Working in education as a Teaching Assistant gives me a magical time of year called ‘Summer Holidays’, a time with no work yay, but due to the nature of my work Im on claims so no money either booo. So I sat at the beginning of the holidays and tried to decide what I wanted to do with my time, a few fishing trips with my daughter, play some games, help the wife with her childminding and generally relax until the chaos of september comes around.

As i’m sat ther trying to decide I get an email informing me that a domain needed renewing, a domain I registered with the view to expanding my affiliate empire but in realty they just sat there with half a website doing nothing, £6,09 wasted? ask the domain collectors/dealers out there and they’d probably say not. So this email arrives and gets me thinking about how to recoup that cost, its a fairly niche domains so selling it on probably wasn’t viable 6 quid isn’t a lot but it made me slightly cross with myself for wasting money.

There was nothing else for it I had to finish what I started, so  I dusted off my wordpress plugins and started developing, within a couple of days I had the site I wanted running, I pop up some related banners and start rewriting the content. As a matter of course I began to check the affiliate stats for the tracking ID  I added to the banners and after just 1 day a few clicks where coming in, traffic was hitting the site already So I checked the stats and low and behold a tricle of traffic for the past 3 months had been hitting the site, keywords extracted from the rough content were bringing in visitors and like a numpty none of it had any affiliate links, several months of wasted traffic, doh! suffices to say, the content has been renewed and the sites well on the way and after 3 days the earnings are £9.87 covered the domain renewal, a bit more and I’ll break even.

So the moral of the story? 1 finish what you start, 2,keep an eye on the stats and monitize 3 take the time to go fishing

now onwards and upwards next sites well on the way

This doesn’t mean that your totally safe, One of the most basic security errors we can make is with ftp Passwords.

The temptation is to have a master ftp account which has access to all domains and as such can make alterations to any pages within that hosting account.

This is the easiest option, but not the safest.

When creating an ftp account you should have the option of restricting an ftp account to a folder on your hosting. I would do this for each of your domains, create a different Username/password combination for each domain and restrict them to that folder.

In the event that someone does manage to get into your ftp then they can only access that one folder limiting the damage and the repair work you will have to do.

It’s saved me a lot of trouble when one of my ftp accounts was accessed.

I would also do similar with Databases create a new user for each database rather than a master account to control them all.

And last but not least, your paying a lot of money to yout hosting company, if you have any problems, get in touch make them work for their money.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector's Edition

I have to say I am a big fan of the Harry Potter Books and Films (i’m a big kid at heart). I read the first book and put off reading the others until they were all released, I then proceeded to read them all back to back.

If you have read the books then no doubt you will have heard of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”. Hermione Granger is given a copy by Dumbledore to help defeat Voldemort.

There were 7 handwritten copies of the book origionally released but fans are not to be disheartened as they will now be releasing the reprinted book to the general public.

British charity the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG), which was founded by Rowling and Baroness Emma Nicholson to help vulnerable children across Europe, will publish three editions of the book.

 Amazon wil be publishing a limited edition copy of the book for £50 ($100)

Tucked in its own case disguised as a wizarding textbook found in the Hogwarts library, the Collector’s Edition includes a handwritten version of J.K. Rowling’s new introduction, as well as 10 additional illustrations not found in the Standard Edition or the original. Opening the case reveals a velvet bag embroidered with J.K. Rowling’s signature, in which sits the piece de resistance: your very own copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, complete with metal skull, corners, and clasp; replica gemstones; and emerald ribbon.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector’s Edition (Offered Exclusively by Amazon)

There is also a standard edition for £3.99

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Standard Edition

Pre-orders are been taken now for the books and with a release date just before christmas then hopefully we should see some good commisions.

The sad thing (for me) is there a high likelihood that I won’t be able to attend. This year has been rather slow and sadly the finances won’t stretch that far.  2 passes, 2 sets of return tickets to London plus tube travel is just not going to happen boo-hoo .

The 2 day event itself will be a mix of networking, Q&A sessions, exhibitions, seminars and more networking.

The list of exhibitors is a bit of a who’s who of internet retail including many merchants, Affiliate networks and agencies and hopefully a few freebies could be collected .

Noteable speakers include:

Joost De Valk

Kieron Donoghue

Naomi Brown

 Like last year there will be a “Meet the Super Affiliates” panel which was incredibly popular last year and no doubt will be just as popular this year.

On top of all this there is Thames Cruise, pre-event network party, after event party, food and loads of the nicest people you could wish to meet, what more could you want?

For a full details of the event and to book your place theres a nice banner here.

