More typical rants

I swear, I had no idea I could be this cynical and thoroughly disgusted with so much in the world by the time I was 40. I thought only really old folks had the 'In MY day...' thing going, about how everything is just useless overpriced crap and no one cares about anything except money. I am ashamed to have to try to explain to my child why so many of the toys people give her break soon after she gets them and can't be easily fixed. I'm sure there will be one of the many held-back Made in China rants unleashed soon...

My daily post is elsewhere

On my HouseBlog that at least a few people read since I have gotten comments. This one, who knows...

At it again for Bananame.com

There is this creative and slightly silly site out there, BananaName.com

For a small fee (currently $24.95), you give them the name of a company, person, etc., and they will write it on a banana and post the picture of it, plus associated text, on their website.

So far it seems to be used by websites wanting promotion, but I can see my child liking something like that as a birthday surprise. Once she learns to read that is. :)

Check it out...

Will blog for money...

Ok, I have a few random comments on child-rearing and then suddenly I am hawking some websites you never heard of, right? Assuming anyone is actually reading this....Well, I am a victim of Mechanical Turk, a nifty relatively new feature run by the folks at Amazon whereby you do on-line tasks that can't be easily done by computers, for small amounts of Amazon credit.
Yes, we humans are still better at some things, like identifying features in aerial photos. They had a huge effort recently whereby people scanned air photos in the search for Steve Fossett's plane for example.

Some tasks pay only a few cents but sometimes they'll pay $1 or more. Why do people bother with such menial things? I don't know, why do I? The amusement or interest, and quick easy Amazon credit perhaps? Some other typical tasks are transcribing podcasts, locating obscure information on the web, writing reviews of websites and so on.

Otherwise, back to our regularly scheduled ranting.

NoBloPoMo Come Lately...

Ok, so this is the second year I have been aware of National Blog Posting Month
. I am deciding to try it this year, but I know I missed the first couple days and I won't be eligible for any prizes, etc, but I think it will be a good motivation to try to write and offload the random floatsom in my brain. My friend at pywacket.org inspired me.

It's so hard to find time to write in between the child things and work and the spouse and house and what not....
The inlaws are downstairs looking at 1.5 years worth of pictures that the spouse-dude just got developed (hasn't entered the digital age. I have but never back 'em up enough and fear the hard drive will crash again....Gotta go, child calls......

A great design-your-own-website for small businesses

Back to our regularly scheduled rants shortly.



In the mean time, if you have a small business and aren't a total website design guru, check out Homestead. They offer over 2,000 really detailed website templates for a variety of businesses to use with as much or as little of their own changes as they need. They seem to have a really good variety of styles, layouts, colors, etc., so they don't all look like they came out of the same box like, oh, Blogger templates. :) The overall small business website design concept seems pretty usable. I think even my mom, who first tried email after age 70, could manage to put up a site with it.

There are specific sites targeted for many areas such as real estate website design. If the many templates aren't specific enough to your business, they also offer custom website design. That can also be a lot of help for people looking for a web presence but quite lacking in computer saavy. Their prices and services tell you how much help they can provide and for what fees ($600-1000).

For people who need more than just basic text and images, they offer ecommerce website design. You can easily create a storefront and upload your product information plus tax and shipping costs.


Homestead offers a basic website package for $4.99/month though it has pretty limited features such as no included domain name or email, only five web pages, 25 Meg of storage and so on. The more real packages are $19.99 or $49.99 a month which include a far better range of features. These aren't the cheapest nor the fanciest things out there, but they far excel over basic web hosting in the range of templates and help they can provide to anyone looking to create a small business website. There is a free 30-day trial, so anyone can give it a test drive.

Checking out a new website, http://www.wevoke.com

Seems like a cool concept...it lets you pick what sort of emotion you want to feel, and then selects from its vast array of links to provide you with suitable news. I picked "I want to feel 'Most happy' from the last 'day' in category 'Animals'" and got a couple stories on saving animal shelter pets.

The default seems to be "most angering" which I guess has its place, though personally, I find a lot of typical TV news these days to fit that category quite well.

I suppose the site is limited by the range of user-provided links that it has at any moment, but that is not so unusual these days, in the world of wikipedia.org, yelp.com and so on.


The site has some roughness to work out in terms of navigation and overall functionality but I assume that will happen in time. One very minor peeve, when you click to register and it asks for your info to contact them, it says Name, Street, Suburb, State...A person i oh, I don' t know, a major municipality such as Chicago might take offense to the 'suburb' thing....

Still, seems like a cool concept, hope it takes off well.....