My Racy ToyBox Blog

From ToyboxCharley at http://MyRacyToybox.com

A little different this time – This is for Tweeters.

I haven’t used this blog for technical recommendations, and much less, technical recommendations that have little to do with blogging. However, I really feel that this is pretty special and wanted to spread the word.

Tweeting with an application

As ToyboxCharley I have some 13,200+ followers. From time to time I send out a tweet, and, since I use Outlook for messages, I found the free application Twinbox, made for Outlook, which will create the TinyURLs, and send the Tweet on it’s way. It’s a good service. However, although I had never thought about it, following each tweet is a dim line showing the hour, and mentioning a ‘from’, which is this case was Twinbox: ‘from Twinbox.’

So every tweet I put up was branded with the Twinbox name. There’s more… That ‘from Twinbox’ is a hyperlink which goes to the site of the parent of the Twinbox application. This is surely just a way to receive some benefit from providing the free software. Certainly not a complaint from me. And you will find this same situation, as far as I can find, on each of the Twitter applications in use for Tweeting.

“TweetBrand” to the rescue

Well, I found a FREE application which puts YOUR name there, and, in addition, makes it a hyperlink which links back to YOUR site. I believe, until proven otherwise, that that is a unique offering. I’ve been using it for a few days, and it just simply works. The ‘from’ is ‘from My Racy Toybox,’ and that is a link to http://MyRacyToybox.com.

We have placed some more information, samples, and download information at http://www.myracytoybox.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/brand_tweets.htm. No name or eMail required. Just linked to the software provider.

Or you can go directly to the provider from here: http://www.marketmetweet.com/tweetbrand-get-it-now.html.

Good Tweeting!

From ToyboxCharley at www.MyRacyToybox.com

ToyboxCharley on Twitter

Well, we have entered the world of social media. We can be found on Twitter, and, perhaps more important, I have been announcing (tweeting) the new posts and will tweet all the posts I put on this blog. As a follower of toyboxcharley on Twitter you will be automatically kept up to date on what we are doing on the blog, as well as the MyRacyToybox.com site.

Join Twitter or sign in here: http://twitter.com/. Then search people on twitter for ‘toyboxcharley’. After finding us, click on the ‘follow’ button and that’s it!

We will be glad to follow you as well.

To be fair, I have to admit that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the WP-SpamFree plugin installation on this powered-by-Wordpress Blog, but that’s not so unusual, really. Many, perhaps most, plugins download and auto-install and only need to be activated before they go about doing their thing, whatever it is.

Well, we  have a lot of new and updated stuff being worked on, and this blog is one of the new ones. After puttng the updated site online, there were, and still are, many, many aspects to complete or improve, and, after a few blog posts, we had a half dozen comments and several spam. So we deleted the spam, and looked for a plugin to control that a bit. This is where WP-Spamfree plugin comes in, and, unfortunately, we go out. We simply activated it, and went on to more pressing things, saying that when we had human blogger ready and willing, we’d get back to blogging.

Yesterday ToyboxCharley, now anxious to get this blog active and valuable, posted an article about Lubricants for Sex (Click to Read) and noted that it was certainly unusual to have all that time pass without even one comment to the blog. It was then that I saw a line on the administration dashboard that said with some pride that 73 spam comments had been blocked by the WP-Spamfree plugin. So we went out and tried a little comment to one of the posts. On pressing the Submit button the browser produced a page-not-found, and essentially blew us (acting as a commenter) away. When I went back into administration, I found that WP-Spamfree had ceremoniously added another kill to its count and was now touting 74 ’spam’ comments blocked. There may be some technically sound explanation for this, but I find it difficult to blame us, the innocent user, for anything except letting it go on for so long. We are aware that certainly some of the comments were spam, but I would gladly pick them out manually at this time of low activity, in order to respectfully welcome those good folk who wanted to  make an addition to our blog.

Under any circumstance, I deactivated the plugin, tried the same little test comment, and it went in perfectly.

I’m sure we will not hear from those offended, but we offer our sincere apology to them, and hope that maybe someday, some of them will find their way back to us. And to those reading this, welcome to My Racy Toybox Blog. Please visit our MyRacyToybox site from time to time. We have good products, and the offering and the site itself are improving rapidly. We emphasize quality and price (doesn’t everybody?), and we update product daily. There are always On Sale Items of the month with about 30% discount for that period.

Admin

We understand the possible value of a comment including a website link, even if the comment itself may be the secondary reason for making it. But just this quickly, this new embryonic blog is attracting some spammers and needs to provide some protection for itself. For the moment, we will try to stay away from CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions, etc., but we will take some action and see how successful it is. Then make more decisions.

I have taken down all recent posts, and may put them back after we see how things go. Under any circumstance, it’s not altogether reasonable to have this blog functioning without the parent www.MyRacyToybox.com online.

Back with you soon, with the site and the blog.

ToyboxCharley (admin)

Well, I’m back the same day.

After a small but important meeting here, we decided to say here, up front, that with the new method of selecting product, it is not too probable that we will be up and running by the end of the month. In the past we had programs which simply dumped the large quantity of products of our suppliers onto the system, with whatever, if any, description and photo. We are now selecting each product and, although we certainly cannot say that we TEST each product, at least we make selections based on the supplier, the cost, the photo, and the description, which we hope will keep out the thousands of trivial products of the past. We’d like to have a minimum of 1000 high quality, selected products in the store.  After we are open, we will continue to improve the selection.

Well, the selection process is very slow, although it is picking up speed. As we find impediments to a rapid decision and installation, we are programming support software to speed it up. We actually started a couple of days ago, with ZERO products in the store, and have passed 100 at this time. It looks like we can search out, evaluate, price, assure we have photo, categorize, and send to the server about 25  to 35 a day with one person working full time. Before we are ready to open, that will probably climb to around 50, so…. maybe we will be a little late. Please hang in there with us.

Thanks again for your interest in our products and our store.

The administration