Author: Richard

Cherished Number Plates

| Richard

As chance would have it, on The Rev Counter today there was a thread about personalised/cherished/vanity numberplates.

I have a couple of them: one for the car and one for the bike. I was lucky enough to get them directly from the DVLA a few years back. It’s interesting to see what similar plates are worth and one way to do this is to visit one of the website runs by sellers/brokers of numberplates.

I have found in the past that the amount some brokers will offer you for your numberplate is way below what they will seek to sell it for, pocketing the difference for themselves rather than taking a flat fee or a percentage of the sale value. One leading company did just that when I approached them: the difference was many thousands of pounds…

Anyway, I’ve since found out about Cape Plates who offer a free valuation service as well as offering to sell your plate for you;  they’ve also got a nice selection of Irish number plates for sale if your budget doesn’t stretch to a full-on cherished number. And yes, I will be paid a nominal amount to mention them and no, it doesn’t mean I’m writing this with a positive spin.

I wonder what their valuation would be of my two plates; 2000 RM and 3 RHM?

PayPerPost

| Richard

As readers of my blogs should by now be aware, I have been running Google AdWords on them for a while now; they generate a small amount of revenue every time a visitor to the site clicks on one of them.

Always keen to ‘monetise’ my blogs, I came across payperpost by following a link from another blogger’s website (I forget who now).

PayPerPost basically act as the middle man between potential blog advertisers and bloggers: we are given the choice of “opportunities” whereby an advertiser wants bloggers to either review a product, website or service or to simply help create a ‘buzz’ about something such as the launch of a new website, artiste or whatever.

The potential advertisers then make an offer to pay x number of dollars for a blog entry that matches their criteria: as a blogger I can see what they want and if I am prepared to review or mention the product or service or to help create that buzz then I can.

Some advertisers will want only a positive flavour to the potential blog post in which case as a blogger you can choose whether to write it that way, or – as is the case on this blog – choose not to write the review at all.

Advertisers can choose either to invite the whole blogging world to write a blog entry or they can approach individual bloggers to write a review for them. There’s a button over there in the sidebar to allow potential advertisers to contact me directly to negotiate a blog entry here.

So it’s early days yet for me: I’ve only just received approval for this blog from PayPerPost. We’ll see how they do … and yes, they are paying me for this entry!


Credit Card Balance Transfers

| Richard

Funny how things change.

Once upon a time, you could transfer balances from one credit card to another and you’d receive a combination of either a low interest rate or a 5% reduction or a combination of the two.

A post will shortly be syndicated here from Crass Stupidity railing at Barclaycard.  Barclaycard pay for Google AdWords so an advert appeared in that post for Barclaycard! Anyone clicking that link – thereby making me a few cents – would be taken to a marketing sub-site of Barclaycard’s where they set out some of the bewildering number of cards they offer, many with offers of low interest rates on balance transfers but surprisingly (to me at least) there’s a 2½% transfer fee.

How things change!

Oh! Suit you, Sir!

| Richard

Really quite chuffed today. I’ve been meaning to buy a new suit for absolutely ages now and the opportunity presented itself today.

I was dragged in to Norwich to help choose between a couple of different pairs of glasses for Mrs. RHM. As we walked past Moss (the shop formerly known as Moss Bros), I noticed they had a sale on, so I popped in to look at what they had.

I had been hoping to pick up a lightweight wool suit from around £250 from M&S so I had a quick poke and was very pleased to find a Cerruti 1881 fine lambswool two piece suit. In 42R, that comes with 36R trousers that I thought might be a problem: my jeans choice is always Levi 501 34L. The assistant, James - who it must be said was a digustingly stylish bloke – said that the trousers were probably akin to a 35″ due to their cut and flat front. Hmm…

So I tried the suit on and it fit really well (I reckon). The best bit was the price: marked down from £299 to £199 to £149!

It’s last season’s style with a three button jacket, but I’m fine with that: part of James’s sales patter was that they’d no doubt be featuring exactly the same suit in this year’s collection at £300 next week, though having looked at the Moss web site, it’s likely they’ll be two button jackets.

I tried it on again when I got home with a decent shirt from Charles Tyrwhitt and my business shoes and I have to say it looks superb.

Yuku Supporter Free Trial!

| Richard

All you have to do is pay…

I kid you not: there is apparently a one month free trial period for Yuku Supporter - basically a way to hide adverts from Yuku message boards if you pay $7 for six months:

“Become a Yuku Supporter!

Welcome to the Yuku Supporter purchase screen. Here you can upgrade to or renew your Yuku Supporter account for your username, giving your username premium status including no ads and special features.
As a new Yuku Supporter subscriber, you are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Great! So where’s the option to select the free one month trial? You can only select $7 for six months or $12 for 12 months.

It must be on the next screen. Check the box that says you agree to the Yuku T&Cs and on we go.

“Selected Subscription Options

You have selected:

Six months subscription for $7 USD without Automatic Renewal.

You are qualified for a one month free trial period.”

Woohoo! On we go. We’re now taken to PayPal and for some reason they want to charge me $7 still.

Where’s my one month free trial period?

Oh and you know the bit where it says “giving your username premium status including no ads”? Well that’s not strictly accurate either:

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4922/t/Gold-community-and-yuku-supporter.html?page=-1

“Yuku supporters will not see yuku placed ads, but they will see any ads placed by board admins.”

