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As I promised I am going to post notifications of new competitions as they appear on any of my sites. So without further ado, we have a competition running over at Digital Lard for five copies of Meet The Spartans On DVD. Here is some blurb about the film:
When the leader of the Persians, Xeres (Kevin Davitian, Borat, S.W.A.T.), threatens to invade his kingdom Leonidas (Sean Maguire, Eastenders, Grange Hill) must round-up 300 of his finest soldiers to defend his homeland. Unfortunately just 13 of his not-so-finest turn up to meet the call of war, and he heads into battle with his ragtag army armed with nothing more than a cape and his leather underwear!
Facing the greatest challenge of his life Leonidas must lead his hapless army to victory, negotiating a hunch-backed Paris Hilton, a ‘Yo Momma’ fight and a Deal or no Deal face-off along the way. Delivering a multitude of outrageous spoofs Meet the Spartans parodies motion picture heavyweights including 300, Transformers, Spiderman 3 and Casino Royale.
Sending-up pop culture favorites including Brangalina, Ugly Betty and Britney Spears the toga-filled spoof also stars Carmen Electra (Scary Movie 4, Baywatch) and Kevin Sorbo (Hercules). Featuring outrageous footage not seen in cinemas, plus a trivia game, behind-the-scenes featurettes and a hilarious gag reel, Meet the Spartans is a laugh-out-loud comedy with a spooftastic twist at every turn!
One of the aspects of web 2.0 design is the look and layout of web pages. Modern sites tend to have a certain look and feel using common elements and themes. Key design elements such as simplicity, uncluttered layouts, strong colours (in moderation), soft backgrounds, shadows, gradients, smooth text and chunky icons are often seen on modern web 2.0 sites. In this article I’ve got a list of five resources I’ve used to help create some of these modern effects through adobe photoshop.
If you’d like to read more on the visual aspects of web 2.0 design, I recommend visiting Pixel Acres.
Photoshopcandy has a large collection of free icons to download and use on your own site.
If you want to create big bold buttons that are just screaming to be clicked, there is a great little tutorial at iris design. I’ve personally used this to good effect at GetThatBargain.co.uk.
Good elements require good fonts and while there are many ways to get hold of fonts many of them are not for free. However there is a site called 1001freefonts which I’m sure you can guess from the name has lots of free fonts.
Websites these days are full of shiny reflective floor effects, you know the sort of thing where the text is reflected on the surface. There is a good tutorial on how to achieve this effect over at Photoshopcandy.
I hope there is something here that you will find helpful, these elements can be great fun to make and adapt to your own sites and used in moderation they can look good and be very effective.
I read a blog posted yesterday from Jason Dale over at One Little Duck affiliate blog. The post was concerning online competitions and the fact that there are now online services that will enter competitions for you and keep entering, without you visiting the site. Now this of course is a very bad situation for the site running the competition for several reasons:
You’re not getting any real traffic for your competition and have no chance of capturing subscribers or selling affiliate products.
Your competitions sponsors (if any) won’t be happy if they find out.
It’s not fair on those dedicated readers who visit your site regularly and enter the competitions correctly.
After reading the post I decided to check my latest competition at DigitalLard and was indeed shocked to find that one of the competitions had some very suspicious entries. It wasn’t really hard to detect them, the email addresses were all from the same few domain names and they all had something like j.doe12346@somedomain.com.
I quickly jumped upon this and changed the way the competitions worked, now people need to be registered and logged in to the site before they can even see the entry form, I also put a small disclaimer on the page explaining why I took the action, stressing that it was in the interest of fairness for all legitimate entries to take this action. Finally I added a message to the terms and conditions to say that any automated entries would be removed from the competition.
This I hope should be enough to deter these automated entry systems, and even though I am sure I will get less entries to the competition I will at least know that they are genuine site visitors and the contest will be much fairer to all those legitimate entries. Also as a side effect I will now get more registered users on my site and get all the advantages of a larger user base.
Anyone that runs a competition should take some steps to protect your competition from these automated entry systems. Some people will not have a registration system for their site, but you should try and do at least some of the following options.
Use a CAPTCHA system on the form to block automated entries.
Place a rule on the competition that any automated entries will be removed
Block the competition from all but registered site members
Watch your entries carefully when choosing winners to ensure they are legitimate
My thanks to One Little Duck blog, for encouraging me to check my own competitions.
Everyone likes a giveaway so I thought I’d start posting here whenever I have a prize to give away at one of my sites. Over at digitallard there is currently a competition running to win one of three copies of Vantage Point on DVD. Entry is free and just requires you to fill in a simple form of your name and email address. Of course you can if you choose also tick the box, to join the excellent site newsletter. Here is some blurb about the film:
The gripping political thriller, Vantage Point, boasts an all-star cast headed by TV heart throb MATTHEW FOX (Lost, Smokin’ Aces) and a powerful ensemble of DENNIS QUAID (In Good Company, The Day After Tomorrow) and Academy Award® winner FOREST WHITAKER (The Last King of Scotland). Out to buy on DVD and Blu-ray and to rent on from 4th August 2008, courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, it’s an action-packed political thriller about an attempted presidential assassination told from 8 different viewpoints.
Also starring WILLIAM HURT (Into the Wild), SIGOURNEY WEAVER (Infamous, Ghostbusters) and Oscar-winning FOREST WHITAKER (The Last King of Scotland), Vantage Point is directed by British filmmaker PETER TRAVIS (Omagh, Henry VIII).
In a similar vein to action films like The Bourne Ultimatum and TV sensation 24, Vantage Point follows two secret service agents assigned to protect the US president at a counter-terrorism summit in Salamanca, Spain. When the President is shot, chaos ensues and disparate lives collide. It is only by carefully following each perspective of the same 15 minutes before and immediately after the shooting that the terrifying truth behind the assassination attempt is revealed.
While your there, check out our great price comparison service where you can find the best online price for DVD’s, Games, Music, Books as well as electrical goods. Did I mention the great newsletter?
Today I launched a new blog, this particular blog is on a very personal subject. It concerns my latest attempt to battle my long term problem I have had with my weight. I have had a weight problem since the age of 18 and my weight has slowly increased year after year since then. In the last few years it has been quite stable but it’s still stable at a level that just borders over the obese range.
So I recently acquired a WiiFit and I decided to see if it could help me shed a few pounds, I also decided to run this experiment in a very public way by blogging about it. My thoughts are that such a public exposure will encourage me to stick to it and hopefully this time do something about my weight problem.
Right now I have no idea if either I will keep it up or even if the WiiFit is capable of helping me achieve my goals but it will at least make for an interesting experience for me and who knows maybe even an inspiration to others.
The blog is called WiiFitLog.com and I officially launched it today. If you take a look feel free to leave any words of encouragement.
I’ve just finished my first tutorial video for one of my sites and I am rather pleased with the end result. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for some time, but never really figured out the best way to do it. I always felt that a tutorial video really needed a voice over, but I hate those ones that people have done, where lets be honest they don’t really have the voice for it. But just recently I’ve seen some great videos done with no voice over at all, so I wanted to try that way.
I tired a couple of screen capture tools for recording the video session but in the end the one I settled on was Camtasia Studio from Techsmith. For me it seemed to have the right blend of features versus price, and it also has a full feature 30 day free trial for you to really get to grips with the software. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
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