Image hosting server
How do we do those fancy html ads, serve our own photos, track our own ads and add htaccess rules to your images? htaccess. what is that? That’s a set of predefined rules for your server. One small file named .htaccess is left in your root folder of your server, or any other sub folder. Any entity accessing any content on your server is bound to follow those rules, because that file is read first.
Here is an amazing guide to give you an idea just what can be done with htaccess. We use our own server for hosting Yesbackpage.de (and formerly Craigslist) picture ads. For this service we use Godaddy. Let’s say you’re being harassed online. Let’s say, you have already emailed your competition and discovered the X-originating ip in their response to you, and you can see who is doing it, and you have their their ip addresses. You can see that they are flagging your ad between two to four times on a regular basis. How can you get at them? How can you let them know you aren’t going to take this. You can make an ad like the one I showed you in our example, or any variation of a picture ad. You host it on your server. Then you create an htaccess file. Here is an example ad. Title first, then the message body.
Ok, what’s going on here? Well I spaced out the code a little so we can examine the different elements of this ad. The title is in the first line, we went over the pros and cons of standing out with double spaced symbol ad titles in the how to write ads tutorials.. We just want to give you a great example, and allow you to moderate it to your own taste. Second line of code is the body of your ad. The main image with your contact details. Again, an extreme example with 5 color videos looped into a catchy design with funny slogans. You decide how aggressive or snappy or colorful your contact information will be. That’s all this really is, description of your product or service, and your contact information. You need to put any information that is being used to hunt down all your ads in this photograph, so you can’t be hunted so easily.
If it is a professional flagging party you have offended, time to duck and cover, change your number, tossable digits, change your company name, who cares about branding if you‘re ghosted, or flagged, you need to exist before the phone will ring at all. The next line of the ad is a text only description that deliberately has no phone number, no company name, no contact details and no special words. It also has a very mellow non aggressive stance, offends no one. It just mentions a product or service va ugly and leaves option to email the annon email only. Last line, how ever many hidden keywords you want to put. Now, for the trick.
the htaccess file is read before it serves the photograph to Craigslist. As for the flaggers removing your ads, well, you have collected their ip addresses by examining their email headers. Now, add them to your htaccess file as follows..
ErrorDocument 403 /404.html
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 500 /404.html
order allow,deny
deny from 28.16.163.*
deny from 27.16.61.224
AUTO IP BLOCKER
If you’re feeling like you’re getting the hang of this and you would like something a little more automated, you can use our IP blocking script. There are 3 files you drop into your server. You need to use the Godaddy ftp interface and change permissions for your htaccess file to 777 which means read, write, execute. Now is a perfect time to get that Godaddy rep on the line and have them walk you through the process patiently and answer all your burning questions about the craft of webmastery. That’s why I recommend them. To keep your life simple. They will do what we cannot afford to do, teach you everything you need to know to run your own webserver. Do not buy any of their websites, you can get many free templates online, and use dreamweaver to change the text and pictures. So back to our htaccess script. When you have done this, you can access block.php by typing http://www.yourwebsite.com/block.php When you see the little form come up on your page, just copy and past all the bad ip addresses into the script one at a time, and click the block button. This script will now write to your htaccess file for you, so you don’t even need to access your server to do this.
Now the engineering of our ad shines through. All of the bad guys flagging you, will be added to the bad ip list. Block the entire subnet, in case they are switching their cable modem ip to try to flag you. I use an asterisk in the example to show this. So, the next time mr 28.16.163.* visits your new ads, your server sees his request right through Craigslist, and denies him the photo. The only thing he is left with is your title, the short vague description, and a pile of invisible keywords. Even if he still knows its your ad, he might just leave it alone. He sees, there is not even a phone number in the body of the ad, and chooses to expend his energy on someone he feels is more of a threat. Remember, this is psychological warfare. Relax your mind, you have a big advantage now that you have read these things. Even if your opponent already has a membership here, now you know too!
Remember the psychological impact the first time you saw flagged and removed in your inbox. We are taking the frustration out of this for you, and hopefully giving you the tools you need to see what you could not see before. Treat the flagged ads you get from now on as a curiosity, an opportunity to find out how they sniffed you out, and resolve it so you can protect your business with your education, not the old way of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. I used to serve alternate content to people on my htaccess banned list. I had a nice printscreen of a flagged and removed ad, and offered that as a substitute. Craigslist now intercepts the switch, and blocks this. But if they are on your bad ip list, they will not be served any photo. And all that’s left for them to see is the confusing out of context text you left for them. This nifty little trick can give you a really great advantage.
Servers
I recommend you use Godaddy for two reasons, they are the biggest, and they have 24hr adequate customer service. You can have all your domains there, and all your different server pkgs there, they have free apps to install wordpress there for your robotic blogs, etc. When I was beginning, I didn’t know much about anything. I called them and called them all hours of the day all hours of the night, and they were there to patiently take my questions and teach me the ropes of running my own servers. Free education, see? Use it. Do not use them for VPS, you’re on your own for that one, Godaddy will rip you off badly for any other service except the deluxe hosting. Read our VPS article. Get the deluxe server linux. You can host unlimited websites from that kind of pkg for around 8$ per month. You will need to choose the linux option to work with php. As your needs become a little more sophisticated, you will need to have that for forms, and all kinds of nifty automated website things. As well as some of the free scripts we will provide you here like the webproxy, and the blocker. We would like to add a web design tutorial in the near future to get some of you started, but it’s not in the current scope of our tutorials.
