Claire's Random Thoughts

Stootsi has a special offer for free photo paper today, if you sign up for an account with them, which is also free. They are giving out 100% free packs of 20 sheets of 4X6 photo paper. It’s fujifilm premium too, not just any cheap paper.

Here’s what they had to say:

I signed up with a virtual credit card from Bank of America’s shopsafe and ordered one. I used the virtual one just for precautions. I don’t really think they will try to make unauthorized charges, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe. Hopefully I’ll get the paper soon!

First off, I would like to warn you that nothing is completely free. These domains that I’m about to list will be free in the sense that you are not directly paying any money to the registrar, but there is always a catch that makes most of these not quite as good as paid domains. Most of these are typically designed for newbies who are not yet willing to spend much on hosting and domain names yet.

www.namepros.com
This is my favorite and probably one the only ones I would recommend to more experienced webmasters. It takes some time and effort to get a free domain with them, but once you get it, you can do whatever you want with it, including DNS control and the option to transfer the domain away from them if you wish to do so. All you have to do is click on the links that they provide you with to earn points which can later be redeemed for free domains. Clicks are worth at least .5 of a point (many are worth more), and you need 425 for a domain registration.

www.hostbidder.com and www.betlik.com
These are forums where you can earn points that you can later exchange for domain registrations or cash. You get full control over your domain that you obtain from these sites. On hostbidder, you can earn up to 10 points per post and can receive a domain for 1200 forum points (425 for .info). Unfortunately, there is a 3 posts per day limit. On betlik, you usually receive 1.5 points for each post. There is no set limit for how many you can post, but realistically, you can only make about 20 posts per day if you don’t want to risk being accused of spam. Domain registrations cost 500 points.

www.uni.cc
This is technically a subdomain, but it’s short enough to kind of look like a domain. If you sign up with uni.cc, then you get a free optional redirect, free site builder, and the option to set your own DNS servers. They’re not a bad service, but keep in mind that you are technically using a short subdomain that just kind of looks like a top level domain if you use this service.

www.freedomain.co.nr
You can get a free domain without ads instantly here. Sounds good? Well, there is a catch. Here’s why they’re not recommended for better sites. All this company does is put your site that’s actually hosted elsewhere in a frame, so if somebody goes to your .co.nr site, they are technically viewing your page in a frame. If he/she clicks on a link, let’s say directory.html, then he/she will not be directed to yourdomain.co.nr/directory.html but rather still have the same url in the address bar. This type of domain may not be good for SEO (search engine optimization), because if you wish to optimize your .co.nr domain, then all your subpages will be ignored by search engines. If you instead optimize the original url to avoid this problem, the url that will show up in search engines would be your old one instead of the .co.nr one.

www.dot.tk
dot.tk is very similar to co.nr but may not be as good. I don’t really recommend them, because they not only put your site in frames like co.nr does, but also put a bar on top of your page saying your domain is from them as well as an interstitial ad before visitors see your site.

I signed up with webmastersroom a few days ago, because I decided that I needed a more active webmasters forum to ask my stupid questions. Their main incentive that got me to join was the 2 cents per post or 5 cents per new thread that they paid us for posting. Previously, I have also tried some other forums, but I think that this one is one of the bigger ones with an alexa ranking of about 38,000.

As if getting all my questions answered within a couple hours wasn’t enough, they raised the pay to 8 cents per post/new thread! That’s definitely the highest paying forum that I’ve seen on the internet. If I just post normally, I could make about a dollar per day doing what I would do for free on other forums anyway. It’s safe to say that I’ve found a new site to waste time on.

It’s interesting how the small incentives seem to be the ones that motivate us most. I’m not motivated to study for tests, which leads to higher grades, which leads to a better chance of being admitted to a selective college, but I’m always interested in spending hours to make a quick buck.

Pageflakes is an ajax based personal start page maker. The purpose of this is to have all your favorite sites together on one page, so you can conveniently click on any one you want from your start page. That way, people who have difficulty deciding what to set as a home page can have everything together! You can create “widgets” (there are over 70 available) that display what you want to see when you open your browser. You also have the option of making your page public, so it can serve as a personal home page. Visitors that you send to your page can then learn about your interests.

You can customize everything from to do task lists to news to photos to your box.net storage. You can also have multiple start pages if you have too much you would like to include and can’t fit everything on one page neatly.

Conclusively, pageflakes may be something worth trying. Overall, it is pretty useful.

I’ve been using gmail for the past couple years and have always regarded it as the best email service that I have used. However, I have found another one worth consideration. crawler.com seems to offer more features than gmail does, although they might not be very well-known right now. I’m guessing that most people who are reading this have never heard of crawler, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with their service.To make sure that they weren’t a tiny company that would disappear overnight without notice, I checked their Alexa ranking which was 44,333 indicating that they were decently sized.

Here are some of their features:
Large 5 GB storage with 20 mb attachments
Customize “From” addresses (send mail that looks like it’s coming from another one of your accounts or use a forwarding alias)
POP3 access
External POP3 accounts (to poll all your other mail)
Autoresponder
Sort rules (called filters in many other email services)
Option to create a public or private photo album

Crawler mail uses a nice interface with no ads, whatsoever. The layout can be either one similar to Yahoo mail beta (shown in the picture above) or one of their other 3 choices. There are also simplified, text-only, or access black and white skins for faster loading, but the default is probably the best. You may also change the color scheme if you wish. The list of emails is displayed on top while the actual message is displayed below it in the default view.

There is also a storage panel that you could use to backup or store your files. If you use the web uploader, then the file size limit is 20 mb, but if you download the toolbar which can be found on the site or here, then you can the virtual storage folder to upload files up to 50 mb


The crawler folder looks like any other folder in My Documents. If you open it, then you will be able to upload files that will also appear in your storage panel next time you access your mail with a browser. You can drag and drop files or folders as well as create folders, similar to a flash drive. This feature is very convenient, because I am able to upload folders with lots of files by simply dragging and dropping or copying and pasting. This is definitely easier than selecting every single file in a browser uploader.