So “no ads” means “ads”. Ah I see.

So then. Back to the question of the supposed one month free trial. How do we sign up for free?

http://support.yuku.com/topic/4904/t/One-month-yuku-supporter-free-trial.html

“if you pay for it, you get a month free thrown in. You don’t get a free month to try it first. The free month is a reward for paying.”

Oh I see! So the one month free trial isn’t a one month free trial after all. It’s a one month subscription extension once you’ve paid.

More creative use of language or misleading information depending on whether you’re ezboard, Inc. or the rest of the world…

visordown.com – Alternatives?

| Richard

So then, given it is abundantly clear that the new Visordown is how it’s going to stay, I decided to do something about it. The alternatives were to put up and shut up, start a new message board or join another one and effectively leave Visordown behind.

Now, what makes a decent message board are first and foremost the people who post on it and secondly the software that runs it.

So I posted this suggestion on visordown.com:

“The old visordown.com was running vBulletin software which is just about to have a major upgrade released: see this thread over on vBulletin.

Now, although I can see why this change has taken place from the owners’ perspective, from the users’ perspective it’s not been a complete success, shall we say, with lots of folk asking for the old visordown.com back.

So what if something the same only new, starting from scratch was to be offered?

I have a spare licence for vBulletin that I am happy to pay to upgrade and install on a server somewhere. I have a couple of domain names regsitered that might be suitable:

TrackDayHero.com (currently pointing at my blog); or

BikeChatBoard.com (ditto).

I’d start by running Google Ads and a supporter scheme with benefits for supporters, so just like the old VD really. No publishing house looking over our shoulders, so perhaps more relaxed?

So, would anyone be interested?”

There was a lot of interest, but I was also reminded about the Revcounter which is shortly to be ported over to vBulletin and already has some of the old Visordown members on there. So to avoid duplication, my suggestion is on the back-burner and can be set up if needs be. In the meantime, I’ve changed the redirect for www.bikechatboard.com to the Revcounter.

visordown.com – An Object Lesson

| Richard

Once upon a time, a motorcycle journalist and his friend set up an online discussion forum for motorcyclists and called it visordown.com

The forum software they were using was vBulletin which is very fine indeed and the site became a great success. That success led to Ben Cope selling advertising space on the board and serving ads. as well as setting up a supporter scheme to suppress those ads. and presumably putting some of that revenue into the hosting and software costs (although there was a rumour that some of those costs were being met elsewhere).

Then a publishing house called Magicalia bought visordown.com to complement their motorcycle magazine, “TWO”. Initially things got off to a bad start with TWO including some content from visordown.com in an issue without asking for permission to do so.

It also appeared that visordown’s free and easy, say what you like attitude was being clamped down on by its new owners.

In the meantime, vBulletin announced that the latest version of their software – version 3.7 – was being developed with user blogs (basically extended user profile pages) and user galleries to make what was already the best message board software even better.

So when an announcement was made a little while back seeking testers for the new version of visordown.com and when the board was turned off yesterday for an upgrade, I was quietly pleased.

And then they re-opened the board today. It’s been moved to a different server now running different ASP board software. A server that appears to be common to the rest of the Magicalia sites all running the same board software. No doubt that decision makes sense to a large company running a number of message boards: one set of architecture to support. Of course that throws aside the history and treats visordown.com as a new site rather than an established one.

And the ‘new’ board software is, frankly, rubbish compared with vBulletin. It also appears from all the server error messages I was getting this evening when trying to post new threads or reply to existing ones, that the server or the software (or a combination of the two) cannot cope with the traffic that visordown.com generates.

I expect that the regular users will soon get fed up with the board issues and the lack of features they were used to before.

Let that be a lesson to us all…

Yuku Pricing Finally Revealed!

| Richard

Well it’s still not entirely clear if yuku is in beta or not: the home page says nothing about the beta status but the yuku help wiki still has beta references and graphics and as anyone who’s using it can see, the software is still full of bugs and the promised features are not all present.

But they’ve revealed prices at last!
http://www.yuku.com/home/goldstory/

$72 for 12 months up to 50,000 page views per month, though how they’ll be working out what page views are with AJAX architecture is anyone’s guess. $72 for 12 months now instead of $54 on ezboard which means a one-third price increase!

Over 50,000 page views?

http://www.yuku.com/home/goldpricing/

“Advertising can be removed from community pages at a rate of $0.20 per 1,000 ads served. The minimum contribution is US $1.00.”

So if ezboard decide to litter the site with ads, that cash will go in a moment…

What about Yuku Supporter?

http://www.yuku.com/home/supporterstory/

“Supporters receive 100 MB of image hosting space. Non-Supporters receive only 30 MB”

Oh I’m sorry, didn’t users get offered 1TB of storage for free?

So, if your “enterprise-quality hosting and software” falls over or you’re fed up with paying someone else to have access to your account - as they do on Yuku - then try another option.

If you go to DreamHost and enter the promo code EZSAVE50, you’ll even get $50 off the first year’s hosting price of $119.40 (you pay $69.40 if you use the promo code) and that includes domain name, e-mail, 500GB of storage (increases @2GB a week) and 5TB of bandwidth, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, CGI, “real” web statistics, one-click installs of blogging, message board and other software, etc.

It’s a no-brainer…