I came across some great ideas for business cards and postcards to help promote your small business or projects, and thought these were too good to not pass on.
MOO Business Cards, MiniCards, Postcards. Create unique cards using your own photos or designs to help your business stand out!
See what you think. Hope this helps.
Tony
It’s freezing cold here in South Florida today. Well freezing is a relative term I know. Put it this way, the temperature when I came to work this morning was 39 degrees. If it was in the 40’s I could have just come to work in a short sleeved shirt as usual, but since it dipped into the 30’s, I decided to put a sweater on, mostly because of the cold wind.
It was so funny sitting in traffic, watching people smoking like crazy as they often do on the way to work, cars all fogged up because they didn’t want to have to open their windows, and then some people wearing thick winter coats with hoods pulled up over their heads, trying to drive with just eyes and nose peeking out. I mean it was barely below 40 degrees, not Minnesota or Canada.
It’s been an odd week really so far. Last week was tough, with it being the second full week since I returned from England, but having Monday off for Martin Luther King day, and then spending time yesterday watching the inaugaration of President Obama, it just seemed different. Maybe in some ways it’s a relief because I was dreading something happening during the ceremony, but all went ok and the man gave a fine speech. I really hope he will prove to be a great president, one who not only cares about the USA as a nation, but about the people, and also the world that we live in. From his stirring speech he certainly has dreams of making big changes, and I truly hope that he can succeed.
While on the subject of the President, I saw this morning that the WHITEHOUSE.GOV web site has been redesigned. Gone is the stuffy old fashioned web site, and in has come a sweet looking new blog, with the first of many great articles to come. Yes there certainly is a fresh feeling in The White House already.
As for the weekend, I took my daughters out to the park twice, and to the beach (just to the boardwalk of course as it was cold), and we had a great time together.
I also managed to create two new lenses on Squidoo. The first I created on Friday night, having had a thought while reading about the new Twitterstorm lens format. So I put together a lens about The Best Breakfast Food and so far it’s done really well, soaring into the Top 1,000 in a matter of days. makes a change for me.
Secondly I thought it was about time to start putting together The Daily Joke for January 2009. This is the twelfth monthly Daily Joke lens that I have created, and the first in a few months that has had jokes and not funny pictures. It’s hard to find really good jokes that I haven’t used before, but having had a break I am finding some, and with the gap since the last one I created I hope to be able to use some of my newly learned lensmaster skills to make it look better.
Both Debbie and I have also been busy working on our blog (see below), and the traffic is increasing nicely, with lots of our friends from Squidoo and Tagfoot visiting.
Debbie (better know to some of you as Debnet) have a new blog, and we both invite you to join in the conversations there and to see what we are up to. We plan to cover just about anything, from what each of us is doing while we are stuck 4,500 miles apart, to news, updates and information on trendy new items or web sites / software that we like. So please if you have time drop in to see us at Off The Record. Be sure to leave us a comment to let us know you were there.
My lens status as of today is as below:
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 4
Top 10,000: 7
Lenses: 74
The Best Breakfast Food
The Daily Joke January 2009
This post is me signing off for the holiday season as I attempt to gather all my things together ready for my flight to London on Friday night. I will be away until the beginning of January and will attempt to post while away, but my focus will be on enjoying the all too brief two weeks with my girlfriend, especially since we don’t know when we will be seeing each other again. February we hope, provided she gets her visa approved, but if not…. we are still waiting six weeks after she went to the US Embassy in London for a response.
It’s going to be cold, damp, and gloomy skies no doubt much of the time in the UK, as compared with Sunny Florida, but hopefully there will be some nice days when we can go out for walks. The countryside is so nice there, the woods and especially the New Forest, even the beaches. I am really looking forward to it, and this will be the first Christmas I have spent in England since 1993 too.
I have spent the last week fighting off a horrible cold. The last thing I want is to fly for 9 hours with a streaming nose and a sore throat and spinny head. So for days now I have dosed up on Airborne, extra glasses of Orange Juice, Tylenol, and even Night Nurse the last 3 nights. I also took a steam two nights running, and that has helped clear my head and so far (touch wood) I might have this cold licked before it had a chance to catch hold of me. Keep your fingers crossed 
I am going to sign off by wishing you all a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR. I hope Santa brings you lots of nice things – however old you are, and that you have time to spend with family and friends.
Until 2009, this is me signing off…..
