Etc… · Dominic Foster

Who wants a free USB Drive?

March 7, 2006 on 10:14 pm | In Etc... | 3 Comments

You do? Then click here and click the image with the “Valuable Information” heading and fill out the questionaire.

Kind of ironic that I just posted about giving up MS Office for Open Office and now I’m hitting up Bill G for a free USB Drive.

Technorati Tags: free, usb, usb+drive, thanks+bill

It’s Christmas at Accidental Entrepreneur

March 1, 2006 on 8:55 am | In Etc... | No Comments

What an amazing day it is today.

First my new Garmin eTrex GPS with Waterproof Exterior arrived so that I can start Geocaching on the weekend.

Then, I check the order status for my new Dell Laptop and the delivery date had been brought forward from the 7th of March to today!

Woo-hoo - big tech fest here today.

After a few minutes playing with the GPS and a bit more work, the Dell Laptop arrived. I dug straight in and got it set up immediately - It only took a few minutes to get it going. However, it took a while longer to get my necessary software installed.

It’s amazing how ‘necessary’ Firefox has become for me. I got frustrated really quickly with IE6. Anyone else noticed this?

The other software I needed to get set up so that I could get back to work is MS Visual Studio C# 2005 Express - a great piece of software for developing windows apps which is free to register until November 2006, and MS SQL Server 2005 Express - a fully functioning scaled down version of the MS SQL Server 2005 database engine.

The great thing is that I estimate that my new laptop is compiling my C# code about 40 times fast than the laptop I have been using.

So my old laptop - a Dell Inspiron that I aquired back in 2001 - will now probably be used mostly as a testing platform.

Technorati Tags: geocaching, gps, visual+studio, sql+server, dell+laptop, gadget+festival

On Providing Full RSS Feeds

February 23, 2006 on 12:22 pm | In Etc... | 15 Comments

Performancing have written about Why Full Text Feeds are Good - having been inspired by Scobles post explaining why Blog Herald not understanding why full text feeds work. I won’t summarize their opinions - go and read the posts for yourselves to be better informed. Pay special attention about what Scoble has to say about influencing connectors and journalists.

However, I will add my opinions about truncated RSS feeds:

They look really ugly. And they usually don’t mean anything because they are often just a part-sentence.
If I subscribe to your truncated feed, then I am probably only going to read about 15% of your website and be less convinced to subscribe to the products and services you are offering. Even if you are on the A List of blogging.
To get me to your website, you are going to have to convince me in 1 Post Title, 50 words and 3 full stops [in square brackets].

And here’s what I think you should consider doing if you have convinced yourself that you really MUST have truncated feeds (at least if you use Wordpress):

Impliment the Wordpress Better Feed plugin. Then you can enable readers to make a more informed choice about being forced to view your website. Also, you can configure it to show links to your products and services at the end of the feed item should you want to.

What are your opinions about not having Full Feeds vs Truncated Feeds?

Google PageRank

October 25, 2005 on 9:28 pm | In Etc..., SEO | 2 Comments

I read today on Entrepreneurs Journey that MSN.COM gets a Google PageRank of 2 in the recent Google PageRank update!

This prompted me to check what my PageRank was incase it had increased. It had! I had the pleasant surprise to find that my PageRank has gone from 0 to 5.

I’ve heard a lot around the Blogosphere that PageRank is now less relevant than it used to be. And to be honest, I have not ever really given it a great deal of thought (but still checked mine from time to time ;)).

However, it’s got to be said that it feels pretty good when it goes up.

Especially when it is higher than MSN.COM!

It was also pleasing to find that my Darvas Trade and Trader Knowledge websites both have a PR of 4.

Woo-hoo! Google PageRank rocks!

Chitika eMiniMalls

October 7, 2005 on 1:31 pm | In AdSense, Etc... | 2 Comments

After reading what Darren Rowse wrote about Chitika eMiniMalls - decided to apply for them myself.

Well, I received the confirmation that I had been accepted today and have configured my Trader Knowledge website to start showing them so that I can see how they fare against AdSense.

