For those of you who haven’t seen this already (I hadn’t before this morning), there is a devil on Digg. You heard me right. Go to Digg.com, right click and pull up the page source. What do you see? This.

I was a bit worried that this was a hack until someone pointed out the URL at the bottom of the image, “www.hellisnigh.com“. When I went to the URL I was asked to put in six passwords to receive a special reward.  The passwords are hidden in the images, which are spread out on different domains. Curious now, I did a little snooping and found out that it’s a promotional ad for the new game Dante’s Inferno. A forum I found listed where to find other, similar images on the different gaming sites. The sites were digg.com, dailymotion.com, gamespot.com, kotaku.com, ign.com, 1up.com, gamestrader.com, ugo.com, and even wwe.com.

How people knew they would be on these domains were beyond me, but here are the rest of the images. Each image is a character in the game that’s been recreated in ASCII.

This is such an innovative, creative ad strategy that’s fun for us techies to hunt down, and it definitely leaves a lasting impression. What was the prize after you find all six passwords? I think I’ll leave that up to you to find out.

A few of you may have noticed an error pop up when adding a new site in LavaLinx. It usually looked something like this:

“ERROR: You must enter a valid domain name”

The error was occurring on normal domains if the user didn’t strip out all http:// and also the trailing slash. We’ve corrected this error so you can include the entire URL and progress onto the rest of the domain setup. However, it will still alert you if it believes the domain isn’t a valid domain. If you get this message and you believe it is an error, make sure there are no spaces within or after your URL.

LavaLinx is still in development stages, and it’s feedback from users like you that make all the difference. If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to make our product grow, or if you’re having any issues you’d like us to look at, feel free to drop it in the comments below.

October was a big month for LavaLinx as we added over 25 new social sites to our system, with a large part of the focus on Twitter-related social bookmarking domains. This brings the total amount of social sites in LavaLinx to over 80! Below is the list of new social sites:

Retweet.com
Twittley.com
FriendFeed.com
Identi.ca
Bebo.com
Url.org
Xerpi.com
Aboogy.com
Acoopit.co.nz
Buzzbookmarks.com
Topstumbles.info
Onlinesocialbookmarking.com
Bookmarkyourpost.info
Smash-up.com
Bookmarkyourlink.info
Onestopbookmarks.com
Bookmarkingweb.com
Izeby.com
Newsmarked.info
Tagsnest.com
Veryhotlinks.com
Muti.co.za
2collab.com
Savethislink.net
Votetags.info
Bookmark4you.com
Topstumbles.com

Don’t see your favorite social site on the list? Leave a comment with the URL of the site you would like added.

Now that you’ve sent a social trade, this tutorial will take you through completing it.

Below, the system indicates that there is one pending social link. Click on “Add Social Links”.

That will bring you to the review page. From here, you can see the date the trade was created, the site it is from and its details, and who created the trade. To begin, click “Add Bookmarks”.

The bookmarking process is the same for each social site – simply bookmark the link, then use our link checker to ensure that it was done properly, and complete the trade. For this example, we will bookmark on Digg.

Above the bookmarking window, LavaLinx gives you all the details you need to add the link – the URL, title and description of the page you are bookmarking. This page had already been inserted into Digg, so we simply have to click “Digg”.

Now we hit the “Check Bookmark” button in the bottom right corner.

Our system will let you know if it has been added properly. If there was an error, you will see a warning with some troubleshooting tips on how to correct it. Here it says the bookmark was added properly, so we’ll move on to the next step.

We have our link bookmarked and we are ready to hit Complete Trade.

Now, if you were to return to the admin page, you would see it a completed social trade.

Now that you have your accounts set up, you are ready to start trading social bookmarks with other LavaLinx users. First, login to your LavaLinx account.

From here you can click “Manage” on a particular site, or you can go straight to the “Create Social Trade” button in the bottom corner of the screen.

This will list out all pages that are available to trade social bookmarks with, starting with those most recently added. It also lists the “Type” of trade.

The “Bookmarks Remaining” is the number of remaining times you may bookmark that particular page. The “Social Accounts” lists the number of social accounts that site has available to bookmark your site.

Select the page you would like to bookmark and hit “Social Trade” on the right column.

Social bookmarks are different than link trades. With link trades, relevancy is key, but with social bookmarks, you will want to use variety. This will show the social sites that you are interested in a multitude of topics, which will help your social account appear more natural.

The next screen lets you select which page of yours that you’d like them to bookmark.

Click on the page you prefer and hit “Next”.

Now you are able to choose the page of theirs that you will bookmark. Here there is one, so select it and hit next.

Then, select the user you would like to bookmark your page. We have this feature for sites that have multiple users on one account.

On step four, you get to choose which social sites you and the other webmaster will bookmark these pages on.

LavaLinx has a counter on this section that ensures it is an even and fair trade. If you select an uneven number, our system will remind you that you must select an equal number of sites from each side.

When you’ve selected the social accounts you want, click next and you will be taken to the review screen. This is where you will look over the trade for any errors. Hit back if you need to fix anything, or if you’re finished click “Submit”.

You are now finished with creating a social trade, and it has been sent to the other webmaster for review.