PS: Please feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to visit my lenses if you have a chance.
Oops – nearly forgot – I updated my Song Lyrics – Walking On The Moon by The Police lens to change the way that the lyrics are displayed. I would be interested in your comments. I got the idea from one of the lenses by Jaguar Julie and I hope you like it. I think there is still room for improvement, and then I will probably clone out the new format to all my other Song Lyric lenses.
If you are in need of some Christmas laughter, I sincerely recommend my Christmas Jokes pages which have been getting lots of traffic since I updated them to add new pictures and also put Adsense on them. Also my Funny Christmas Pictures lens, which I updated to add several videos of amusing Christmas songs that I thought were cute.
If you have any family or friends that you plan to call over the holidays, or if you are travelling abroad, this is the company that I use for my calling cards – Almost Free Phone Calls. There are no hidden charges, the calls to the UK and anywhere in Europe, South America, Asia or Australia are really cheap, and I have saved myself hundreds of dollars in the last year by using their cards, as against paying the high rates charged by my long distance company or cell phone company. It’s not even half the price – it’s far lower than that! Serious Savings… So take my advice, plan ahead and save yourself some money on those phone calls. The cards don’t expire either, and you can use them with your mobile too.
My lens status as of today is as below:
LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 3
Top 10,000: 10
Lenses: 73
NEW LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008
MY TOP 5 LENSES
The Daily Joke December 2008
Bournemouth
My Pet Peeves
Golf Jokes
The Daily Joke October 2008
LENSES IN NEED OF LOVE – I AM LONELY – PLEASE VISIT ME
Premiata Forneria Marconi
Song Lyrics – Madness – Baggy Trousers
Song Lyrics – Peter Gabriel – Spedgehammer
I powered my laptop on at lunchtime to find the desktop showing a message indicating that I had spyware running. Of course it wanted me to buy a product, PC PROTECTION 2008 which is a fake product. Meantime, it keeps popping up warning messages to try and get me to click and buy the product.
So I made sure my AVG anti-virus was up to date, updated Search And Destroy (Spyware Protection) and I’m currently trying to eradicate 3 spyware products, 2 of which are nasty ones.
Other than downloading a new version of Wordpress yesterday, I don’t recall having done anything else out of the ordinary, and I do use Firefox as my browser too which further protects me.
I ran Search And Destroy – looks like I have a nasty case of Smitfraud-C – a persistent piece of software that is hard to get rid of and which steals things! Could be a rough night for Debbie as I get completely frustrated at failed attempts to clean my pc…
Wish me luck…
If you haven’t registered with Tagfoot yet, this is taking off really well. It’s a lot faster than Digg, which just seems to be getting impossibly slow these days, and a lot nicer, plus all your friends are signing up too. People are posting some great articles on there this week. You can also earn money with Adsense on Tagfoot which is great.
Work was very busy yesterday, so when I got home dinner was ready, and we headed off down the beach for a walk as the sun went down, then watched the full moon rise from the water. It’s very relaxing walking along the water’s edge in the moonlight, very romantic too, except the recent storms had washed up lots of seaweed and this was washing back and forth, so you had to constantly watch where you were walking. Lots of coral had been washed up too.
My girlfriend is now ploughing ahead with her lenses having got a new laptop over the weekend. That means we aren’t fighting for mine in the evening or at the weekend, which is nice. So we should now be able to both work on lenses at the same time, as well as not having to wait for each other. I’m hoping I can now start to catch up a bit.
My lens status as of today is as below:
LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 7
Top 10,000: 7
Lenses: 66
MY TOP 5 LENSES
My girlfriend and I are both still working on our joint New York lens, which is coming along nicely, but I think it’s going to be a monster. We have so much material to add yet, lots of photos, descriptions, advice on what to do and what to see, plus our own observations. I hope it will be a hit when it’s published.
My Pet Peeves
Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
Religious Jokes
Bournemouth
It looks like only one of my posts from yesterday made it to the front page of Squidtop, Favorite Lensmasters – Debnet.
I am not sure what happened to the previous one, maybe only your latest post gets added to the front page, but it did contain a few tips for using Squidtop, features of Wordpress that some of you might not be familiar with. In case you missed it, and I suspect everyone did, Here Is The Link
It took forever for the lens rankings to update today, and during a discussion in the Lensmaster Lounge I had an idea to create a lens about what we do while we are waiting for the lens rankings to update. It’s not only the change in rank that takes place, it’s the giving of the Green Light to new lenses, so it’s important to us all. Do we tap our feet, pace up and down, tear our hair out, or what?
