Month of February, 2008

This picture was take from a real eBay auction, make sure you ready what it say and don't cheat.

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My Search Funds pay you 3p for every search you make online! If you can imagine how many searches you make a day then it wont take long to make a small income. They provide a replacement toolbox for IE and Firefox or you can set your search page as your home page.

Payments are made to your Paypal account or by Cheque. The service uses the Ask search engine, the results are not as good as Google but are close. You can use the service on as many computers as you want or give your friends your search page to use.

You can sign up through the following link:

"An exhibition of Commercially Creative Talent.

Creative Shropshire, a networking forum for Shropshire-based creative professionals will be promoting Shropshire as a centre of creative excellence at an exhibition they will be holding in early March.

Creative Shropshire was initiated by Steve Ashdown of Shrewsbury based Phoot Creative. Steve recognized the lack of networking opportunities and support services for like-minded creative individuals in the County, and along with a small group of creative professionals from various backgrounds coupled with the valued support of Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council, Creative Shropshire was launched in 2006.
The objective for Creative Shropshire includes the raising of the profile of the sector both locally and regionally and to encourage businesses and organisations to automatically consider Shropshire based creative businesses when sourcing services and supplies.

Steve said “early on we felt there was a lack of networking opportunities for like-minded creative professionals in the county. Shropshire is home to many innovative small businesses yet few of them communicate with each other. Our aim is to create a central point of communication in a friendly, informal environment for individuals and businesses of all sizes to meet regularly, share ideas, increase our marketing potential as a group and participate in networking events.”

Steve continued “Shropshire is packed full of innovative and talented creative businesses and individuals but they lacked a focal point. It is a thriving sector which until now did not have a public face and so often went overlooked. Many people are astounded by the shear size and quality of Shropshire's creative industry. There are talented people in Shropshire who can offer a service of the highest quality and with portfolios that include many of the biggest names in retail, business, publishing and entertainment.”

The exhibition, ‘Creative Shropshire ’08’ will be held at Enginuity in Ironbridge, Shropshire. The exhibition will feature a selection of companies from the 50 members within Creative Shropshire to include illustrators, web and graphic designers, film makers, internet marketing companies, marketing consultants, pr and advertising agencies, copywriters, printers and photographers.

This event will be the first time Shropshire is treated to a display of its wealth of commercially creative talent, and Creative Shropshire welcomes all local business people who will be able to gain real benefits from refreshing their marketing strategy with some fresh thinking.

Another benefit of visiting the exhibition will be an informal ‘Creative Surgery’. Visitors can pre-book a free 15 minute consultation with members of Creative Shropshire to get some ideas and inspiration about their own creative business plans. The free consultation can be booked via the event website at www.creativeshropshire08.org

For anyone looking to promote their business or develop their marketing plan this is an essential opportunity to make the most of the region's creative talent. Visitors will be able to discuss their requirements with a whole range of creative companies who's clients range from major international companies and charities to small local businesses and start-ups.

The exhibition will be open from 2-8pm on Thursday March 6th and will also feature free seminars (to include the fascinating ‘Wake Up Your Website’ which was recently Highly Commended in the ICT Excellence in Creative Partnerships Award). A cartoon wall will also be provided for visitors to show their creative side. Further details and an online registration facility can be found at www.creativeshropshire08.org "

I will be exhibiting at the event for the web design company I work for - The Web Orchard. 

Top Gear's tame racing driver was photographed yesterday in such a way that the flash of the camera revealed part of the man's face. Still can't tell who it is.

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The website Online Casino Bluebook details the best online gambling websites with reviews from users. The front page features a top 10 list of the casinos with the best payouts. For US visitors it also says whether the site accepts them as American gambling law is lot stricter than in Europe.

The site offers a personalised gambling experience, for those of you that find it hard to decide which site to play on there is an email address that you can send your requirements to. They will then get back to you with recommended sites to play on.

The site established 2000 also covers a selection of Bingo sites, Poker sites and Bookmakers in their own top lists.

*This is a sponsored post. 

There is nothing easier than spotting a drunk. It doesn't matter who they are or where they're from, they all have the same characteristics. Here are the 8 sure signs you're a drunk.

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I've been getting a lot of questions about the reasons I moved the site from a Wordpress/PHPBB combination to Drupal and changed the theme. Hopefully this will clear things up.

Advantages

1. Drupal allows us to integrate all the different sections of the site together giving us the advantage of a single sign on for the whole site. Before we had a different accounts for the blogs and the forum which could easily be confusing for people expecting to be able to use their account site wide. This can be extended soon with the Drupal integration of Open ID and when we come to upgrade to Drupal 6 in the coming months this will be even easier.

2. Templating and management - This is more an advantage for me but does help consistency throughout the site. Before I would have to write a number of different templates for Wordpress and PHPBB, as a result each would look slightly different and behave slightly differently. PHPBB was especially hard to template and the code on my part always ended up messy with various hacks. With Drupal we have one template and all sidebar widgets can be put in blocks meaning that once the basic template is made everything can be added into blocks within Drupal (rather than editing template files).

