I am a Myspace noob. I admit this readily - but I am not new to the internet. The way Myspace ‘works’ is neither intuitive, nor consistent, nor friendly - and I can say this with some authority since I do have some little experience in this field. Today’s rant is about Myspace hosted images.

The whole ‘hosted images’ thing was once completely foreign to me. In my experience, if you want to post an image on a website, you either uploaded the image yourself using one of several standard methods to your own site and made a link to it, or the site you were using would provide you a means to upload it to their website and would automatically link it into the story you were writing somehow. Once Flickr became popular (and I have several Flickr accounts, here’s one of them) I found that I didn’t have to pay to host my images, I could upload them free using Flickr, and then link to them - I realized this is not an entirely bad thing. I still maintain a (personal) policy to never post anything that I want to retain ‘personal ownership’ to on these photo sharing sites, though.

Myspace allows you to link to images that are already on the web, AND they allow you to upload (up to now 300) images, but they don’t provide any easy means for a non-web-savvy user to link to their own images. So, unless you already have a website or access to webspace someplace (and know how to use it), there is no obvious means of linking a picture you have uploaded into a comment that you post on someone’s comment space. Blog entries are different since Myspace provides you with a button to link an image, but you need to know the URL of the image. Most Myspace users would be hard pressed to tell you what a URL is much less be able to use one correctly in a web post. Well, read on to learn how to decipher this crap and take some control of your image posting.

What Myspace has done, (probably because they didn’t want to pay for hosting people’s pictures on their own webspace) is to create a cottage industry of websites offering cheezy images to use to express whatever shallow sentiment you happen to want to share with your ‘friends’ in lieu of actually speaking to them on the phone or even writing them a short email. The images are lame, first off - if you have even a modicum of artistic talent you can produce something better in a few minutes with Photoshop (or similar). The images are hosted as a ‘loss-leader’ in the hopes of snagging folks into visiting their ‘affiliate’ links. Usually the affiliates are porno outlets, but there are some software companies as well. My favorite is the ‘friend-adder’ software. I will make no link back to the software, if you need it I’m sure you can find it on your own. Here’s a typical testimonial:

Prior to having this it was a long and painstaking task adding people but with friendadder we were able to identify our target market and start adding with tremendous results of between 200 and 300 a day, add to that the opportunity to comment everyone with the click of a button I find this to be the best investment regarding our exposure on Myspace.

Here’s an image I found a lot of folks posting around New Years:

Here I have uploaded the picture into my Myspace ‘Pics’ section - which I am only using to host images for use in this blog, and not for any personal pics - (my personal pics can be found here on my own site).

Here’s the code that the site asks you to copy in order to post the image someplace:

<br /> <br /><a href="http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/graphics/view.php?id=1298&#038;cname=New+Years" class="external">
<img src="http://content.pimp-my-profile.com/graphics/set7/Newyearwine.png" border=0 alt="Myspace Graphics">
</a><br /><a href="http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/" class="external">Pimp-My-Profile.com</a><br />

The site advertises itself by making a link on the image itself which takes you back to their site *AND* below the image on the text ‘Pimp-My-Profile.com’. If you don’t know any HTML, here’s whats going on:

The

<br /> is just a break. Think of it as a RETURN on the keyboard. It makes a line break, so the image will display on it’s own line basically. Then comes the link back to their site. Whatever is between the A HREF start tag and the /A end tag will be a clickable link, so starting with <a href="somesite.com"> and ending with </a>, whatever is between those two ‘tags’ will be a clickable link. In this case there is an image tag between them:
<img src="http://content.pimp-my-profile.com/graphics/set7/Newyearwine.png" border=0 alt="Myspace Graphics">.
The tag reads like plain english: img means this is a link to an image, src says the image source is a web URL which is equal to “http://this is the web address you know what that is”, border is optional and set to 0 means if the image is used as a link, don’t make an ugly square border around it - make the border width equal to zero pixels wide, alt is optional and sets an alternate text description for the image for browsers that can’t display the actual image for some reason.

THEN, there follows some crap you don’t need:

<br /><a href="http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/" class="external">Pimp-My-Profile.com</a><br />
This is just another link back to their site, but it’s a text link, you’ll see it underneath the image in the post. ie: the text ‘Pimp-My-Profile.com’ will appear as a link back to ‘http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/’. Alot of this crap can be deleted and you can post just the image!

For instance, to post the image above in a comment, all you really need is this:

<img src="http://content.pimp-my-profile.com/graphics/set7/Newyearwine.png">
Try it in a blog post and see what happens! Understanding some basic HTML allows you to link back to hosted images without providing links back to porno sites and without the advertising text links.