Blogsvertise

This is a sponsored post.

I am going to experiment with the Blogsvertise program to see what kind of products they ask me to write about and what kind of fees they pay for a blog that gets so few hits as mine. I will identify these at the top of the post so you can avert your eyes if this type of post offends you.

One difference I see in the Blogsvertise program is that their rules do not require you to promote the product or service. You just have to link to it three times in a post. You are free to say anything about it that you choose. I wonder how that works in practice. I expect that bloggers that post consistently empty or highly negative posts find that they get few plum assignments.

One thing I stumbled on that I will warn you about is the extremely short Blogsvertise password length. I have a preference for substantial passwords that are easy to formulate but hard to guess. The 15 character limit on the password field caused two and a half problems for me. The first is that the password was cut off as I was typing it with no real warning that it was cut off. The second problem was that when I entered the password to log in, instead of just cutting off at the limit, the extra characters typed become the last character making the entered password incorrect. Both of these are really a problem for the input form and not for the designers, but having a longer password would get past these problems.

The 'half' problem is that when I sent a Lost Password request, the site sent the current password to me in email in plain text. That's kind of bad in a couple of ways. First you should never be storing plain text passwords in your database, you should be storing a digest (MD5 or SHA1) instead and that is what you should be sending over the air. It would also be better to reset the password to something random and require me to change that on my next login. The main point is that 15 characters is much too short for a password. 64 is a minimum, but it should really be very large. You should not care how large because you are only going to be storing the digest which is a fixed size.

I will keep you posted on the progress of the Blogsvertise experiment.