From a management point of view the advantages are that everything is centrally managed. I can monitor all content, comments, spam, security problems, 404 issues etc from one area. Before I used to have different logins for the different parts of the site and it was hard to see if people were getting errors.

So far in the last couple of days our 404 (page not found) page has been one of the most popular, with the new site I can see why people are getting to this page and setup redirects to fix problems and customise the 404 page to be more useful.

3. Spam has been an issue on the Forum for a long time and last year caused us to stop allowing new members. The Blog used a service called Akismet to remove spam very sucessfully however this was not available for PHPBB. Fortunately it is available for Drupal so that the whole site can hopefully become spam free.

4. PHPBB development is slow which in some ways is good as it means less upgrades for me. On the other hand it means it misses out on new features. In the past five years technologies such as RSS feeds have come along and left PHPBB in the dark. PHPBB 3 fixes a lot of these issues but after we trialed it there were missing features we were already use to (such as quick posting). The decision boiled down to upgrading to PHPBB3 or migrating to Drupal we opted for the latter.

5. Wordpress development is also slow but the software is feature rich. For anyone with a single blog I would highly recommend Wordpress as the best blogging platform in the world. Unfortunately for our multi blog layout and forum it was a necessary sacrafice.

6. Drupal's development goes at a quicker pace but because it has more general uses than Wordpress or PHPBB it needs to be. By moving to Drupal it opens up a lot of options for the future such as the integration of E-Commerce (for Switchweb), galleries, Wikis and many other modules that can expand on the current site and content.

7. By merging all the content in one place its a lot easier to categorise and produce custom views on data. For instance I can easily create pages with the most popular posts (such as the widget on the right) or most commented posts. This would be very difficult before.

8. The front page can reflect everything that is happening on the site from blog posts, to articles, to extra posts, to the forum and as such content will flow much quicker and easier through the site.

Disadvantages

1. People inheritantly do not like change, especially the sort of change we have experienced over the past week on ImAFish (new design and functionality). Fortunately 75% of our visitors are new so wouldn't notice the difference between old and new. Reoccuring visitors will notice a difference and will likely experience some usability problems (particulary on the forum) until they get use to the new system. I saw the same problem when we moved to ImAFish X however over time people will get used to it and hopefully find the new system easier to use.

2. Parts of the functionality are still being finished off and I will admit its going to take a couple of weeks to get everything perfect however I feel it will be worth the hassle and time.

Many of the things I've described here may be available elsewhere or within Wordpress/PHPBB however Drupal makes it easier, quicker and more efficient.

We asked our readers to photoshop us some "inappropriate children's book covers." We thought it was an innocent enough idea. More than 400 entries later, we realized how tragically, horribly wrong we were.

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If you're reading this then the all new ImAFish 10.2 Seabass is working! After weeks of work the new version of ImAFish is ready to go. You will notice a new theme that is completely different to what we previously had. We wanted to simplify the whole design, making the pages load quicker and the text easier to read.

Why ImAFish 10.2 Seabass?

The previous version of ImAFish was 10.1 Monkfish, 10 being the tenth version of ImAFish. All of the 10x series of updates to ImAFish are being named after fish. Tech geeks will notice the humourous relation to the Apple operating system, OS X, releases.

Move to Drupal

The site is now entirely using the open source content management system called Drupal. After using Drupal for the past 18 months at work I decided that my flagship website needed to be running it.

All of our data has been migrated from three installations of Wordpress and a PHPBB Forum into a centrally managed Drupal installation. It wasn't easy but thanks to some great Drupal modules, a bit of database hacking and some IRC help everything has come into place.

This is not to say that Wordpress or PHPBB are not great scripts, they just do not integrate well on a site such as ImAFish and now that Drupal has got to the point where it can match functionality it seemed the perfect time to update.

Whats New

The best feature of the new ImAFish is being able to use your ImAFish profile to post anywhere on the site, no longer are the days where your forum account was different to your blog account. In the coming months we hope to integrate with Open ID opening the doorway for thousands of more visitors to post on ImAFish under their Open ID accounts.

The Forum has been signficantly updated with new features and there will be more to come in the next few weeks. Files can now be attached to topics and anonymous users can now post again. The restrictions of creating new accounts have also been lifted.

Great Time to Join

If you don't already have an ImAFish account then there is no better time to sign up and join the community!

Let me know what you think to the new site and if you have spotted any problems!

As a young child (or perhaps even an adult) who hasn't dreamed of living in a tree house? Some tree houses are suspended in trees, others are built around or even inside of them. Here are ten incredible tree house designs that range from functional to fanciful, sustainable to strange and affordable to impossibly expensive (with images and videos!).

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Stay in school, kids.

