Tabloid Edition

Great webhosting offer

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Nexx Online. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you're looking to get yourself online....whether it's for a blog, a website or perhaps you want to try your hand at running a business....there's a great little offer to make it cheap and simple for you to do so out there.

NEXX Web Hosting have just upgraded their server centre and to kick off the new technology they're offering a very decent indeed introductory package. For just $10 (and this is $10 for the full year, not a per month fee) you get unlimited web hosting for that year. That's not all, you also get a free .com domain name: that alone is worth more than the $10 you're paying.

Of course, it's not worth all that much if you cannot use the site but they've got some great tools there as well. For example, the support all the usual open source programs, Wordpress, Joomla and so on: even better, you can install them with just one click from their custom interface.

That's not all: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email and even $50 worth of both Google Adwords credits and Facebook ad credits. So you can do some basic marketing of your new site as well.

As an introductory offer this looks great: I certainly don't know of one better out there. If you want to get on the web, definitely worth checking out.

Unlimited Web Hosting

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Nexx Online. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you're looking to get yourself online....whether it's for a blog, a website or perhaps you want to try your hand at running a business....there's a great little offer to make it cheap and simple for you to do so out there.

NEXX Web Hosting have just upgraded their server centre and to kick off the new technology they're offering a very decent indeed introductory package. For just $10 (and this is $10 for the full year, not a per month fee) you get unlimited web hosting for that year. That's not all, you also get a free .com domain name: that alone is worth more than the $10 you're paying.

Of course, it's not worth all that much if you cannot use the site but they've got some great tools there as well. For example, the support all the usual open source programs, Wordpress, Joomla and so on: even better, you can install them with just one click from their custom interface.

That's not all: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email and even $50 worth of both Google Adwords credits and Facebook ad credits. So you can do some basic marketing of your new site as well.

As an introductory offer this looks great: I certainly don't know of one better out there. If you want to get on the web, definitely worth checking out.

Unlimited Web Hosting

Getting the business online

OK, well, most of us have managed to absorb the point that if we're going to have a successful business in this day and age then we need to get the business online in some manner. It might be just as advertising, giving potential customers details of how they can find us. Or it could be after sales service....I've always found sites which have the full sets of manuals on them to be terribly useful.

We might also want to go the whole hog and have a full marketing business online: looking for customers, interacting with them, selling to them and also servicing them afterwards. This particular model can be more difficult and it depends crucially on who you use to host the whole business. It's almost certainly true that you should do this with a company that is expert in email hosting.They'll have there all of the tools you need to make such a site successful and more than that will be able to guide you through what you need to do. Things like mailing list aquisition, management of those lists, sending out emails and respoinding to them.

It isn't easy to make sure that you've got your site properly set up and properly connected: but using the right host does make it a great deal easier.

Shopping on the internet

OK, so I guess we've all internalised the idea that we're going to get a much better deal by shopping on the internet, yes? A site which doesn't have to pay for a series of bricks and mortar outlets across the country (and the stock to fill them) is going to be able to offer us a better deal.

Yes, OK, but how do we actually find the stores which will give us a good deal? That's a little more complex. Say we wanted to buy some comforters. Or maybe a therapeutic pillow is more what we're looking for, or a simple bed pillow. Well, we could try the standard search engine but that's going to throw up every crank that has ever mentioned any of those things.

Or we could try a comparison shopping engine: but that'll pretty much limit us to those suppliers who have paid to be included in such an engine. So what we really want is something with the best of both worlds and the worst of neither: which brings us to ShopWiki.

It's a search engine, yes, but only of those who are actually selling things. It's a comparison engine, yes, but of all those who are selling things, not just those who have paid for entry. So the selection of home furnishings, bed linens, lamps,  desk lamps and home accessories is going to be both larger and more focussed than either of the other two methods.

Oh, and by including everyone of course we're going to get even better deals. Click through a link to try it out.

Custer's Revenge

Hahaha....this is a great little story. Custer's Revenge was one of the early computer video games and it was really rather incredibly lame.

Seriously, incredibly lame in fact. It wasn't just the incredibly blocky graphics and the entirely minimal gameplay, it was the very premise of the game which was terrible too:

In the game, the player controls the character of General George Armstrong Custer, depicted as a man wearing nothing but a cavalry hat, boots, and a bandana, sporting a visible erection. Custer has to overcome arrow attacks to reach the other side of the screen. His goal is to have intercourse with a naked, large-breasted Native American woman, named "Revenge."

In fact it was so bad that Atari, who made the machine it was played on, sued the games writer for bringing their machine into disrepute.

I was involved in the games business, years ago, and I have to say that I never got involved in anything quite as bad as that (I should also point out that I never got involved with something quite as successful as this game. They shifted 80,000 units so I'm told). At first we were working on simply taking games designed for the Commodore Amiga and then cutting them down so that they would work on hte Commodore 64. It wasn't all that hard work: we were using E European programmers who were used to working with really little memory so they got the grasp of it very quickly indeed.

Then we moved on to more complex things: like we took the DOS version of Another World and turned it into a Windows game. It was said that this was impossible but we did manage it and it sold quite well. After that, as games got bigger and nigger, we ended up having to subcontract for smaller parts. Things like animating the figures in ClayFighter. All good fun and it all earned money but it wasn't quite as fun as it had been when we were doing full games.

