Having just cancelled my subscription of PC Pro due to the finanical restraints of Christmas I have been on the lookout for an alternative (cheap) manazine to buy until I can afford to renew my PC Pro subscription in the new year.

Having a quick look around I managed to find an offer for 3 Issues of Computeractive for £0.03 and as I do not think I will be able to find much better than that so I am now awaiting my first of 3 Issues of Computeractive for £0.03.

This seems to be only one of 850 Christmas deals on over magazine subscriptions so if you are not into computer magazine then I am sure you will be able to find another magazine subscription you will enjoy.

Heart Internet are constantly bringing in new features and facilities to help with managing your websites and domain names and I have recently found out that Heart Internet provide a free web hosting service for those individuals and companies are in need of ways of reducing costs, which is ideal for small start up companies.

Unlike a number of other free web hosting services Heart Internet does not need you to purchase a domain, does not have any popups and the free web hosting account is allowed for commericial use.  In addition to this the Heart Internet free web hosting account has a decent amount of websites, mailboxes, FTP access but is a little lacking in the bandwidth and does not have any database support but there has to be some incentive to upgrade to a paid for package.

As well as low cost web hosting they also provide cheap domain names and although I have found certain domain names cheaper elsewhere, I like the ability to manage all of my domains centrally in my reseller account so a few extra pennies here and there is fine for me.  You can often transfer .co.uk domain names into your Heart Internet account for free and Heart Internet run other special offers from time to time meaning you can save a few pounds if you keep your eyes open.

Heart Internet have a couple of additional features I have not had the chance to try out yet but I am very interesting in, including:-

• An iPhone application to manage your account.
• HeartDrive – An online storage services with 10GB free space for Heart Internet customers but this can be increased to 100GB+ for a small fee.

All in all you are getting a lot of features for a very small price and Heart Internet is a service I would recommend to anyone looking to purchase a domain name or hosting.

For Totally FREE Hosting with No Pop-Ups, Commercial Use Permitted, No Purchase Necessary, Instant Activation from Heart Internet click the “Free Web Hosting” link in the footer.

Out of Canon and Nikon, which brand do you think make the best cameras?  Digital Rev wants you to vote on whether you think Canon or Nikon make better camera in their Canon vs Nikon competition and participating could would you an iPod touch.

The idea is simple, just re-tweet for whichever brand (Canon on Nikon) you prefer from their Canon vs Nikon Competition page and you are automatically entered into the competion.

Good Luck

This was a fantastic find for me and one which really helped me out of a sticky situation.

Having recently moved address I had to go through all the hoops with moving my services to this new address.  Unfortunately moving my Sky Television and Broadband services did not go as smoothly as I would have liked so when I found this 3 Month Free Broadband offer from O2 it seemed like the perfect time to change.

The services provided by Sky had been rather poor prior to changing address and since they had failed to get anything installed 2 month after we had moved into the new property, and being advised it would be at least another 3 months, it was definately time for a change.  I was being driven crazy with no broadband.

I signed up for O2 Broadband on a Thursday morning around 9.30am, had the router delivered to my work at 6.30pm on Friday (yes the following day) and the activation took place on the Wednesday just like I was told.  How it can take Sky 3 months for the same thing O2 provided in under a week is beyond me.

As I am an O2 mobile phone customer I also got my broadband a bit cheaper (£7.50 pcm for existing mobile customers instead of the standard £12.50 for non-existing customers)  so I’m saving myself money and my 8mb broadband is now up and running and I’m much happier with the performance I am now getting.

As a result of my own experience I have no problems recommend O2 broadband to anyone.

Having seen the price of these Harry Potter Years 1-5 box sets in the high street I was extremely scheptical but never-the-less I tried it anyway as I was bored with what was on Sky Television and a few good movies sounded just like what I was needing.