Cuil (pronounced Cool), and old irish word for knowledge, claims to have a larger index than google with 121,617,892,992 pages indexed.

They also say that they differ from google and similar engines because instead of relying purely upon popularity metrics, they search for and rank content based on relevance, they then analyze the entire content on the site concepts and inter-relationships to generate its listings.

The results are then listed Magazine Style rather than in list format, which takes a little getting used to but seems to work well.

It might be interesting to see how they do, but I, no doubt like many others, am not sure how much of an impact they can have on google or any of the other search engines. They’ve certainly got a huge hill to climb before google starts to panic.

I have had a look for some of my main keyphrases and if they do become huge should  be fairly well placed, unless they alter something that is.

The homepage is even more minimalist than google and the results are very slow to appear at the moment(new servers may be in need).

from the Cuil website

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

Full press release here

Filling in profiles and then adding contacts, and then getting all the crappy updates about shoes people have been buying etc. just seemed to take up to much of my day.

I finally set-up an account earlier this year and am very gald that I did, I’ve found loads of old friends some new and keep in contact with business associates aswell, but the best thing about facebook is the ‘Developer App’ adding this to my profile has enabled me to create a simple application for facebook which now has a dozen users at my last check.

I spent just an hour creating the program and then linking into the facebook app and of course its a money making excercise for me, but also for those people who have added the application, it saves them time(they’re always on facebook anyway) as it gives them the latest information about the products and with some very good offers I’ve managed to rustle up from merchants they should save some money too.

So give it a go there is a very good communty on facebook willing to help and you could have a simple application along with your affiliate links put together in no time at all.

Now I just need another couple of thousand users and I’m really onto a winner.

Well the hard drive is and the system itself is getting to old to do anything with (AGP who uses that anymore).

So i’ve now disconnected my hard drive in the hope that no more damage is done till I can afford to buy a new one to transfer all the data too.

Anyone one wanna sponsor me a nice new hard drive in exchange for a nice review here, it worked to get a new T-Shrt from spreadshirt so who knows.

Or how about a nice new computer lol.

Might start an appeal, donate a computer component in exchange for a link/review. All it would take is a few nice companies and I’ll back up and running at full speed again.

Before we start I would just like to say I really want one of these machines.

There are some good looking machine available, with flashing lights and pretty add-ons, but there are very, very few who can match the range of pro gaming computers on offer at Commodore Gaming. Each of their pro gaming computer systems features a Ckin(/skin/) a custom Gaming related piece of artwork that is then painted onto the panels of the computer to produce a truly stunning looking computer system.

• High definition paint finish made to last
• Artwork is baked on metal case in 350 degrees Fahrenheit oven
• Paintwork is covered with durable anti-scratch layer for protection and shine
• Feel and touch of a painted car surface

  Best of all these ckins are changeable so should you see a new one that takes your fancy you can simply change the case panels to the new ones and you have a new looking machine.

Of course for gamers a pretty machine isn’t everything! so today we’ll take a look at the top of the range gaming machine Commodore xx coming in at just over £3000 it aint cheap but you can choose any of the Ckin range and just take a look at the specs below and you see below the Ckin this beauty is a real beast:

CPU/ Literally at the core of the Commodore xx is an>Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad Core CPU. Carrying out several multimedia based tasks while taking headshots or issuing commands to your guild has never been this seamless and fast an experience, with Intel’s four headed monster sitting inside your machine.

• Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX9650
• 12MB Level 2 Cache
• Clock Speed: 3 GHz
• FSB Speed: 1333 MHz

Chipset/ The P5N-T Deluxe is the most advanced, feature-rich motherboard available for gaming. It is triple SLI™ ready, has built-in 7.1 sound and many overclocking features for users who demand even more performance.

• ASUS® P5N-T Deluxe (NVIDIA® nForce® 780i SLI™)

Memory/ Corsair’s DOMINATOR™ Series make sure your memory is seemingly infinite. This 4096 MByte matched pair of DDR2s is built using Corsair’s latest high performance heat sink with Dual-Path Heat Xchange technology.

• 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 1066 MHz

Storage/ We are here to meet your storage needs, no matter how ridiculous they may seem! Do you have a massive collection of music, videos and still need more disk space? This is your chance to do something about it!

