n00bie Challenge

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Well I put the new player on the first five videos on the site now so you can play with it more, I thought I had it all working good last night and so yesterday I began putting the player onto the site only to realize I had a bunch of bugs after I uploaded it so I spent a lot of yesterday fixing them up.

There are still a few minor glitches to work out with the player but it seems to be working pretty good now.

Ok since everyone is talking about my player I have stated that this is the first one I've built with no previous background in creating flash players and I did this up inside of one week from scratch, now the reason I was able to pull it off in a decent amount of time is because I have over 6 years of programming experince in other languages which means that I understand how code is supposed to work and learning new programming languages for me goes a lot quicker then someone with lower amounts of programming experince.

With that said if you all want some really good flash tutorials then check out gotoandlearn.com - Free video tutorials on using the Flash Platform by Lee Brimelow they have some really good shit there that can help you get started with this type of thing, honestly flash and actionscript for me seems to be a lot easier to learn then other languages because there naming convention simply makes a lot of sense over others.

As for changing the girl in the share section of the player I might get around to doing another one up but I want to make sure everything is all good for now, I've still got to re-tweak my buffer system and I've also found out something very important about this type of thing.

-----------IMPORTANT ABOUT YOUR OWN FLASH PLAYERS BELOW--------

Ok the first 5 videos playing on my site right now are being hosted by me on my own servers because well I've found out something very disturbing about leaching videos from other sites and using your own flash player.

You see when you create your own player and then use Live HTTP Headers (Firefox plugin) to get the flv location of the videos you want and you begin to play the file in your player for the first time everything works 100% no problems what so ever. Good right? Well this is what really got me fucked up yesterday.

You see the file locations for videos on YouTube and LiveVideo (Most likely all other sites as well) have some sort of dynamically generated codes which disable you from leaching there videos with another flash player.

See yesterday I set up the first 5 vids on my site and was leaching the vids from LiveVideo and YouTube but after about an hour all the videos stopped working on me and I didn't change anything at all so I was like ok what the fuck happened, then I began to dig and learn more.

I realized that if you take the flv location and use it to play your files (Like you have to in order for it to work), it plays perfect for a few plays, sometimes it works for like 10 plays sometimes it stops working after you've played it only 5 times and basically I tracked it down to leach security on the part of the other sites.

See YouTube and LiveVideo have many many video servers all running in order to support the bandwidth and traffic levels they get but (And I haven't taken the time yet to trace this) they have Javascript which reads the url location and transfers it to the right server with authorization of some sort in order to say hey this video can be played.

LiveVideo on the other hand might have this type of security built directly into there flash player (I've built my own security directly into my own flash player so people can't leach the vids from my servers as well).

Anyway to put it simply there are one of two ways to leach the videos from other sites, the first way is you don't and the second way is that you dig through there Javascript and try to figure out what values they are changing to make the authorization work but again I believe they may also have this type of security built into there swf file which means it'll be fucking impossible to crack unless your very experinced.

So in my first tests the leeching of vids from other sites worked great thats why I thought it would work but as I've stated they will only work for an hour or two and then your fucked the vid won't play anymore cause of some sort of leech protection thing they must have built.

However as I said I haven't done a lot of digging into exactly how they do it but I do know that there is security there.
 


Aequitas, what is your view on this ..... just something that popped up after seeing your post.

Now I am not sure, how you've made it so that the FLV plays from the server directly, maybe a file leecher that let's you insert the direct link to the FLV on the youtube or LiveVideo server.

Now FDC servers have been my favorite for all my filesharing experiments, it's the closest I have gotten to being on something that's actually unmetered.
FDC - Services - Virtual Dedicated Servers :: Dedicated servers, Colocation chicago, Virtual dedicated servers, Dedicated server forums, virtual dedicated server forums, VDS, VPS, virtual private servers

Let's say you code a script that downloads FLV straight from Youtube to your own server (in this case an FDC unmetered VPS) and we utilise this FLV link for embedding on our server. This would prevent the NaN Anti-leech errors and let us stream from our own server without having to go through a lot of trouble.

Check out Rapid Leech - This does exactly what I said before file sharing sites like rapidshare and stuff.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers
 
Anarkist said:
Aequitas, what is your view on this ..... just something that popped up after seeing your post.

Now I am not sure, how you've made it so that the FLV plays from the server directly, maybe a file leecher that let's you insert the direct link to the FLV on the youtube or LiveVideo server.

