Archive for the ‘Odd Stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.’ Category

Facebook and Twitter to be closed down!

No, this isn’t some viral scare story with no foundation in truth.  This could happen, and it could happen soon.

The American government, at the request of the Hollywood movie moguls, are debating a bill, SOPA, which if passed would give the power to immediately close down any site that it wants.  Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr etc. are particularly at risk.

The internet giants, including, Google, Twitter, AOL, eBay, Yahoo and Facebook have joined forces to kill off this bill.  In an open letter to the US House Judiciary Committee they say;

“We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation’s cybersecurity. We cannot support these bills as written and ask that you consider more targeted ways to combat foreign “rogue” websites dedicated to copyright infringement and trademark counterfeiting, while preserving the innovation and dynamism that has made the Internet such an important driver of economic growth and job creation.” 

Google spokesman, Matt Cutts has this to say; 

“If SOPA becomes law, it could stifle the innovation (and jobs) that the technology industry creates. That’s why Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, and Zynga all oppose SOPA. This is not a Democratic or Republican issue–Red State thinks SOPA is a bad idea too.”

So what can you do? 

Sadly, for those outside of the US the answer is very little, other than contact all of your American friends, family and colleagues and ask them to contact their congressman to register their protest.

For those in the US there are a few more options.

First you can contact your congressman and express your concerns that this bill can, and will do serious harm to the internet.

Or you can sign the online petition here, KILL SOPA BILL which is hosted on the Whitehouse server.

And then again here: American censorship  

Finally, webmaster you can, (and should) link to American censorship, black out your logo and give details on how you oppose SOPA. 

This bill WILL affect us all, I urge you to act now.

STOP SOPA

House spud gun

The 150th episode of House features Thirteen and House participating in a spud gun competition.

I don’t know about you, but I *REALLY* wanted one of these awesome potato guns.  But… yup, you guessed it, you can’t buy them

Luckily, for me (and for you too) I found some videos online that I could watch which took me by the hand, and showed me step-by-step on exactly how to build my own House spud gun.

And it was really easy to build and way cheaper than I tought it would be.

My House spud gun can blast a potato over 100 yards and anyone can build one of these suckers! And the great thing… I bought everything I needed from Home Depot, there was nothing to order off the internet and no ‘specialist’ parts

Just watch this video and see how quick and easy it is to create your own House spud gun.

Before I watched these videos my potato gun was just popping spuds a pathetic 20 yards or so. But now my House spud gun fires my missiles well over 100 yards, time after time. And it was really easy to build and unbelievably cheap!

Here’s just a few of the things that I learnt from these fantastic videos;

• The best fuel to use to launch potatoes at jaw dropping velocity.
• The worst possible fuel to use, which happens to be what most people trying to use
• The one type of pipe that you MUST use to build the ultimate House spud gun
• How to discover the optimum pipe to chamber ratio, without this your spud will just plop to the ground 10 feet in front of you
• Even the best type of spuds to use – choose wisely to avoid embarrasing misfires

Check out how to build a House spud gun now

Check out how to build a House spud gun now

House spud gun

eBay Discount Coupon November 1st – 14th

You can always tell when the run up to the Christmas shopping season starts as there are always lots of discount vouchers issued.

Perhaps the most useful are those offered around this time every year by eBay.  This year is no different as they have just announced an early eBay Discount Coupon Event. Seventeen different sellers will be honoring their eBay discount coupon and you could get up to 35% off from selected items.

The eBay discount coupon promotion runs from today, November 1st to midnight on Sunday November 14th 2010.

It is good to know as well that each eBay discount coupon isn’t just valid for one purchase, it can be used again and again.  A few of the retailers are using a special sales landing page, I have made a note of the address next to the effected sellers.

Anyway, here is a note of each eBay discount coupon Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t forget that you can buy your new Top Level Domain .CO from July 20th. Many of the Domain Merchants such as Godaddy and NameCheap are taking pre-orders, so in effect you can get your hands on these domains before the 20th.

So what can you do with a new TLD?

These are brand new, fresh domains, so all of those massive search volume keywords which are either unavailable or on offer via auctions for 1000′s of dollars are now available again.

Just look at some of these Read the rest of this entry »

We are still trying to get to the bottom of the recent Google ‘Mayday Mayhem’ algorithm change. But it seems like one of the factors which is receiving more emphasis is the Bounce Rate.

So what is Bounce Rate?

Well in the simplest terms it is the amount of traffic that visits your site and either leaves immediately or just reads one page without then clicking onto another page or post on your site. Googles own definition is “The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).“

It’s not clear from Google what it considers to be an acceptable bounce rate, but whatever yours is, you should make an effort to improve it.

The first thing that you need to do is dive over to Google Analytics and examine your bounce rates. (If you’re not using GA then I suggest you start. The information it provides is much more accurate than that supplied from within your C-panel.)

As I mentioned, it isn’t clear where the line between good bounce rate and bad bounce rate fall. But the nearer your rate is to 100% the worse it is. It is widely believed that a good bounce rate for your homepage is anything below Read the rest of this entry »

My name is Dave Pickett and this is NetBenefites.info.

That's me on the left!

This blog isn’t an attempt to make money (although I will add in affiliate links and throw up some adsense and other ads wherever I can!) nor is it now or probably any time in the future likely to be an authority blog.

No, what it is, is somewhere for me to keep a track of all the useful tools and tips I find dotted about the internet that I may be able to use on my own sites.  A repository for the gems that should make all my other sites better.

You may notice that NOTHING in this blog is optimised, NO keyword research has been done and very little SEO.  As this blog is mainly for me there didn’t seem to be much point, after all, I already know where the blog is!

However, if you have managed, by some fluke, to stumble onto this site, then please feel free to use the hints tips and tools with my blessing.

Have fun

Dave….