtScn] button works just fine - as always. 5) The JavaScript can be decrypted if you were trying to hide other work. I've seen writers try to use this to protect the written word from theft. This is a much more function tool for writers than photographers. 6) For browsers where JavaScript can be disabled, Firefox and the new IE 7, the page will not display for non-theives. Many great suggestions have been posted. These activities would be more prudent for Robert's page: 1) Watermark your photos so when they are stolen, at least people will know where they came from 2) Slice your photos into multiple parts so they cannot be easily portrayed on blogs 3) Write the page in Flash 4) Have the images delivered by a Java program Amy D. Moore http://internetsupportservice.com Internet, Database, and Media since 1996 -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Brett Dorron Subject: Copyright fraud and Image theft Please be warned Adam [and LEDers], The link in Robert Bass's post in issue 2131 ( http://www.jewelex.com/bobspix.html ) is to a fraudulent page of stolen images. They are NOT his work, NOT his images. This is a serious copyright breach. The first image on his page, titled "Boat", can be found here: http://www.photosig.com/go/photos/view?id=65948 The second image, titled "Study in Black and White", belongs to Bjoern Oldsen and can be found here: http://www.photosig.com/go/photos/view?id=128929 or here: http://snipurl.com/opdt [art-nudes.de] The sixth image, titled "Windmill", can be found here: http://www.photosig.com/go/photos/view?id=128137 I will be reporting this page to the artists involved Brett Dorron Photographer -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: Image theft It's useless to stress out or waste time trying to protect against image theft. There is not one single thing you can do to keep a competent developer from taking any and every image from any site any time no matter what you do to try to prevent it. If you can see the image with a browser it can be downloaded, or the whole page can just be copy / pasted to a graphics program. It doesn't matter if it's a background image, right click disabled, or anything else. Watermarking - also useless. That's a fact of life you just have to live with. Mark Whitman ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: John Smart Subject: Googling Tom Foolery One of our clients has a lot of technical data on their site. We trained them that the rules for search engines include (but are not limited to) content content content! And they are being good - posting lots of good data regularly. Google loves them compared to their competition and all is good with the world. However, they have one page of 'news headlines' Google adores this page, but it is too much, and ugly! They want to get rid of it for aesthetic reasons, but keep it for traffic. Given that I can see who is coming before I show the web site - it would not be a lot of work to set the site to show page A if it is the Google bot, and page B if it is a person - allowing the content to be tuned to the audience. Will Google catch me out and punish me by dropping my beloved site? Are there any downsides - or other ideas to circumnavigate this problem? Kindest regards, John Smart, Technical Director InternetDesign.com - A Human Touch in a Digital World ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view." - Anon. |
