Newsbites

For small bits of news, quotations, odd videos, and flimflam.

Buzz: Making Money Magazine – Franchising in the UK

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I just came back from Blighty. At the airport, there were no newspapers for the flight to HongKong so desperation drove me to find something else. That’s what happens when you buy good reading for the flight but then pack your flight reading in your check-in bag, not the carry on one! Doh!

making money magazine

There were stacks of a newish magazine (or at least one I had never heard of) called Making Money Magazine which is primarily about the franchising market in the UK. There are lots of feature articles on all sorts of companies from almost every industry you could imagine, including some very prominent names like BurgerKing, Subway, etc. Their online contact form lists over 400 different franchises. The only problem with the magazine is you can’t read it online, it’s a print-only publication, though the website is quite informative in its own way.

Buzz: WebHostingGeeks dot com – affiliate site simplifies search for new hosting

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About six months ago, I had been having a lot of trouble with my hosting provider, Dreamhost. So I started looking around for new hosting solutions, and it was a pain to track down different hosts. There are numerous hosting solutions on the web, but painfully clicking through all those different ads on computer websites can be slow.

Enter a review site: WebhostingGeeks.com offers reviews for web hosting as well as ratings for many of the top websites available for hosting and they breakdown the different packages in ways that can help you identify suitable products for your needs.

webhost geeks

Can a review site such as this be useful?

While the type of website isn’t particularly new these days, if you are researching a host, positive and negative reviews can be helpful in describing the kind of problems that you will experience with the different hosts. For example, if you are not particularly needing robust hosting, you may wish to go for more budget hosting that has reasonably good uptimes.

Some may legitimately wonder if a website like this can offer impartial advice, and this may or may not be the case. Reading reviews will allow you to have a better review of the site’s editorial policy. Negative reviews, especially, will allow you to see if the editorial is light- or heavy-handed. Check for negative reviews.

As a simple guide to some of the more popular solutions, a site like this may never be able to cover ALL the options out there. Indeed that would be impossible. But it could certainly help steer you in the right direction, provided you realize that these sites are affiliate links, and could earn money for the site-owner.

Some suggestions

Yahoo! hosting generally is not highly regarded, yet it is placed quite high on the list. I’m not sure why. It would also be great if users could submit hosts to the directory so that the list of hosts gets longer. Naturally, with many hosts offering affiliate schemes, it would be easy to generate additional revenues from them. But hosts without affiliate schemes may not be included… It would also be nice to see some easily identifiable disclaimer links such as “…this link is an affiilate link…” or even a disclaimer page.

Overall, it would have saved me quite some time, cut out some of the waste of effort in examining useless sites, and saved me even more money. Pity I found it six months’ too late. Oh, well.

To Blog on the Go: Acer AspireOne

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Bloggers who are addicted to blogging really need good equipment to help them get the job done. But what do you do when you’re away from home?

Presenting the AcerAspire One.

P1020221

This is my new on-the-go laptop: small, light, and running XP it provides almost all the stuff I need to blog with. The kit you see here is the AspireOne, the SanDisk Cruzer, and a simple Skype phone from Lobos. With the price of international calls, finding a wi-fi spot with open access or a hotel with wi-fi or broadband, and you’ll be able to call anywhere conveniently.

To find out more about this unit: Acer Aspire One 8.9-inch Mini Laptop (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) White click on the link to visit Amazon.

Once I get back to Taiwan, I think that adding a couple of neat dongles would significantly improve this device: a USB GPS tracker, and a mobile wireless service. Travel anywhere would become significantly easier, and you’d be able to create a kind of SatNav system, too, courtesy of Google Maps.

I had thought about purchasing the Linux model, but LiveWriter and BlogDesk are my favorite blogging applications, so that made it an obvious choice. For the mobile blogger, this would mean that we could blog anywhere, anyhow. Perhaps even with a live broadcast!