Category Archives: Internet

Internet, ReviewMe

Share your Thoughts with Thoughts.com

Leave a comment

Would you like to be the next Mr Daz? Well, when I say that I don’t mean get married, divorced, lose all of your transformers and have your car stole. No, I mean start an online Blog Site.

If you’ve wanted to write on a website with your very own blog, but you’re not very computer literate (or just illiterate if some of my commentators are anything to go by) and you don’t know your HTML from your DIY you need not worry. There is a website that will give you very own blog, for free.

I know, there are actually loads of websites that do this, one very large one owned by Google, but for those of you that like to avoid the big G you could try Thoughts.com.

Thoughts.com allows you to air your views on a variety of subject matters and to become part of their community of bloggers. Your own personal blog is offered with unlimited bandwidth so you don’t need to worry about becoming too popular and receiving loads of traffic… a common problem for me 😉

You can also upload photos and videos to share on your blog as well. It does all sound very similar to MySpace and Facebook yet doesn’t have the same clean interface. You do get your own personal page though where visitors can leave you feedback, view your photos and read your blogs, like this one for Janie Jeffers.

It’s worth giving it a look if nothing else, every Facebook started somewhere.

Humour, Internet

Shtop! This is no way to steal some furniture

Leave a comment

Those crazy Dutch police have arrested a teenager for stealing virtual furniture from a virtual hotel. The online youth social networking site Habbo is a hotel whereby members can pay real money for furniture… whatever turns them on I guess.

According to Reuters a 17 year old hacked into other user’s accounts and virtually stole the furniture from their hotel rooms and moved it into his own.

An Amsterdam police spokeswoman confirmed a report that the teenager was accused of stealing 4,000 euros (2,844 pounds) worth of virtual furniture by hacking into the accounts of other users.

This begs the question, if the furniture did not exist, was there ever a crime? How can they punish the kid? Lock his virtual character up in a virtual jail cell?

Internet

Star Doll – perfect for perverts everywhere

Leave a comment

If you’ve ever wanted to strip Natalie Portman down to her panties and then choose an outfit for her not to wear, then Stardoll.com is for you. I’ve been playing around with this site for some time and have to say, for perverts it’s first class.

Imagine my joy when I found Angelina Jolie and the Olsen Twins. Here’s a couple of outfits I made earlier:

dolls

Natalie PortmanAdmittedly the outfits are minimalistic, but you could do more if you wanted. Stardoll.com isn’t the only site that allows you to do this, there are thousands of them in varying styles. This Natalie Portman was from another such site.

I’m not sure of the morality of all of this, but I’m loving it.

For irony fans out there you can even dress up the Hoff himself, but you might want to dress him with more than I’ve done here.

The Hoff

Affiliate Marketing, Internet, Make Money

Just buy Toys launches using Affiliate Shop Window

2 Comments

The network Affiliate Window recently launched a great system called ‘Shop Window’ where you can take code written by them that imports all of the available merchant feeds direct to your website. It means you can create your own Affiliate site in minutes, and with a little website design flair and CSS knowledge you can customise the website to your heart’s content.

With this in mind we’ve just launched the website www.JustbuyToys.co.uk through Just Search. It contains product feeds from many of the major merchants in the toy industry such as Toys R Us, The Entertainer and Woolworths and features category pages for toys like Barbie, Bratz and my personal obsession; Transformers.

Just buy Toys

Have a look at the site, browse around and buy some toys! Seriously, you don’t need to buy any toys if you don’t want to, but the website is a shining example of how Affiliate Window’s ‘Shop Window’ can be used and customised.

Naturally we’ll be making a few of these now in different sectors and promoting them using natural SEO. I’m so excited I could rip a tissue.

Just buy Toys - Optimus Prime

If you want to create your own affiliate site like Just buy Toys then you can sign up to Affiliate Window and get designing.

Internet, Rants

What I hate about eBay

5 Comments

Recently I’ve been selling a lot of DVD’s on eBay to get rid of movies I’ve bought and never watched. There are a lot. This can be an exercise in frustration though as I end up selling DVDs bought for £10 and upwards for as little as 99p. Once eBay have taken their listing fee, their final valuation fee and through PayPal, their money transfer fee, that leaves me with around 60p for a DVD.