Now FDC servers have been my favorite for all my filesharing experiments, it's the closest I have gotten to being on something that's actually unmetered.
FDC - Services - Virtual Dedicated Servers :: Dedicated servers, Colocation chicago, Virtual dedicated servers, Dedicated server forums, virtual dedicated server forums, VDS, VPS, virtual private servers

Let's say you code a script that downloads FLV straight from Youtube to your own server (in this case an FDC unmetered VPS) and we utilise this FLV link for embedding on our server. This would prevent the NaN Anti-leech errors and let us stream from our own server without having to go through a lot of trouble.

Check out Rapid Leech - This does exactly what I said before file sharing sites like rapidshare and stuff.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers
Click to expand...

Hmm I like the idea but in a way I would do more research on the servers, for instance with my GoDaddy account I get 100GB of storage space and 1 Terabyte of transfer each month, now this works out to be about 3000 of my hosted videos played each day.

The price is currently set at about $70 a year so around $6 or $7 per month, with prices like that its pretty fucking cheap, so when the time comes and I exceed the 3000 played vids per day from my server I can just buy another hosting for another $70 per year now if the site cannot make more then $70 per year or $7 bucks per month with 3000 vids being played each day then there is something really fucking wrong with the site.

Now obviously there are tons of issues with not running your own servers and its 10 times better to run your own servers but the main thing to keep in mind I think will be price, storage space, and bandwidth.

I mean fuck for around $2K I can build my own server with a Terabyte or more of storage space and I could go down to my local internet service provider and see how much they would charge me per month to hook up my server to there connection if I do all the maintience and keep my server out of there way.

This would enable me to have complete control over my own server but again it would be interesting to know how much bandwidth allowment my local ISP would give me for a specified price.

The rapid share script looks very handy and I'll have to try it out, it could really speed things up when adding new videos to your site just as long as I could somehow change around the naming convention with it all.

But its definately a kick ass idea to look into more.
 
Monkey see, monkey do. I love the idea of messing around with Flash whenever I get the chance, but more often than not I build sites that don't use any. So, my flash skillz really are hurting right now.

Here's my lame attempt at the player:
SEO Mike's Flash Player Test Page

It's still a work in progress, but I wanted to see it on the net, rather than my local machine, so I uploaded it. The video is a rip, so it is actually hosted on my server. Feel free to make fun of it (the player) or whatever. Like I said, it's a work in progress, and likely won't look anything like the final product.

Enjoy.
 
SEO_Mike said:
Monkey see, monkey do. I love the idea of messing around with Flash whenever I get the chance, but more often than not I build sites that don't use any. So, my flash skillz really are hurting right now.

Here's my lame attempt at the player:
SEO Mike's Flash Player Test Page

It's still a work in progress, but I wanted to see it on the net, rather than my local machine, so I uploaded it. The video is a rip, so it is actually hosted on my server. Feel free to make fun of it (the player) or whatever. Like I said, it's a work in progress, and likely won't look anything like the final product.

Enjoy.
Click to expand...

Thats a fucking awesome movie haha and don't worry mine looked like shit until I got it done up, its all about the finished product.

I wanted to ask too what do you all think of the promotional material I got going? - YouTube - 2 Girls Giving 1 Girl A Lap Dance
 
Thanks Aequitas! The player is pretty much finished now, just need to figure out how to integrate with a db and XML and then I'll be ready to do some damage. ;)

Springer: get the Firefox plugin called Download Helper then visit YouTube or any other site that uses .flv files and just rip away.

Aequitas: Hot chicks...umm...let me think...Yeah I like it! Nice clip on YouTube man, should attract some attention. BTW, you have:
Code: 
NaN:NaN
showing up beside your Play button. Otherwise your player looks sweet! Nice job man!

/edit/ also, your player locked up on me after the video finished and I copied the embed code.
 
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springer said:
OK, I'm pretty clear on the player. Where and how do you get the videos?
Click to expand...

I just use Live Http header the firefox plugin and when I play the video it gives me the download location but just do a simple search there are tons of free flv downloaders out there.

SEO_Mike said:
Thanks Aequitas! The player is pretty much finished now, just need to figure out how to integrate with a db and XML and then I'll be ready to do some damage. ;)

Springer: get the Firefox plugin called Download Helper then visit YouTube or any other site that uses .flv files and just rip away.

Aequitas: Hot chicks...umm...let me think...Yeah I like it! Nice clip on YouTube man, should attract some attention. BTW, you have:
Code: 
NaN:NaN
showing up beside your Play button. Otherwise your player looks sweet! Nice job man!

/edit/ also, your player locked up on me after the video finished and I copied the embed code.
Click to expand...

Yeah the NaN:NaN beside my player will be gone soon enough, the reason it shows that is because I've disabled well no bad choice of words I've stopped all the players from auto-playing or starting in any way shape or form, I basically have no NetStream for each player until they press the play button, when they press that button then the timer comes on cause the NetStream is connected.