• Standard 2x 150GB SATA 10000 RPM (RAID0) and 1TB SATA 7200 RPM
• RAID 1 and 0 available
• RPM Starting at 7,200 up to 10,000
• Capacity Starting at 1 TB up to 4 TB maximum
• Interface Serial ATA 3GB/s

Optical Drive

• Standard Dual Layer Blu-Ray – DVD±RW Drive, also reads HD-DVD

Digital Media

• Standard 7in1 media reader / writer

Networking

• Integrated Dual High Performance Gigabit Ethernet Ports

Cooling/ In order to actually maintain its cool with all the heavy machinery put to work 24/7, the Commodore xx comes equipped Commodore’s exclusive Ice Cube technology. This thermal exchange system converts heat from the power supply into freezing cold air, generating a dramatic temperature decrease throughout the whole machine.

Graphics/ NVIDIA®’s GeForce® SLI™ setup inside the Commodore xx will ensure you don’t have to turn the graphics settings of your favourite games down. The world’s first DirectX® 10 GPUs deliver a graphical experience that takes you as far into your gaming reality as you dare to be taken.

• 2 x 1024MB GDDR3 dedicated video memory (512MB per GPU)
• Clock speed: 600 MHz
• Memory speed: 2000 MHz
• Up to 4 display support * with SLI™ disabled
• Full DirectX® 10 and OpenGL® 2.0 compatibility
• Shader Model 4.0 enabled
• NVIDIA® SLI™ enabled
• 4 DVI-I Connectors
• 2 HDMI Connectors

Sound/ To make your sound go well with your graphics, the Commodore xx is optionally outfitted with a sound card from Creative’s Sound Blaster® X-Fi series, the most powerful range of sound cards out there.

• Standard 7.1 onboard sound
• Optional Sound Blaster® X-Fi XtremeGamer
• 8-channel (7.1) 24 Bit audio
• Eight-channel analog jacks
• One Optical digital output

Connectivity

• Two Hi-Speed USB ports (front)
• One FireWire 1394 port (front)
• One 1/8″ analogue headphones jack (front)
• One 1/8″ analogue microphone jack (front)
• Six Hi-Speed USB ports (back)
• 1 PS/2 keyboard port (back)
• 1 PS/2 mouse port (back)

Case Chassis

• Exclusive Commodore Gaming Metal Chassis
• Exclusive C-kin process for high definition graphics
• Two lighted fans
• Easily accessible front connectivity port in Commodore Connect! Bay
• Unique 270 degree opening door
• Standard 850W power supply with Ice-Cube cooling system
• Easily changeable panels (front, sides and top)
• Height: 45 cm
• Width: 20 cm
• Depth: 50 cm
• Weight: 8.2 kg (empty chassis)

Operating System

• Microsoft Windows® Vista™ Ultimate

*note*

If your not a fan of Vista then with Vista Ultimate you can downgrade to XP using your own CD and then back to vista if you want to.  I would prefer to go for a dual boot option.

Now those are some serious Specifications any pro gamer would be proud of, and with these specs there are no game son the market that would put it under to much strain…

..but just to make sure if the guys at commodore gaming would like to send me one to test I’d be glad to put it through its paces.

Click here for more details

The Commodore xx is the top of the range model, for a more wallet friendly option you could try the Commodore GX with very good specifications at £1600 you should still have the edge on the competition

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One of my newest students suffers with Cerebral Palsy. When we first started our lessons we made steady progress but a recurring theme was mousing difficulties.

We tried many things, increasing the mouse sensitivity, different mats, different mice all with varying degrees of success but still the usage of a mouse was a problem.

After attending a gaming LAN I turned up for a tuition session with my Razer diamond back still with me, and whilst unpacking my paperwork the obvious hit me.

Within a couple of minutes the drivers were installed and the mouse connected.

The first test was interesting, I’ve never seen a mouse pointer whizzing around the screen so much, after 10 minutes practise and a little tweaking with the in-built control panel, success.

Activities that would normally take a couple of minutes could now be done in next to no time and with much increased accuracy.

Why?

Without messing to much with the windows settings the average mouse operates at approx 400 dpi, the Razer had a dpi of 1600 3 times the sensitivity and with the drivers in place this seems like a lot more.

An action that would normally require 3 inches of mouse movement could now be completed in less than 1, meaning that with limited movement the same actions could be completed.

So if you need that extra sensitivity, precision or speed and not just for gaming why not try a high quality pro or gaming mouse.

the guys across at Spreadshirt are offering a free t-shirt from the marketplace if you blog about it(limited numbers if your interested ).

Browsing around the Marketplace there are certainly some interesting t-shirts available including this little Number:

Student Life

Certainly not for wearing when you having tea with you aunt dot is it.

My personal Favourite is ‘Power to Gaming’. A simple design with a lot of impact, and the mouse looks a lot like a Razer diamondback.

Spreadshirt

Power to Gaming

Whatever your taste pop over to SpreadShirtand see whats there or make your mark and design the next best t-shirt.