I’d get more at a boot sale. With some of the DVDs to be honest I’d be happier giving them away than letting someone nab The Princess Bride for under a quid.

Furthermore, when you do sell the DVDs it seems the less people pay for them, the more they want them quickly and complain. The fact that it takes 5 days to transfer money from PayPal to your bank matters not to them (incidentally there goes another 25p of your remaining 60p profit from the sale, leaving you with 35p).

The complaining emails I get demanding the DVDs immediately is becoming a bore, so much so that I’m considering abandoning actually selling on eBay.

For instance…

RE: You’ve received a question about eBay item: Doctor Who – The Movie (DVD 2001)(110183307350)

Seeing as I paid for this item on 31/09/08 I honestly thought I would have received it by now.
Thanks

– tedtrott01

Great eh? This is one of many such emails which usually receive the stock response, however this time I thought I’d make more of an issue of it.

Dude, firstly; that’s not a question.

Secondly, as the auction didn’t end until 31st October I don’t see how you could have paid for it on 31st September, unless you ARE the Doctor?

All DVDs get sent out this week.

There has to be a better way to get rid of your DVDs?

Internet

CiD Pop-up removal

Leave a comment

Recently I downloaded a program to play video files because a certain video I’d downloaded (not porn) requested a special player I’d never heard of. Against my better judgement and desperate to watch this particular video (again, it’s not porn) I downloaded this supposed player.

Naturally the video wasn’t actually what it claimed to be, even though the player did actually work. Would you believe it, but the damn thing installed adware on my machine?

What were the chances of that?

This awful annoying adware produced these damn CiD pop-up windows for trash like 888.com and even Sky.com (what were they thinking?) using Internet Explorer as a launch base. It couldn’t use Firefox of course. I even uninstalled IE, but that didn’t stop it either.

Finally, searching the net for help I found the solution, which was a simple one. I didn’t realise at the time that it was this CiD Help program doing the malicious crap to my PC, but Google taught me all about it. In a nutshell, go to Start>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs and select CiD Help to Remove it.

It does try to protect itself with a CAPTCHA test (probably designed to stop Adware Removal programs from deleting it, but it shouldn’t stop you).

And that’s it. The crap was gone and my PC runs fine again.

The moral of this story is don’t download dodgy software on the promise of a cool video clip, don’t use Internet Explorer… for anything and don’t trust any adverts for 888.com or Sky.

Internet

You Send It FREE trial

1 Comment

The Internet’s leading business file upload website YouSendIt.com is offering a FREE trial of its service for 1 month. What they offer is a way to send those large files such as documents, files for print, photographs and applications without the need to use FTP or risk an email filter blocking them out.

Having worked in a design agency I know the annoyance of one of the designers emailing a 1.6GB attachment to a client and then wondering why it hasn’t gotten through (Clare) so a site like YouSendIt.com would be invaluable.

Best of all, with a 1 month FREE trial you’ve nothing to lose. If you need to send large files to clients regularly and don’t use YouSendIt.com, give it a try. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Send, Receive and Track files- branded for your company with YouSendIt. Start Your FREE Trial!

Their regular package starts from $9.99 per month, that’s less than £5 Sterling.

Internet

Littlewoods recharge customers for online discount vouchers

2 Comments

High street store Littlewoods have committed some PR suicide today by retracting a £25 online voucher that was redeemed by customers some months back. It seems the voucher was intended for a small portion of customers, but as is the case with these things was passed around like a cheap tart.

This code was then circulated, without our authorisation, through a number of websites resulting in around 3,000 customers obtaining a discount for which they were ineligible.

As a result, in accordance with clause 2.3 of our online terms and conditions we have re-charged this discount back to their accounts and have written to them individually to explain.

Recharging the customers for the extra £25 ensures that no one will ever trust any online vouchers Littlewoods offer in future. I certainly won’t. You never know if they’ll simply recharge your account some weeks, months or even years down the line if they need to increase the profit margins.

This all seems highly murky to me as obviously Littlewoods wouldn’t have had these sales had it not been for the voucher.

Putting their customers first? Not bloody likely