At the end of the 14 days I cancelled my trial and there was even an option during the cancellation process for “I only signed up for the free gift” so clearly this is not uncommon.  I waited about a month before I received a letter from Tesco DVD Rental which advised me they had ran out of the Harry Potter Years 1-5 box sets due to high demand and therefore they would send me individual DVD’s instead and true to their word theses DVD’s arrived about 2 weeks later.

This was perfect timing… one less Christmas present to buy!

There are a number of network providers offering free PAYG sim cards and to make things quick and easy I have included a small list of some of these.

• 4 Free PAYG sim cards from O2
• 4 Free sim cards from Orange
• 2 Free sim cards from T-Mobile
• Free sim card from Tesco
• 2 Free sim cards from Vodafone
• Free Sim Zero from 3

I have listed a few of the benefits of some of these PAYG sim cards below:-

3 – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

• Free Calls Forever – Just put your free SIM into a 3 mobile to make free Skype-to-Skype calls & send free instant messages, forever. There’s no need to top up ever again.
• Free Texts & Internet with every top up – £5 = 25 Free Texts, £10 = 300 Free Texts, £15 = 500 Free Texts, £20 = 1000 Free Texts, £25+ = Unlimited Free Texts

O2 – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

O2 has several different pay as you go (PAYG) free sim cards including their O2 Unlimited and O2 Text Anytime with varying benefit depending on your selected pay as you go sim card type.  For example:

O2 Unlimited
Top up £10 – £14 and receive Unlimited texts O2 to O2
Top up £15+ and receive Unlimited UK calls and texts O2 to O2

O2 Text Anytime
Top up £10 – £14 and receive an extra 300 UK texts each month
Top up £15 – £29 and receive an extra 500 UK texts each month
Top up £30 and receive Unlimited UK texts each month

And on top of this O2 Rewards gets you 10% back on all your top-ups as a thank you for your loyalty.

Orange – Free Pay As you Go Sim Card

• Join Orange now and get £5 free credit with your first £10 top-up
• Animal packages – Free texts, minutes, facebook – for the rewards you want, choose your animal.
• Bright Top Ups – Instant win, top up for a 1 in 3 chance to win texts, holidays, bikes and more.
• Orange Wednesdays – 2 for 1 cinema tickets every Wednesday.
• Magic Numbers – Talk to your friends on Orange for up to an hour for just 20p.
• Phone Fund – For every £10 you top–up we’ll put £1 aside towards the cost of a new phone.
• Reserve Tank – Never run out of credit with our pay as you go overdraft.

T-Mobile – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

Vodafone – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

• Call any other UK or standard landline for just £0.20 per minute
• No peak or off peak charges – it’s always the same price
• Make top ups go further with freedom packs, Unlimited Texts or Free weekends
• Great network coverage and UK call centres
• Call anywhere in the world for £0.05 with Vodafone international

• A friend or client wants CD burning software and doesn’t want to pay for it
• I’m re-installing a PC where the owner does not have the key for it
• To replace an unlicenced copy of Nero

Over time I have come across my favorites to replace these programs and in this case I have found a free alternative to Nero which fits the bill quite nicely.

CDBurnerXP is a free alternative to Nero which runs on all windows operating systems from Windows 2000 SP4 upwards (so it is not restricted to Windows XP as the name might suggest) and can perform all the operations you would expect with Nero.  The dialog options appear slightly differently but you can find your way around the software very quickly and can perform all the normal operations you would expect from Nero including:-

• Copy a CD or DVD
• Burning an ISO file to CD or DVD
• Create an audio CD
• Create an data CD

In addition there is also a very clear FAQ section with helpful tutorials for those who are not familiar with the software and an active user forum with over 23,000 members (at the time of writing this post) so help is not far away should you run into any difficulties.

All in all this is a very nice, user friendly free alternative to Nero which I recommend to all my friends and clients and I have even gone as far as replacing Nero on my own machines with this.  Nothing seems to sell a product better to your client than the fact that you are using it yourself.

• Produce a website which includes special offers, freebies and services which appeal to my visitors
• Make a little money from it.