If you would like to contribute to my lens, I need from you a brief description of what you do while waiting for the lens rankings to update, plus a candid photo to go along with it. The details of how to submit your entry for the lens are in This Thread.
Meantime, the rankings did update finally early this afternoon, and here is my current status.
LENS STATUS
Top 100 0
Top 2,000 9
Top 10,000 4
Lenses 60
As well as posting blog entries to your Squidtop blog, did you know that you can create pages in Wordpress as well?
I already had an About page, but today I added several more pages with links to Surveys where you can sign up to earn money by completing surveys, Savings with links to good places to save on web hosting and electronics etc, and finally a page with links to all of my Song Lyrics lenses.
You can see a list of the pages that I have created along the top of the page, as well as in the Pages Index in the sidebar. I think the list along the top looks good – a nice feature about this particular Wordpress Template.
So if you think this could be useful to you, why not create your own pages and generate more backlinks for your lenses.
What a busy week! Not just work, but going out with my girlfriend, booking a long weekend in New York, and of course spending time at the beach over the weekend.
Friday evening I got my hair cut, and for the first time in 15 years I didn’t color it, so now I have sides that are silvery with still some streaks of brown, but by the time the next cut comes around I might look like a short haired Santa. Oh well… At least I still have my hair…
Unlike last weekend, which saw Tropical Storm Fay approaching, this weekend was gorgeous. Saturday there was a whispy high cloud cover that kept the brightness of the sun down a bit and also the temperature, and the occasional darker cloud that blew past and cooled things off for a few minutes, so almost perfect at the beach.
Sunday the weather was practically perfect too, with almost no clouds, a very calm sea, and the beach was really busy. Both of us love to people watch, and there is always someone doing something to attract your attention.
Sunday we got down to the beach when the tide was at it’s lowest, so it was interesting to watch people come and lay out chairs, towels, coolers etc on the flat area close to the ocean, when we knew within a couple of hours the waves would be gradually coming closer, and it only takes a boat to go past for a bigger wave to surge in and send people into panic mode. We must have spend over an hour watching various groups of people struggle to salvage flip-flops as they kept attempting to go on boat trips, it was a good time.
Saturday night we went out to a Brazilian restaurant, where they being the meat to the table on skewers and it just keeps coming. The restaurant was great, but my girlfriend doesn’t handle red meat too well. She does as long as it’s not red – but the sight of blood soon had her feeling queasy. Shame, as it was a good meal otherwise, and the appetizer/salad bar was also very good.
Well I did manage to find time to make some minor tweaks to my lenses, and the benefits have paid off a bit, with several of them now back into the top tier. But I am still short of 10 hours a week that I need to spend on them to really turn things around.
It gets frustrating at times, and I am sure I am not the only one to think this, but I see some Lenses Of The Day and think to myself “I have lenses as good as that”, and in some cases the lenses haven’t had a lot of content either. Maybe my time will come, but for now I think I will have to be content with having a few in the top 2,000… Money is more important right now than fame…
I am still struggling to earn a lot, other than through Adsense. My earnings for the month are now close to my all time high, but in real terms this is only averaging $1.50 a day – not enough to get me very far! But it’s progress at least. I hope September and october see a continued improvement in the earnings.
Well here is my sad lens status…
Hopefully I can improve on this next week.
LENS STATUS
Top 100 0
Top 2,000 8
Top 10,000 6
Lenses 60
Doesn’t matter if I access Digg at home or at work, the pages take forever to load. I just wondered if it was the same for everyone else, or just for me?
Whenever a site takes a long time to load and I have a lot I need to do, I get very frustrated with it and tend not to use it. I can’t say I have had much success with Digg, ditto with Del.icio.us either, but if Digg can’t speed itself up, I might just give up…
Have you had any success with either of these sites at all? I don’t seem to get any of my del.icio.us submissions tagged by anyone else. I have got a few mutual friends, but other than that, nothing…
If you are interested, I would be pleased to connect with you on Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon etc. My id is Poddys on all of them.
PODDYS SQUIDOO DEBNET SQUIDOO OFF THE RECORD THE LAUGHLINE SQUIDBLOGS