I did that because I have 5 vids on one page and if all where to connect right away it would cause major slowdowns (Like there is already) and major waste of bandwidth but I'm adding a thing to hide the NaN:NaN and have it just display 00:00 until the user clicks play.

I also have to figure out how to properly get those images to pre-load, they work fine and all but they only begin to load when you are over top of the player and that makes me mad haha I want them to load on page load. I'll figure it out in the morning.
 
Ok noobs and everyone else I'm going to help you out a little bit on brandability side of things but this method will only work if you are using videos on your site, your entire site doesn't have to be all videos like most of mine hell even if you have ONE single video on your website you can easily do this to increase your website brand and to hopefully gain some more traffic.

Over these last few days I've been noticing that a few visitors of mine have found my site with there cell phone, who knows those visits may have came from WickedFire members but then again they might not have.

Upon seeing this I remembered reading so many articles of how cell phones will quickly become a decent player in the way people view the web, so you should not loose out on this type of traffic, most cell phones use whats known as GSM, actually almost every new cell phone will have GSM unless your in a small town like me and your service providers are cheep ass bitches but back on topic.

These phones can play a movie file type which is called .3GD and .3GD2 so what you do is you take your video (Download it if you don't already have it on your hard drive) and then convert it to this format and allow your website visitors to download the video directly onto there cell phone (Make sure your website URL is somewhere in that video though).

If you want an easy solution to download movies onto your computer there is a really good firefox plugin called Sothink Web Video Download

Download that and then do a simple search for any .3GD converter there are tons and tons but you might end up spending like $30 bucks for a really good one.

I was going to get into talking about how to optimize your site for a mobile device because I already did up my mobile site, if you have a cell phone check it out just type in www . cutesexywomen . com into your cell and you should see 3 100px by 100px images and when clicked you'll notice my little message so its nothing special but it still gives brand awareness to the mobile community.

What I really wanted to do was allow mobile users to be able to watch my videos on my site on there cell phones just like how www.m.youtube.com does but upon my research I realized that there is no other real solution to stream the videos other then to have your own server software running in order to do it, at this point its just too much hassle to deal with and easier to just wait a little until a more valid solution comes up or maybe when I'm board I'll figure something out.

Anyway why even stop there with your videos see if a few people download the video to there phone then there is a very very very good chance they will show that video to there friends, but think why not create a few other formats and allow your website visitors to download that video to the Apple Ipod and the Microsoft Zen, again these converters can easily be found on Google and when someone puts your video on another mobile device there is a very large chance that they will show there friends the videos and so on and so on.

So just because you create a video and spread it around the web doesn't mean it has to stop there, think mobile devices, even some PDAs should now have the abillity to all play videos.

So there you go just a little something to help you out and to help get your website brand out there a bit more.
 
Great update Aequitas!

I was thinking earlier that this thread has been going for about a month or so, the halfway point theoretically based on my initial post, and I was wondering what people have learned so far. How much have you made? Did you find a new way of doing something that you had already been doing?

In short, what have you gained from participating in this thread?

To start things off, I learned a shit-ton about gaining backlinks fast. Made about $8 off the autoblogs. Learned how to create a XML driven MP3 player, and a Flash video player. Found out that video blogs can be profitable, and fun. And have really enjoyed the comments and information from all of you.

Your turn.
 
I haven't made any money directly from this thread, however I would like to think that I would not have made the money I did (in my sig) without this thread. I was flatlining and this thread got me jumpstarted again. I learned more about wpmu, autoblogging and I've gotten all around more friendly with WP. I consider my achievements still being a big work in process though, with alot further to go. Thanks to everyone in this thread, you guys are the best.
 
Let's see..

So far in November for the sites I started working on in this thread I have made ~$60 from adsense.

Things I learned included doing keyword research for a niche I wasnt actively in the industry for, using a cycle site to generate links, working on ad placement for better CTR. The biggest lesson I learned is that I definitely believe that it is scaleable, and I am working on a system to be able to crank these out.

Thanks again SEO_Mike and the others here that have shared, if your at Pubcon a round is on me!
 
Holy shit Mike, what I've learned and remembered and changed about the way I do things would fill up the whole rest of this page if I listed it all. Man, what a great idea this whole thread was. Thanks!

Even though I'm not participating in your competition, I've changed my whole outlook on what WP is capable of. Previously, I looked at it as a blog platform, even though I knew it could do more. I was limiting myself thinking that way. I just never tried some of the things I'm doing now.

I've designed some kick-ass looking sites (that don't look at all like blogs) using WP, a sweet collection of plugins and some newly acquired php editing skills. I know a hell of a lot more today about WP than I did just a few weeks ago, all because I began following this thread and thinking about what I could do.