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UnluckyForSome.co.uk is website dedicated to bingo news, bingo sites, free bingo and the best online bingo deals. Last week we covered a list of 30 bingo sites that give you free offers for signing up, hopefully you are making good progress and money through these, UnluckyForSome takes this to the next level providing an entire site of bingo related offers. If you are new to online bingo then UnluckyForSome is a great resource, they have tested a wide range of Bingo sites to make sure they are safe and fair. Each review clearly states offers, games and recent news for the site. I found the stats to be up to date and correct. The "Bingo Lingo" page explains the various terminology you may hear when playing bingo, I certainly didn't know what some of the phrases were! The site has a modern Web 2.0 look and feel, is quick to load and keeps a similar feel to other bingo based sites. The forum is active and for a new site is doing well to attract users. Overall UnluckyForSome.co.uk is a solid bingo orientated site with plenty of great content, care has been taken to provide useful information in a structured way. Key Pages of Use Bingo Reviews Free Bingo Beginners Guide

I've previously looked at cash back sites in parts one and two of the incredibly popular Cash Back: How to Make Money Online series. Since then hundreds of clone cash back sites have popped up, I've largely ignored them as they offer nothing new or exciting.

This was until I was contacted by a new cash back site that offered a slightly different model, one that benefited you and your friends. The site Ei42 (E is for Everything, I is for Internet, 42 is the Answer to Life the Universe and Everything) sets you up with your own on-line store which you earn cash back through. Anyone else you get to use your on-line store will also earn you cash back.

My on-line store is : www.ei42.com/pwhite

People can also join Ei42 through your store and earn themselves cash back. As a reward you get 10% of the cash back they earn. If other people then sign up through your friends store you still earn cash back, this time 4%. As the model expands and more and more of your friends and their friends join and spend through the site you still earn money.

The store is the most impressive part of the site, the way they have integrated products from different merchants is different to any cash back site I've seen before. The themes leave a lot to be desired aesthetically but are usable and well structured.

However compared to other cash back sites such as Quidco and Rpoints Ei42 does not show you how much cash back you will get from each purchase. The creators state that they want to remove the worry involved in using a cash back site and having to work out how much you will earn from each purchase.

From the people I've shown Ei42 they think its a great idea because you can make money out of your friends however they would not use the site as they don't know how much they would be making. One person made the example that if Quidco no longer offered cash back then you would have no incentive to use Quidco and if you do not know how much you are making from each retailer how can you decide who to buy from?

I would like to see Ei42 expand on their store and provide web masters with ways to integrate the store into their own sites - so for instance I could sell products through ImAFish earning cash back. They could even provide Facebook widgets of products allowing people to buy and earn cash back that way.

Ei42 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary and I've found it hard to see it more than a cash back site. Ei42 has removed an important part of the cash back process and replaced it with a complex referral program. Your own store is impressive but needs to be taken to the next level so web masters can integrate it with their own sites and social networking profiles.

Sometimes people were just meant to play movie roles.

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God help him if he is.

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This is the dramatic moment when a two-year-old child was thrown from a third floor window after a suspected arson attack in flats in Germany. As a police officer edged along the ledge to try to help the people trapped inside, the parents try to save their youngster in the most radical way.

read more | digg story

Here are a list of 30 Bingo sites that offer either £5 or £10 free sign up bonus without having to deposit anything. They have all been tried and verified to work by Benjie and myself. We have both won hundreds of pounds through playing Bingo. Most of these sites use the same service meaning that you will need to pick a different username per site, all your other details can stay the same. The added advantage of them being the same service is that you can play yourself in order to increase your chance of winnings.

One method is signing up for 4-5 sites at a time (in different browsers or computers) then all join the same bingo game (buying the maximum number of cards) this way the jackpot is higher and your chance of winnings is 4x higher. Once you win take the money out immediately, most of these sites have a minimal withdrawal of £30 so if you win £20 you will need to deposit £10 then withdraw straight away.

Benjie has produced a spreadsheet to track your winnings (right click and select save link as).

www.mirrorbingo.com
www.dailyrecordbingo.com
www.sundaymailbingo.com
www.sundaymirrorbingo.com
www.thepeoplebingo.com
www.closerbingo.com
bingo.iccoventry.co.uk
bingo.icliverpool.co.uk
bingo.icnewcastle.co.uk
bingo.icwales.co.uk
www.icbingo.co.uk
www.foxybingo.com
bingo.icbirmingham.co.uk
www.themillionpoundgame.com (have not seen any million pound jackpots)
www.ticklebingo.com
www.puzzlerbingo.com
www.offerxbingo.co.uk
www.sundayworldbingo.com
www.totallyjewishbingo.com
www.weluvbingo.com
timeout.femalebingo.com
www.sundaylifebingo.com
www.toptenbingo.com
bingo.gazettelive.co.uk
www.femalebingo.com
www.stvbingo.tv
bingo1.nebusiness.co.uk
bingo.liverpooldailypost.co.uk

Experience has told us that playing Sunday night is not a good time to win as its peak bingo playing time. I've had good results on week nights and weekend end afternoons. Let me know how you get on and if you have done as well as us! Previously reported on this forum post.

An investigation has been launched after a video of a topless French air stewardess performing a sexy striptease for the captain while the plane was flying was leaked on to the internet.
Despite the plane being in the air - and with several hundred passengers presumably blissfully unaware of what is going on...

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Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then

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Or ripping it apart.

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