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Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto

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You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology

Next time – we’ll have our HDTV flat screen professionally installed

March 21, 2007 by Tricia

hdinstallerslogo1.gif Around this time, back in 2004, we noticed that our 29″ Sony Trinitron TV was having a hard time starting. We’d turn the power on, but the picture would be static, and then blurry until the set had warmed up for 15 to 30 minutes. The problem had actually been going on for a number of months, but it was getting worse.

We looked into getting the TV repaired, but found that we could purchase a comparable TV for about the same price as it would cost us to repair our 10 year old television set. So, we decided to take the plunge and treat ourselves to a HDTV ready television.

After spending a couple of weeks doing research on the various types of HDTV ready television sets we decided to get a Samsung. Well, we went through two RCA’s first, but that’s a whole other story!

The following story is one of the main reasons why I have decided that anyone purchasing a flat panel TV should have it professionally installed rather than using the services of companies like BestBuy or Circuit City or trying to do it on your own. Instead, I’d recommend that you get professional TV installation for commercial or residential locations from HDInstallers.com.

The television set and the home theater system that we’d ordered were delivered to our house about a week after we’d made our order at the store.

Unfortunately for us, the company that we purchased our new television set from didn’t offer an installation service. That’s probably a good thing though because I know a couple of people that have used the services of boxstores for their flat panel TV installation and they weren’t all that happy.

We ended up setting up the television and the home theater ourselves. It was very difficult. We have a vcr, a dvd player, a multi-CD player, and a DVD recorder that all had to be hooked up to the TV and the home theater system. It took us at least two weeks to get everything working properly.

If we had used a professional HD installer, the technician would have discovered several of the problems that plagued us right away. You see, we had a weak cable signal. A professional installer would have discovered that as he or she set up the television, home theater and all of our other electronic equipment and they would have either fixed the problem for us perhaps by installing a booster, or let us know that for a better picture we’d have to have the cable company come out for a service call to fix our weak signal.

Having our flat screen television professionally installed would have also allowed us to use our new television within hours of it’s arrival in our home. Instead, it took us weeks to set everything up ourselves.

We wasted time. We were frustrated. We weren’t happy with our TV because the picture wasn’t as good as we had expected thanks to the weak cable signal – and the last thing that you want when you’ve just spent a few thousand dollars on a new TV is to be unhappy with the picture! We also argued quite a bit as we tried to set up the television ourselves. It just wasn’t the new television experience that we’d been hoping to have.

If only we’d been smart enough to contact a great LCD TV Installation and Plasma TV Installation Service Company we wouldn’t have gone through all of that anger and frustration.

HD Installers are Nation wide LCD and Plasma television installers. They service every major city in the United States. The company provides both residential and commercial LCD and Plasma television installation, as well as home theater, projector and screen installations.

HD Installers will install your LCD or plasma television on the wall or table stand for you, plus, they will also integrate all of your audio and video equipment – including a current or new home theater system so that everything works properly. They’ll even program your universal remote control for you.

If you are thinking about getting an HD Flat screen TV or if you’ve already ordered your new TV you might want to visit HDInstallers.com as their article section is a great resource for installing your big screen lcd or plasma television. The articles discuss things that you should consider if you want to install your HDTV above a fireplace, and what cables you will need when you install your new TV, plus many other things that you may or may not have considered.

If you are simply trying to decide what size tv will be best for the room you plan to put your new LCD or plasma TV in then you should read the HD Installer calculator article.

Honestly, after the experience we had when we purchased our flat screen TV I’m certain that we will have our next flat screen professionally installed. I mean, when you decide to have your flat screen TV installed by HD Installers you are working with professionals with years of experience. Not to mention that they also have a 100% satisfaction guarantee, offer a one year warranty, and are fully insured.





Filed Under: Services, Shopping, Television, Web and Technology Tagged With: articles, audio, cable, Commercial, electronic equipment, flat screen, HD Installers, HDIstallers.com, HDTV, home theater, insured, LCD, PLasma, projection screen, projection TV, residential, speakers, Tech, technician, Television, TV, Video, warranty

Halloween Express for all your costume and themed party needs

March 16, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been asked to write about Halloweenexpress.com. Now obviously, with a site titled Halloween Express you would expect to find Halloween Costumes, wouldn’t you?

You will, but you’ll also find costumes that relate well to just about any other major holiday, and costumes that could be used when attending costume parties and other themed events.

disco.gif Halloween Express carries everything from Adult, kid, pet and Halloween costumes, to accessories and make up, hats, wigs and masks plus decorations for your costume party. They offer the largest selection of Halloween costumes and merchandise. Just browse through their pages to see what I mean.

The costumes and merchandise sold at Halloween Express are a combination of the latest popular trends in costumes, as well as the tried and true best sellers.

There are so many different types of costumes to choose. Clicking on the adult costume section revealed an assortment of different styles of adult costumes. I see listings for everything from classic men and womens costumes, to horror, career, couples, Disney, fairytale, holiday, humorous, medieval, military, pirate, religious, sexy, super hero, and TV and movie related men and womens costumes.

babybug2.gif Now that’s just one section. Don’t forget they have costumes for children too. Isn’t the baby bug costume adorable?

Oh and don’t forget to browse through the pet costumes. I just love them.