Thanks to everyone who gave tips, ideas and solutions. Thanks to all the people who asked questions, too. I got a lot out of reading answers to other peoples questions, too... things I didn't know I didn't know.

Good luck to all you new Wordpress hackers! I hope y'all got half as much out of this thread as I did. If so, you've gotten one hell of an education.
 
Started a shit ton of Autoblogs, which are more work than I was expecting, but then again- what isn't? Getting my feet wet with affiliate marketing. Still not seeing any real money, but I'm learning tons.
 
SEO_Mike said:
Great update Aequitas!

I was thinking earlier that this thread has been going for about a month or so, the halfway point theoretically based on my initial post, and I was wondering what people have learned so far. How much have you made? Did you find a new way of doing something that you had already been doing?

In short, what have you gained from participating in this thread?

To start things off, I learned a shit-ton about gaining backlinks fast. Made about $8 off the autoblogs. Learned how to create a XML driven MP3 player, and a Flash video player. Found out that video blogs can be profitable, and fun. And have really enjoyed the comments and information from all of you.

Your turn.
Click to expand...

Where to start well first off I started a little later then most but overall the site has been up and running for about a month now, I took the first day actually setting up and designing the website (One solid day), after which I spent the next week doing a few tweaks with the type of affiliate products I want on the site and deciding how much and where to put them on the site, testing the overall look and feel of it.

During the first week of the site my average visitors was 10 unique per day, which was killer traffic I mean shit I wish all my sites were getting 10 unique per day (Joke).

During the second week I placed 3 videos with my embeded URL on YouTube, Veoh, Dailymotion, and Live Video and I spent that entire week adding posts like crazy I think I added close to 100 posts that week. (Yes all 100% unique content) and after that week my average daily unique visitors wen't up to 49.

Then on week 3 well I really didn't do fuck all with the site I didn't do any additional advertising and I added maybe 10 to 20 more unique posts and spent the entire time learning how to create the flash player for the site, then made a ton of tweaks then at the end of that week my unique visitor count went up to an average of 82 per day.

And finally this last week I've looked a lot into putting my vids on mobile devices like the cell phones, PDAs, and Ipods, I also began to do a bit of PPC and added some more posts which brings up my daily average of unique visitors to 217.

Total profit so far is at $82 dollars but missed out on another $35 bucks because I started off promoting paid for free sign ups which I get $1.50 each and then it turns out a lot of my visitors were actually paying out which earns me $35 so I switched everything back so I get paid when my visitors sign up for the service and not just for the free account.

At this point I learned a lot about flash and a lot about expanding the reach of my video sites all around, I did a ton of thinking and work since I started up this challenge so it definately was a good one. My conversion ratios are pretty good right now as well.

For instance right now one out of every 16 people who click through on the ads sign up for a free account and one out of every 8 of those so 50% are signing up for the paid service which makes me $35 bucks each and the amount of people clicking through to the ads from my site stands at about 47%.

So to break that down 47% of visitors to my site click through to my affiliate offers, then about 58% of those are signing up for a free account and 50% of those free accounts are becoming paid accounts which are making me $35 each so I'm averaging a solid 50% CTR and actions around the board but when you do the math I make about $35 bucks for every 200 people I send to my site right now.

Once I start sending serious traffic to it I'll be curious to see if those numbers increase, hold, or fall but nonetheless by taking part in this thread I found myself to get a lot more done in terms of production and I also learned a lot so this has definately been a good thread to take part in.
 
Since we go back and forth here, talking about videos and such, I'm learning a lot about them... what do ya's all use to edit these videos you're ripping from the youtube?

I found a couple I liked, downloaded them in .flv format, searched around and found a program to convert them to other formats, like .wmv and so on. Now I'm struggling with making edits like embedding urls, changing the soundtrack, doing transitions, etc.

Thanks
 
springer said:
Since we go back and forth here, talking about videos and such, I'm learning a lot about them... what do ya's all use to edit these videos you're ripping from the youtube?

I found a couple I liked, downloaded them in .flv format, searched around and found a program to convert them to other formats, like .wmv and so on. Now I'm struggling with making edits like embedding urls, changing the soundtrack, doing transitions, etc.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Download or hack Camtasia from Techsmith thats what I use and it works pretty easily.
 
I have a noob question that maybe someone can help me out with...

I'm trying to compile lists of information about various thing.. For example, I might make a list of bible verses or something. How can I turn that into a database file to be displayed on my website? Well, actually, I understand that part pretty well, but is there a way to make each entry get it's own page? I'm just looking for an automated way of doing this. Like, is there a way I could just upload the file to Wordpress and let it do all the work or something?

This question was prompted by a post I read here about .sql files: All your database are belong to us - Seocracy.com
 
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