Hosted gallery / site tool -- Tell me what you guys want!!
 

Ok, so I’ve been inputting galleries for a few traffic buys we’ve been doing. Man, it is a pain in the ass. I didn’t know we were making it so hard on our webmasters…so, I want to set up a bulk gallery import / export tool and I have a few questions…

Is there a good “out of the box” solution that works with NATS?

Or just an out of the box solution that we can make work with NATS?

Are there common export configurations that are needed for each tgp script?

What is the best way to handle columus thumbs?

What features would you like to see in a custom script?

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Also, we are about to add over 200 new free sites…we already off pre-written titles and descriptions. Is there more we could be doing?

Jay

I don't know much about the gallery side of things, but I'd say as far as HFS's go, title, URL & description is all anyone would need.

To add to what GG said - the ability to export a list (comma delimited etc) of those attributes without copying one at a time - which I think is a tool already in Nats so it shouldnt be hard to do - just more HFS's would make all the difference in the world for any program - as long as they follow standard LL rules and they arent 30 sites of the same template every day :)

Comma delimited or pipe delimited (both formats work well) no special characters in there (like ' or !, which blows some software into the weeds) etc.

Some software also goes funky with long link codes and stuff... simple programming will allow you to make all URLs look normal, be easily digested, have no ? or & in the URLs, etc... makes it good for software loads and makes it decent even for the SEs to follow along easily.

You might want to make your program name or site name an available field, which would make it easy to flag as a keyword or whatever for comus thumbs... easier to break things out and sort of them.

Alex

I've seen some scripts around, not sure if they're custom or what but they basically allow you to export any number of different fields associated with a gallery/freesite/site, in the order you want them in, delimited by any of a few different common delimiters ( pipe, comma, semicolon, etc. ). It's basically a series of drop down boxes - I'm sure you've seen it. This is kind of a catchall way to do things as you never know what software people are using or what information they want. Ideally I think you should output to a new window in pure text with nothing BUT the exported information, and make sure everything is 'trimmed' .. no spaces at the beginning or end. SapphicCash is a pretty good example.

Some other things to consider are having the same style tool available to export link codes for your SITES. A couple weeks ago I started writing a script to import sites for a review site and the vast majority of sponsors make you jump through hoops to get link codes.. very annoying. Also, if you're going to provide descriptions, don't skimp! Write proper length, catchy, coherent, relevant descriptions. I hate finding out that "FHG's With Descriptions" means a url and "Guy fucks girl" as the description.

Just my $.02.
QD

May seem petty, but for both my LL script and my TGP script I need type, pics/movies and number of pics/movies. For the most part I count them by hand, but as long as you are asking...

Hiya Jay ... and thanks for asking. :)

Preacher - I'm with you on wanting all the information I can get. I'd download the type (movie/pics/mixed) and the number of pics/movies too. I like when the sponsor has their name as one of the fields. And the name of the paysite which the hosted gallery or free site is promoting.

A few sponsors have a field with several keywords that apply to the gallery or site too. I like that since I manually add keywords anyway. That's a great feature if you build category pages using queries instead of just by the one category assigned to the gallery/site.

QuickDraw - You're right about not skimping on the descriptions. They don't need to be longer than 100 characters (maybe less for some people), but they need to be well-written descriptions. Making it easy to grab all of them is another problem a lot of programs seem to have. Why would I want to copy HFS links one at a time, or worse, from multiple fields for every single HFS?

(I usually wind up copying the source code into a text editor and running some grep searches to massage it into a usable import file. But I don't go back for more regularly like I do with the places with make it very easy to get what I want.)

I'm seeing too many hosted free sites with the name of the paysite as the title of the free site. Bad move. Each hosted free site needs it's own title. Why don't more sponsors know the basics? Some people write or rewrite the decsriptions, but we're stuck with the titles that actually appear on the free sites.

Jay - I'm sure you know a lot of this, but you can really make your hosted stuff stand out if you take the time to make them as good as the best independent free site builders are making these days.

Personally, I want as much info as I can get when I build the export list of a sponsor's hosted sites or galleries. I may build more than one site from the contents of my database(s), and being able to present a different set of information on each site can help make them appear to be "more different" while still pulling from the same central content source.

Thanks again for asking.

Simon

Nice post man. Thanks.

Cool...so, I think everyone agrees we like pre-written descriptions....I like them too.

Yes, in different lengths also.

We offer 5 sizes for each gallery:
2 word (25 character max)
3 word (45 character max)
30 character (30 character max)
45 character (45 character max)
55 character (55 character max)

As far as fields options you will need:
Gallery URL
Gallery Description
Gallery Thumb URL
Number of pics and vids
Number of pics
Number of vids
Category

Also make sure to have an option to export all galleries for all your sites. This is one thing that NATS won't do. (last i checked)
Exporting 20 lists for a sponsor that has 20 sites can be time consuming.

This is a little screenshot of what our custom exporting tool looks like:
http://www.bvcash.com/galexporter.gif

I know this doesn't apply to OC Cash, but what gets me is a sponsor displaying mulitple gallery links with the same content, just different templates. I don't care about different templates; when I'm batch importing links, I dont want to go through each url just to weed out dupes.

OHHHH! I never said I liked the pre-written descriptions. I write all my own :D

But I do realize that others do like them & that they are needed :)

Ok, you had me scared there for a minute...last I remembered you were pretty militant about writing your own descriptions. :)

Good to see you haven't gotten lazy in your middle age!

:D

I just thought about this
How about gals that get updated once per day and gets pinged ?????
RSS FEEDS along movies/pics ????

Now that's something !

Thanks for bringing this one up! |thumb

I only caught on to this after I'd already imported thousands of galleries filled with duplicate content into one of my databases. I review all hosted sites and galleries, just as if they were submissions, and seeing 5 or 6 "versions" of almost every gallery really pissed me off. Thousands of galleries turned into hundreds instead (and almost turned into none at all when I considered just deleting all of them).

I think a lot of sponsors don't realize some of the things that can prevent a LL or TGP/MGP owner from using their hosted content, or from making as much use of it as they'd probably both like.

Simon

Well...except GG of course (but you know that). :)

I like writing descriptions. And I rewrite some of the sponsor-supplied ones since some are really bad. But I like the idea of supplied descriptions (good ones!) because then I can dump everything 'as is' into a database for one site, while importing and writing/rewriting the descriptions for another site.

That way, even if someone leaves one site and goes to the other, it doesn't seem like a list of the same galleries/sites if the description text is different. Each site can be built with differing queries and sorting options so that the listings don't look much alike at all, even without taking the site design into account.

(Note: yes, of course it's even better if the content is actually different.)

Really, I just wanted to say that even those who like to write their own descriptions can sometimes find a use for pre-written ones too.

Simon

To me, it's just common sense. It's taken me a long time to get my reviewers all on the same page as me so that most of the descriptions follow the same flow.

Plus, if you get 100 link lists using the same text, it might be frowned upon in certain SE circles - so I just take the time to review the site (which is always a good idea - and another topic for discussion, since a lot of sponsor can't code their links properly) & my text is different from everyone elses....until someone copies my pages :D

Even if I don't use the provided descriptions, I find them very useful in locating desired niche specific content within related or more general categories.