If I had a dog or cat I might be tempted to dress them up at least once a year after seeing photos of costumed animals. How do you like the masked Power ranger dog costume?

petpowerranger2.gif There are just so many costumes that you really must see the Halloween Express site for yourself.

Halloween express also offers a large assortment of accessories, make up, hats, wigs and masks that you can add to your costume to complete the look, or use to personalize your costumed character.

alien2.gif Halloween Express started out in 1990, and has built itself up to become one of the most aggressive and dynamic Halloween chains in the US. That’s 17+ years of experience, and over 140 retail locations.

There are several company owned as well as franchise locations across the United States. If there isn’t a location in your area, have no fear. Just visit their online site HalloweenExpress.com. They ship merchandise across the continental US, however they do not ship internationally at this time.

So remember Halloween Express the next time you get invited to a costume party or a themed event. I’m certain you’ll be happy with the selection.

Filed Under: Fashion, Recreation, Shopping, Website Promotion Tagged With: classic costumes, costume, costume accessories, costumes, Halloween, halloween costumes, halloween decorations, hats, holiday, horror, makeup, masks, sexy costumes, wigs

Report Splog sites!

March 16, 2007 by Tricia

Hey, I found a site that might help in the fight against the spam and scraper blogs that steal posts from our sites.

The site is called SplogSpot. It’s a service that keeps track of spam blogs or splogs. Their database can be queried by anyone using the splogspot API. In this way it can help blog related services such as directories and search engines keep their sites clean.

SplogSpot works with a blacklist that Pingoat.com (a blog pinging service) generates. Pingoat apparently has automatic software that can detect spam blogs.

You can manually submit splogs to SplogSpot whenever you come across one.

If Google and the other big search engines are smart they are already checking this sites database and using the information to remove the splog sites from their index. This might help keep our sites, which have been the victims in this mess from being penalized by Google for duplicate content.

Filed Under: Web and Technology Tagged With: blacklist, database, fight splog, google, pingoat, report splog, search engines, Spam, splog, splogspot

Sick and tired of Splogs!

March 16, 2007 by Tricia

Ah! All my sites are getting hit heavy by sploggers!

Ok, according to this definition I’m being hit by a combination of Splogger and Scraper sites:

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.

Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either Inauthentic Text or merely stolen from other websites. These blogs usually contain an high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

Ever since I started my blogs I’ve had sites copying my posts – some giving a link back to the original post, others not linking back at all. However, since December or so this problem has increased. In fact it’s been so bad in the last two weeks that my husband and I have had at least 100 posts stolen from our sites.

I get a pingback from the sites that include our post links in their stolen copy of our posts – that’s the main way that I’ve been finding these sites.

I call them sploggers because of course the sites are full of adsense ads – so they are trying to build a site artificially to gain traffic in order to scam adsense and make some money by using other peoples content to earn money. However, technically, they are scraper sites – as in bottom feeders – because they are gathering content from our sites rss feeds.

This site has only had a few posts stolen that I’m aware of, but my gardening site, my celebrity blog, and my husbands two sites – Odd Planet and Guitar licks have been hit hard.

Yesterday, after a combo splogger / scraper site stole 10 posts from Celebrity Scoop I decided to fight back.

Ok, just to back up for a second. I have been fighting back by reporting these sites as spam to google, and by doing a whois search on their domain name to find out who the sites web host is, and sometimes even the sploggers email address.

Alright … fighting back … I created a graphic last night. A big red stop sign that says “Stop stealing my site feed”, and created a post, that when copied on the splog site would notify anyone viewing the site that they are reading stolen information. Check out my “Take back the Net – Stop copyright Thieves” post on Celebrity Scoop.

We have to stop these sites.

The more duplicates of our posts out there, the higher the chance that google will take OUR sites off their index as a penalty for duplicate content. It could even affect our page ranks too. Not to mention the whole copyright violation and even bandwidth stealing (if they are hot-linking to an image in your post) problem.

Other than turning off our RSS feeds how else can we stop these thieving sites? I’d love to hear some ideas.

Filed Under: Web and Technology Tagged With: celebrity scoop, duplicate content, fake site, garden, google adsense, guitar, odd planet, page rank, plants, scraper, site stealing posts, Spam, splog, splogger, stealing posts, thieve

Use Quik-Find contextual ads to replace Adsense public service ads on your site

March 15, 2007 by Tricia

I don’t use Google Adsense on this site, but I do use it on a number of our other blogs and websites. I do pretty well with Google Adsense, but sometimes I think I could be making more money if it showed ads that were even more relevant to my sites content.

I may have a solution that lets me combine Google Adsense and another form of advertising at the same time. You see, I was just visiting the Quik-Find.com: Web Search Engine Directory and I discovered that they have an advertising program called Quik-Find contextual ads.

You can use this new ad program to replace the public service ads that show up in your Google Adsense advertising area from time to time. You can also use it to block out your site competitors ads too. You might even find that you make more money using the Quik-Find Contextual Ads than you do with Google Adsense and decide to get rid of Google Adsense altogether.

One great thing about Quik Find’s contextual ads service is that, while it is contextual, you can still select what type of content gets advertised on your site. To get more information about this new advertising system please visit quik-find.com.

Filed Under: Sales and Marketing, Web and Technology, Web Design Tagged With: adsense, blog, competetors ads, contextual ad, google, google adsense, public service ad, Quik Find contextual ads, relevant ad, website

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