Lesson Learned
 

Confessions of a dork:

I built a free site using a sponsor I'd signed up with a while ago, but this was the first time promoting them.

When logging in, I could access all the linking codes just fine. The only part I couldn't get to was their stats page. The rep and I email back and forth over a couple weeks as schedules permit. In the meantime I've submitted this site and I know it's getting traffic I just can't see just how much. No big deal, I knew it would get resolved soon.

After pestering this nice lady several times, I discover that I'm entering in the wrong password. |doh| Ta Da! It's amazing how with the right one I can finally access stats and see what's up.

It was kinda depressing seeing that the sponsor ads had only recieved like 2 clicks. In fact, that just didn't seem right at all. I double checked and almost all the LL I'd submitted to had already listed this site days ago. Hmmmm...

After looking closer it seems I'd not double checked my site thoroughly in HTML. After each link code to the sponsor there was a %20 which would not allow any traffic to the join page. I don't really know how it got there, but I removed it from all pages...yada yada.

But, the bulk of the traffic I got from LL's to this site was pretty much for nuttin'. That'll teach me.|pcwins|

Been there. Dreamweaver (combined with my fat fingers) has bitten me once or twice recently. Every freesite I build now, I click every link manually just to make sure everything is good before mirroring/submitting. The 15 minutes that takes buys me a lot of peace of mind.

I am an over-checker. When I build a gallery using GASS, I check every mirror URL to make sure that ftp didn't burp or something when I uploaded files.

I check every link before uploading also.

Except once. I was building a free site and was up waaaaaaaay too late. And wouldn't you know, I screwed up a link. Had my enter link going to a gallery that had the same name as the free site I was sending out.

Thankfully I caught it the next day when I realized I wasn't getting any acceptance mails.

And if you use Dreamweaver, that is likely where the 20% thingy came from. Why it inserts it sometimes I do not know.

Dreamweaver puts the %20 thingy in if you leave a space in a link. I do it far too often to admit (still a newbie lol)

I think we need to have basic HTML classes so people stop using these wysiwyg editors. They use characters that are not needed and screw up pages and newsletters :)

GoLive at least leaves it a space and not %20 but it is still bad to do. I'll see spaces in my URLs when I'm copying and pasting from sponsor's admins.

I always finish my html by hand so that is when I'll catch things like that.

Having an editor with syntax highlighting really helps in catching coding errors but does nothing for fucking up a url.

Jim, trust me, I am perfectly capable of screwing up when I hand code too. :D

Yep, it was a Dreamweaver vs sleepy newbie screw up. I think I'm going to recite 10 times before bed every night for the next month: "I will not submit without rechecking, I will not..."

Commiseration does give a certain amount of comfort though. Thanks for letting me know that I wasn't the first.

Hiya,

In reference to Dreamweaver URL rewriting...

Select "Preferences" form the "Edit" menu, then select/highlight "Code Rewriting", then locate the "URL Encoding" section and select "Do not encode special characters". That should keep DW from messing with your URLs.

I would suggest that you turn off all code rewriting in DW to be safe. Writing HTML code by hand is always best but DW can be a helpful tool at times if you know its strengths and weaknesses.

Anyway, hope that helps someone...:)

Regards,
SF

It helped me. :)

Who's newsletter gets messed up? |jester|
Also, make sure that you are using absolute file paths and not relative file paths otherwise you wind up linking to the hard drive! Right Greenguy! |pcsucks|

Hey KoolKat,

I've always used relative paths to improve page load time and never had a problem...is there some doom lurking somewhere that hasn't bitten me yet?

Ditto. We won't even talk about some of the things I did when I first started promoting multiple CCBill sponsors....

It is mainly a problem with these WYSISYG html editors, because if you are on a Windows platform, a lot of time they will make the relative path to the file on your local computer, so when it gets uploaded, it tries to point to the C:\ drive and then tries to find the images off the viewers hard drive. Just ask GreenGuy about that and the newsletter last week |goodnight

Oh - that's nice. I see how things are :D

Been there, done that! |shocking|

Ah, cool. No worries for me then, DW has yet to bite me, and I'd imagine that if it did it would be because I set up the site wrong in DW |rasta|