Of the offers and freebies that are available on Lots Of Freebies there are some that I earn a small commission from and there are others where I don’t earn anything from… but while I was looking over a new offer to put up I had to think which of the 2 goals above I valued more.

This was while I was considering promoting the 24-7 SMS Club and after a short while I came to the conclusion I would prefer to have a site with content my visitors found useful rather than earn a quick buck here and there!

The reason that I really dislike this promotion was that it was offering a freebie (105 free texts over 7 days) but if you read the small print you found out that you were signing up to a £4.50 a week subscription service. 

This tends to be the type of offer you see all the time for mobile sevices… free ringtones, free wallpapers, free mp3 and these words are always big and bold and the “i agree to a £4.50 a week subscription service” is generally the smallest writing on the page or sometimes hidden away in a FAQ or Terms and Conditions which often gets skipped over in a hurry to get the free stuff.

With this particular promotion there were a number of red flags including:-

• The checkbox is automatically ticked during signup and has small writing stating you agree to a £4.50 a week subscription charge.
• You have to email in all your personal details, name, address, email, mobile number & a copy of a mobile phone statement to prove you owned the phone.  Usually you just enter your mobile number, receive a text messages with a pin code, enter the pin code into the website and you are good to go so why all the additional stuff… identity theft came to mind!
• Their second question in the FAQ was “I thought it was a free service, how come I have been charged?” which to me suggests their customers frequently get charged when they think they are getting a free service.
• Any friends you send a message to are potentially subjected to advertisement messages (see paragraph below which is taken from their FAQ page)

When you signed up you agreed to the following “By using the Site and our Services you agree that we may select and send up to 2 advertising messages, special offers or invitations per week from you (from your mobile number) to any of the mobile numbers that you send SMS messages to and/or we may add these advertising messages onto the end of messages that you send.”

These days I get enough spam through via stuff that I do and now it sounds like I’m going to have to be watching over the shoulders of my friends all the time to ensure they don’t use my mobile number with services such as this.

Conclusion

At the end of the day this is not the type of offer that my visitors would appreciate and I would most likely annoy them and they would lose faith in the service I’m trying to provide so as a result any freebie that I see with conditions such as this get binned before they get anywhere near our website.

Please let me know your thoughts on these types of services.  Have you requested a freebie only to find out that you’ve signed up for a subscription service?  Did you get your money back or cut your loses?

Why would anyone send him free stuff?  Every company that has their own website is competing against everyone else for search engine rankings… the higher the rankings the more traffic, more sales, more comissions etc but one factor in gaining a better search engine ranking is obtaining backlinks.  The company could make their money back many times over if they send out a freebie to someone who then writes about it on a busy blog.

I’m not sure if this would still work now or not… would a high profile blogger be happy with including product advertisements within their blog just for the sake of a few freebies or would they prefer to just stick to their topic of choice?

rssHugger aims to bring bloggers and readers closer together and provide the blogger with good backlinks provided the content is useful to the reader which is a good for both the blogger and the reader as there is enough junk floating around out there already.

The rssHugger website has some useful features like being able to browse through the blog directory to find blogs which are relevant to you, although I personally would like to see free text search option as well, and in addition there is a random blog option which works similarly to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” or StumbleUpon.

On top of all this, and my personal favourite thing about this site, is that it has a Top 100 but with a twist.  Normally if you see a top 100 on a website the list is pretty much static but rssHugger implement this with a Top 100 Reset.  What this means is that on the first of each month all the rankings for the RSS feeds are reset giving everyone a level playing field to achieve a Top 100 position. 

Now I imagine the long established bloggers will not be overly happy with this as they will have to battle it out each month to get one of the Top 100 spots but it does give a lot more opportunity to the smaller bloggers who may not have the time to sit and solely promote their blog.

I think we need to see more of this type of system and help give the little guy a fighting chance, especially if he has something useful to contribute.