Questions and Answers

OK, no one is really asking these, but I need to test the software.

 

Policy Questions

Do I have to have the RTA badge on my site?

If you are serving your content as a sub domain of eroticaplexus.net then yes. If you are serving your content from your own domain name then no. However, if serving from your own domain name, you still must send the RTA header if your content is going to be part of the Erotica Plexus network.

Do I have to have the Valid HTML5 badge on my site?

No. The primary reason it is there is to promote standards compliance. A secondary benefit is that it gives you an easy button to click to check your content for compliance so that you can fix mistakes.

What is your policy on images and videos?

If it is your server, I do not care. If I am providing the server, no images or videos will be allowed that require U.S.C. Title 18 § 2257 record keeping.

The issue is I do not want to risk my servers being shut down during an investigation involving someone else hosting content without proper documentation. Even if you have a prominent 2257 statement I have no way of knowing that you actually have proper records for all models, so I just can not take the risk. Erotic literature does not need to be accompanied by explicit photographs or videos. Let the creativity of the reader’s mind work.

 

Features

Does your product have built in measures for protecting children from adult content?

Yes. This is extremely important to us.

When you identify your site as a web site that contains adult content (check a single box), all pages will be sent with the RTALabel HTTP header as well as the meta tag within the document head. All images and multimedia will be sent with the RTALabel HTTP header. This labeling system will trigger any competant content filter that is set to block adult content.

Furthermore, “Click through Age Verification” (CAV) is implemented automatically which alerts a user that the web site contains adult content and gives the user opportunity to leave the site before being presented with the adult content.

The CAV is done in a SEO friendly way and does not require that the user have JavaScript or Flash installed and enabled, as some CAV systems do.

When will you have a Facebook share button?

Soon. It will take two clicks to share though because Facebook requires violation of our security policy for their button, so I have to have a secure button launch a pop-up to a separate page for their button.

When will you have a Tweet This button?

Soon. They actually provide a decent interface for building one that does not require relaxing of security policy.

When you will you support automatic login from my OpenID account?

Never. Never ever ever.

Do you provide e-mail accounts?

No. Providing e-mail accounts is cost prohibitive due to measures that would need to be taken to prevent spam and providing customer support for a wide variety of e-mail clients. Nutshell, you have to have staff available 24/7 to deal with issues such as mass spamming either from a naughty client or a sniffed SMTP login.

Furthermore, some users may want features such as MS Exchange compatability etc. or spam/virus milters. I looked into it, it is just more than we are capable of offering at a price that even remotely competes with companies that already specialize in it.

If you have your own domain name, however, we are happy to add the appropriate MX record(s) to your DNS zone file for you to use something like Go Daddy Email Hosting. Very affordable, and they do it on a scale that allows them to hire the necessary staff to properly run a e-mail server.

Do you support Google AdSense?

Working on it. The basic problem is that AdSense still uses document.write() which breaks in anything XML. I am playing with a function that emulates document.write() in a DOM2 fashion but I am hesitant to actually use it in production as it does not work with invalid XML. I would feel better if there was a JavaScript library similar to libtidy that I could pass the argument through first.

Please note that AdSense can not be used on web sites that contain pornographic content. I am attempting to find out if that includes erotica.

How does your product compare with WordPress?

I can not give an honest answer. Other than the security lists I follow, I have not followed WordPress in at least 5 years. Back then I was not very impressed, it looked like they paid more attention to presentation and not enough attention as to how the presentation is produced. However 5 years is a long time, and I can not comment on the current quality of their code (other than the high number of security alerts I see related to WP).

Currently I make it a point not to look at code of similar products in order to avoid accidental code copyright violation within my product.

If there is a particular feature you need, you can tell us what it does and I may be able to implement it (there may be a fee involved, I usually do not code for free).

 

Multimedia

How come it will not let me upload a WMV file?

DOMBlogger uses HTML5 for multimedia presentation. WMV is not an HTML5 appropriate format. The license fees necessary to legally transcode from WMV to an appropriate format on the server are cost prohibitive. DOMBlogger supports uploading Ogg Theora and H.264/AVC videos.

How come it will not let me upload a WMA file?

DOMBlogger uses HTML5 for multimedia presentation. WMA is not an HTML5 appropriate format. The license fees necessary to legally transcode from WMA to an appropriate format on the server are cost prohibitive. DOMBlogger supports uploading FLAC, AIFF, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 audios.

FLAC, AIFF or WAV is preferred from a technical standpoint (no lossy to lossy transcode.)

Can I make a members area where only members can see videos?

Not at this time. There may be an addition to DOMBlogger to support member areas in the future.

 

CMS Layout

I want to use my own layout. Is that possible?

Yes. Your layout will need to honor some specific CSS classes by id, and you will need to describe how the main portions of the page are to be assembled by the CMS. An article describing how to do this will be written.

Can I upload my own style sheets?

Yes. However, you may not use CSS tricks to hide our non obtrusive advertisements if you are using a free account. If you are using a paid account, we do not add advertisements anyway.

Do I have to have the “Alternative Views” on my pages?

No. You choose whether or not you want alternative views available, and which templates are made available. They are shown here to demonstrate how easy it is to change the layout on demand with the DOMBlogger CMS.

 

CMS Optimization

Your CMS puts script references at the beginning. I read that this makes pages load slower because the browser has to download all the scripts before it renders the page. Why don’t you put them at the end?

I would be very surprised if you can actually time the load difference. In either case, the same amount of data has to be downloaded before the page is fully functional. Unless you use an insane amount of JavaScript, I do not think it will have a noticeable difference on page load.

But to answer your question, the issue at hand is the ability to protect the user who reads the page. It is a lot easier to inject malicious code into the document body than it is to inject the payload into the document head. Putting it in the document head allows my security filters to remove any and all script nodes in the document body before sending the document.

I was looking at your site with YSlow and it says you do not minify your JS or CSS. Why don't you minify them?

YSlow is a good tool, but it sometimes does not report logically. You should notice that this web site gets an A for sending data with zlib compression. The space saved by passing JS and CSS through minification, making JS and CSS very difficult to read by people, often does not really matter when the file is compressed by zlib for sending. Empty space compresses extremely well.

In the case of large JavaScript libraries with a large amount of comments, minifying the JS library makes for smaller zlib compression simply because all the comments are removed. When we use jQuery, for example, we do send a minified (and zlib compressed) version of the main jQuery library. For most scripts we serve though, the benefit just is not there. It is preferable to debugging to be able to clearly read the JS in a browser window just in case your working readable copy differs from what is on the server. Minifying also removes copyright notices if present, as they are comments.

Just for a point of reference, the difference between un-minified jQuery 1.6.4 and minified jQuery 1.6.4 is 143.1 KB. That might be worth worrying about.

However the difference between zlib compressed jQuery 1.6.4 and zlib compressed minified jQuery 1.6.4 is only 35.7 KB. That is a large 9,064 line library full of comments. For smaller files, the difference when compressed really is not even worth mentioning. Keeping them human readable is of more value.

Ignore that warning from YSlow, it is a moot point.

YSlow also complains on some pages about images that are scaled down by HTML attributes.

First I would like to point out this is done in content, not by the DOMBlogger content manager. What you do with your content and image size attribute tags is up to you. As far as the cases where I do it, there is a simple explanation.

The vast majority of the time that I do this, the image being scaled down via HTML attributes are SVG images. They are Vector Graphics, YSlow complaining about them is a bug. Changing a line to specify a different viewBOX in the SVG file is not going to make a difference. SVG is specifically designed for scaling to arbitrary target sizes.

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