They are really easy to set up - very much like creating the Adsense units - and putting them onto Trader Knowledge was just a case of replacing the AdSense code with the Chikita code.

It will be interesting to see what happens - I’ll post back with the results after a week or two of testing.

The Million Dollar Homepage

October 3, 2005 on 12:37 pm | In Blogging, Etc... | 3 Comments

I have just signed up for an interesting project at at Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneurs-Journey blog. Yaro plans to purchas a 100 pixel package at The Million Dollar Homepage which will link to his website. The package costs $100, but he has invited people to pay for a $10 share in his purchase. If you pay for a share, he will link to your website for a month and also report back on the traffic that he receives from The Million Dollar Homepage.

Alex Tew - who created The Million Dollar Homepage has already raised $252,900 - so has $747,100 worth of space left to sell.

Yaro has already sold $74.95 of his pixels (including my purchase - as long as it has gone through) - so has only $25.05 left to sell.

It will be interesting to see how much traffic I get from entrepreneurs-journey.com.

Website Hosting - Dreamhost Sale

September 30, 2005 on 8:24 pm | In Blogging, Etc... | No Comments

If you are thinking of buying some shared Web Hosting, then I suggest you check out DreamHost because they are currently having a Massive Birthday Sale.

Use the DreamHost promo code “888″ and you can get the following for $10 per month with 80% discount for the first year:

4800 MB of disk storage - which increases by 40MB each week!
120 GB Monthly Bandwidth - which increases by 1GB each week!
600 email addresses
1 Free domain registration
UNLIMITED DOMAINS HOSTED!

There is also a whole bunch of other stuff which is too much to mention here.

One problem though! This offer is only available for the first 888 takers. So if you are considering it you may want to get there now and check that they offer everything that you require for your hosting.

Sorry guys…

September 26, 2005 on 10:38 pm | In Etc... | 1 Comment

… for the lack of content over the last few days. This is due to a content drive for some other sites I am working on!

I’m also getting to grips with a piece of useful open-source software called phpAdsNew which is used to manage advertising campaigns for websites. I’ll post some of my findings on this in the coming days/weeks. It really looks pretty cool.

If however you are looking for something interesting to read right now, I can highly recommend Yaro’s post about How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit - it is very informative.

PS. Yaro - Thanks for the info about phpAdsNew!

GoDaddy Again

September 15, 2005 on 8:38 pm | In Etc... | 2 Comments

The other day I posted about how I thought that GoDaddy.com sent me an email with a special offer promo code for purchasing domain names at a reduced price not long after purchasing a domain name. As I stated in that post, I wanted a promo code because I was about to purchase a domain name - but had to use one that I found on the internet.

Sure enough, I have just received an email from GoDaddy with a promo code to purchase domain names for $1.99!

Oh well - good job I have some domain names that I thought I would buy if I ever got a good offer.

Is there a special name for this kind of marketing? I guess it works since I’m about to go and get me a couple of domain names.

The Hypomanic Entrepreneurs

September 8, 2005 on 8:35 pm | In Etc... | No Comments

Changethis.com have just released a new bunch of their manifestos today. I pay the occasional visit to ChangeThis because it is where I first came across the Bootstrappers Bible.

One of the manifestos that has been released is called The Hypomanic American because it mentions Jim Clark who I recently read about in The New New Thing as well as Bill Gross and the whole 1990’s dot com boom.

In the manifesto - which is a PDF document - John D. Gartner hypothesizes that ‘American entrepreneurs are largely hypomanic’. Hypomania is a mild form of bipolar disorder in which the person displays mildly yet persistent manic behaviors talking too much, spending money wildly, etc. Hmm… Jim Clark?!?

He says -

When asked, “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91 percent of Americans said yes, as compared to 28 percent of British and 8 percent of Japanese respondents.

Are you an entrepreneur? Are you planning on becoming an entrepreneur? Are you American??? Will you invest in one of my ideas when you make heaps of money? Please?