But to have the manufacturer suing you because the game is so bad?

Now that's got to hurt, doesn't it? More on Custer's Revenge at the link.

How to watch Hulu shows outside the US

If you've ever tried to watch streaming services in the UK, or wherever you happen to be outside the US, you'll run into the error 'content not available in your area.' The issue here is that Hulu, Netflix and now Youtube, the internet's main online providers of tv shows and movies have licensing deals that block outside-US traffic from using their services, instead focusing on the US market for its lucrative advertisements for US-based services.

Many people from the US will encounter these frustrating blocks whenever they are traveling. 

Solution:

If you're American and happen to travel a lot, using a proxy service is one way to get around the blocks. 

A proxy is computer access you can rent for around $5-10 a month to gain access to US-only content wherever you are in the world. These services work for anyone of course, wherever you happen to live and already have broadband access.

OK, but if you're like me you won't know about how to set up a proxy....but help is at hand! If you go to WatchTVoverseas.com then they can (and will) tell you all about it.

Wikipedia could be failing

This isn't good news, that Wikipedia could be failing.

The essential point is that the number of volunteers is dropping quickly. But twhether that's a problem depends on how you view Wikipedia itself. If they've pretty much done what needed to be done and now all that's needed is updates and housekeeping then it doesn't.

If, however, you think they need millions more pages written then perhaps it does.

Up to you which you think really.

Woo Hoo, I want me some Phatband!

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Charter. All opinions are 100% mine.

I know, we've all been waiting far too long for our Jetson's style flying car and just when is this space tourism thing going to start? But rather than simply wail about what we want but can't have, why not celebrate what we want but can have? Like this charter ultra fast 60 service which was tried in St. Louis, is rolling out in Southern California and is arriving soon in the north east?

Put simply, it's the internet connection I've always wanted. They call it "phatband" which really is what it is. A 60MB connection is indeed one fat pipe. Just think about it, no waiting on online games: you can watch TV shows on the 'net as well. Come on now, even YouTube stutters sometimes with current speeds (the number of times I've had to download into cache a video before it will play with out judders and halts!).

And of course it's not just me that wants this technology (and don't forget that hugely faster speeds are possible in the near future): where it's been installed it's been a huge hit. And this is the advantage of cable internet access rather than DSL: the speeds which are available. DSL depends upon the copper cable running the "last mile" to your home. Cable, being based upon fiberoptic, does not and that's how the phatpipe is possible.

Now my problem is this: do I want this service badly enough that I'm prepared to move into Carter's catchment areas? Or should I just stay jealous of those who are already there.

Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea?

Something of an interesting question, yes? I mean, as this blog says, we would indeed like to know why won't my parakeet  eat my diarrhea, wouldn't we?

Well, the answer actually is that someone's playing a game. And whoever it is playing that game has just won a lot of points. For what is happening is that the new Google can be trained into offering suggestions. You ask the first part of a question and it offers you possible finishes to it, based upon what other people have asked.

Of course, such a thing can be gamed: no one really wants to know why my parakeet won't eat my diarrhea, the interest is in simply getting Google to display the question:

This actually all looks like a variation on "googlewhacking". That's the attempt to get your page as the only entry in the entire Google index for some phrase or another. You do have to be pretty inventive to manage it now, given the size of the index. My assumption is that this is a variation: a game being played to see who can get the most outrageous suggestions out of Google by asking the question a few times and seeing if it comes up as one of those suggestions. And I would think that whoever came up with "Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea?" has managed to win a very large number of points.

What fun, eh? Anyone coined a word for the game yet?

So, which webhost should you use?

I think we're all pretty much up with the idea that we need to have a presence on the web these days, yes? There's no real way that a business can survive without offering at least information to potential customers...we do all understand that I think?

The next question though is what is it that we're going to do on hte web? Simply point out that we exist and work in a particular location? Or are we going to offer a service to current customers? Enable them to search for manuals, book in for support? Or are we going to go further and offer to sell products over the web?

Once we've decided how the web fits into our business model (or perhaps how we fit our business model to the web) then we can make the next set of decisions about who to use for web hosting. And this is important and it's worth visiting the WebHostingGeeks site at that link to see what they can do to help. For the different business models will mean that we're looking for different things in a web host.

We might want cheap and cheerful, or perhaps lots of free tools, or perhaps reliability is most important, or security, perhaps even bandwidth. If we're going to sell directly then we would want to see the best ecommerce hosting packages for example, not the best email servers. If we're to use the web more for marketing, then the position would be reversed.

It's a very useful website and recommended if you're looking to place your business on the web.

Fast search engine review

There is a huge variety of file search engines which help to get needed resources. You know, anything from the lost .pdf manual for your phone through to all of the delights available over the peer to peer networks.

But which one should you use? How about one made by those skilled enough to use only the best ones with no ads, high load speed and clear pages?

Here we offer the biggest search engine Kvaz.com and the fastest file searcher Xlinker.org which finds the most rare and exquisite resources, those hidden away in the little corners of the internet.

Of course, taking our cue from the grandaddy of all search engines itself, we've made sure that there's a simple and clean interface and that there's very few ads: meaning it's all clean loading a fast and simple to use.