Pack Rat

I am a saver. I married the opposite. I save papers, toys, clothes, EVERYTHING. I have every school paper ever done by all three children. Considering I have a 4th grader, that is a lot. A few years back I finally threw away MY old school papers. From high school that is. I'm keeping the college stuff. You never know when I might want to become an accountant or a psychologist. Or maybe I can treat myself for free.

Storage is a problem. Right now I have a million 'green totes' - filled and stacked in the basement. They hold all the clothes the kids ever wore, books, computer parts (those ARE the hubby's). You name it and you can find it.

Some day I'd like a garage. Not for my truck, but for this stuff, it's kind of cool: storage solutions (totally sponsored link, but still cool stuff).

For the Person Who Has Everything

This is a neat site: Wallhogs
You can get life-size prints of your pictures. According to them:

Imagine taking one of your photos or a graphic, blowing it up to 7 feet
tall by over four feet wide, removing any background junk you didn't want,
having it printed on a semi-adhesive vinyl, receiving it via UPS, and installing
the masterpiece onto your wall in just minutes - there you have WALLHOGS.

It appears you can get a vinyl, poster, or canvas done. Pretty reasonable too. A 2 foot tall one will run you between twenty and twenty-five bucks. They offer a money back guarantee as well. They claim that they can remove background clutter as well, but they do not show a pricing for that. I think they look pretty cool and might be an idea gift for that person who has it all. The shipping is through UPS. You upload your image at their site. For their giant 84" print, you're going to want at least an Eight Mega Pixel camera image, according to their chart. What will they think of next?!

Looking for a Host?

I’ve started a new site recently just for fun and needed to find hosting for it. We’ve been going through some hosting changes at work as well. The rough part is finding a company that gives you a good plan – what is a good plan anyways? – and provides good support for when you need it. Little to no downtime is a plus too. A lot of times hosting companies will start out great and then slide downhill. This happens especially after you fork over a year’s worth of hosting fees.

The easiest way I’ve seen to compare the hosting companies is here: budget web hosting. You don’t actually buy the hosting through them, but they give you the rundown of the best deals going on. They offer hosting reviews and a nice Frequently Asked Questions section. Also on their site, you will find web hosting news. A lot of it isn’t going to be interesting unless you follow that sort of stuff, but it seems comprehensive. They also offer some Google tools like a link popularity checker and a datacenter checker. This site offers a lot, but most of it leads to other sites. It truly seems to be a directory. While a lot of could be less than worthwhile, the quick comparison on the home page looks great. It could potentially answer a lot of questions

I’ve thought about moving this blog to a hosted domain and saying good-bye to the free stuff, but at this point I really can’t justify it. Blogger has been good to me so far. You really can’t beat the way it integrates with Google’s other stuff like adsense and analytics (convenient, right?). So while you won’t see changes here yet, this might be a good place to start if you are considering moving up to something more permanent.

Online Shopping

One year I did all of my Christmas shopping online. That was 1999. I had a two year old and a brand new baby at home. I avoided going out at all costs because it was a lot of stuff to tote around. Two in diapers? A nightmare. I didn't know much about online deals back then. I stumbled upon stuff and, more often then not, paid too much. Now the first thing I do when I'm buying online is a coupon code search. I still turn up empty-handed a lot, but sometimes I get lucky.

Here are some Best Buy coupons in time for the holiday season. If that is not your store, here are some other coupon codes.

What's All This Stuff?

Well since I've been blogging, I've been trying some new stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have touched. You noticed the ads. I've also been trying a site that pays you to advertise on blogs. It's called PayPerPost and you get a few bucks for posting on an 'offer' and leaving it live for 30 days. Your blog has to qualify, which basically means you have to use it. So far it seems ok. It means I have some weird posts now and again, but I'm tagging them all ppp. You usually have to include a link, which is the value to them. But I figure, big deal if I get 5 bucks for 20 minutes of my time. I haven't gotten a check yet. They'll send it to PayPal in 28 more days. It seems fun so far - some of the offers are out there, and some are not so bad. I did get the code to download my songs. Never fear, I'll try to keep them sparse and fill in the gaps with lots of good sarcasm, just like you are used to!

The Way We Do the Things We Do

SEO is what I do. Lots of other people do it too. Like this guy:

Search Engine optimization and online marketing from SEO'Brien

SEO is what makes the sites you see when you do a search come back at #1 (or #300 if you suck). In competitive markets it can get tough. Sometimes people employ professionals (like the above-mentioned dude) to do it for them. The tricky part is that we really don't know what the algorithms do to process the stuff. There are guidelines to follow, but there is no magic formula. It can be stressful. I liken it to playing the stock market. Things can be going really well for a long time, you show up to work one day and find it has all crashed. The obsessed fight over PR (Google Page Rank, which you see if you install their toolbar) and analyze datacenters (the google results you see aren't necessarily the results I see). There are the link swappers, white hats, black hats.. and the occasional guy who spouts that he's got all the answers. It's a constantly changing battle, but it's a fun ride if you are on top. The really funny thing? The die-hard obsess about Google, but in reality most of our conversions come from Yahoo and then MSN. MSN is considered junk. They give out love to anyone who can fit the 'keyword' on their page 2 million times. Places like Dogpile? They are a nightmare because they throw the combined sponsored results at the top. Ask.com? I'm not even sure THEY know what they are doing. Right now we are on top, so it's good.

Freebie

The website, Vimo is giving five free song (MP3) downloads on emusic.com for reviewing a doctor. According to their site: "Vimo lets consumers and small businesses shop for and compare health insurance plans, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), doctors and dentists side-by-side." To get the songs, you have to fill out a review on a doctor. It took me about 3 minutes. The downside is that it said it may be a couple days until the code comes in email. I think you can review multiple doctors for more songs, but I haven't tried. It actually looked pretty interesting, I'm going to see if anyone had bad things to say about any doctor in town - of course!