The sarettah vs Nick war thread.......

[sarettah]

Once and a while you get shown the light....
In the strangest of places if you look at it right (Jerry Garcia...Scarlet Begonias)

Ever since Nick posted his parody, it has been running around my head, or at least the points he made.... Not about the news threads...lol..But the other points, many of which are quite valid...

I am answering the points, not in a defensive posture, but in what is actually a quite open minded posture....

and yes, I know the song was written in jest and yes the thread was just for fun.... But like Jerry said... In the strangest of places...

"I saw his site , it was rather lame
no reason to have a wank No chance of making bank
There were several thousand just the same"

I love that verse... and it is quite valid... Most of what I have built I built in a learning mode. They are predominantly based around a standard free site style template ( http://www.partyafterdark.com/petite_panties http://partyafterdark.com/honesty http://www.strapgirl.com/dungeon as examples)

When I started out I was trying (still am) to learn all the ins and outs of the adult industry. Not so I could conquer it, but so that I could sell my programming and system design skills. Before you can write programs to automate something, you must understand what the something you are building is supposed to accomplish. So, my gallery and free site attempts have been done while trying to master the webmaster skills of the people I would like to be doing business with on the programming side.

Unfortunately, the prices I am used to getting paid for my work are much higher than the rate that most of the folk I see charging. I see programmers going at $50-75 a script for something that will take several hours. Thats fine if you can sell a couple of dozen copies of it. I have done/ do custom programming.... I bill out at anywhere from $100.00 an hour to $150.00 an hour for programming and around $175-$200 and hour for system design... At the prices I like to make I can not compete with the php guys doing it on the cheap.... So, if you want a full custom system, I'm your guy... If you just need a few scripts, I'm not even going to compete, so I don't try...

"A crowd of webmasters stood and stared
They'd never seen a site like his before
Nobody was even really sure what he did this for"

lol....I believe that probably refers (if it has an actual site reference) to http://www.bitsntits.com . This site is definitely experimental and is really more of a programming exercise then a sales site attempt (although I would like to get it on to a real host and expand it's possibilities). The site is automatically rebuilt every 2 hours, top to bottom. The various newsfeeds are updated on a schedule determined by an algorithm that takes into account how long it has been since the program last checked the feed, how often the feed updates and a preset priority. The first touch of code for the program was written on September 25th or 26th and the first time I showed the site to anyone was around October 2nd... So it was in raw development for about 6 evenings (3 or hours an evening) and that included much of the searching out of newsfeeds... It has not had any kind of technological breakdown since around the 10th of October. The only adjustments I have made to the database was to remove several gallery feeds that had very questionable content. I don't know how, but Google had it listed for me by the evening of the 3rd...

I did the site to first of all, see if I could write a tight enough proggy to make the whole thing work and secondly to see if a news site/pics site would attract much traffic.

"But if you want to make dough
I'd love to turn you on "

Lol...Is that an offer Nick ? (serious question there.....)

"find a niche and get the traffic quick
make money , try not to be a dick "

Excellent excellent advice....... Especially the "try not to be a dick"....

"don't sell those jewels
whad up wid dat
porn and pills that where the money's at "

Paper Jewels is my wife's site It is not my predominant effort.. I carry it in my tag line because I view webmasters as a potential market... You guys have girlfriends and wives... You ladies like Jewelry....

Jen does some beautiful work in a unique medium that she developed from scratch (and we have investigated and the process, because we have never revealed it is patentable...lol)... She has recently started working with more gem stones because it is a hard sell to get folks to fork over $50.00 for something they know is paper (as Vick very kindly pointed out a while back)... This stuff sells quite well when we get it in folk's hands and they can touch and feel it.... Selling it across the web via photo and description is a whole different story.... We are getting another domain name and setting up another version of the site in the next week or so, a name that will not have paper in it and will play down the paper angle some...

Just for info, the entire site is coded by hand by Jen, occasionally I will do a site wide price update with a proggy, but other than that, it is her handiwork throughout and she puts a lot of time, effort, frustration and love into both the site and her product.... I wish either of us was more of a marketing whiz so we could get the sales up...

"Somebody posted back to him and he went into a dream "

always !!! I shiver in anticipation when I see that someone, ANYONE has posted back to me....lolololol......


Anyway, Nick my friend (and I do consider you a friend, one of my favorite people on the board even though we have never met) Thank you... Sincerely, not sarcastically...

Through that one song parody I have gotten more solid constructive criticism than I believe I have gotten in the entire time I have been posting on Oprano..... (although Vick offered up some rock solid advice at one point also..thank you also Vick, if I did not say so at the time)

Thats all I wanted to say.....





(and don't even think that I am gonna stop posting my news links dammit...aint gonna happen)





Last edited by sarettah at Nov 4 2003, 10:35 PM