The july coupon just appeared and as usual it provides 0.88$ OFF on new domain registration (doesn’t work for renewals)

The coupon code is: GLOWINGSKY

The coupon will reduce the price of a newly registered domain from 9.29$ to 8.41$.

Also, when buying a new domain or renewing/transfering a domain you can get a FREE PositiveSSL Certificate(Limited offer)

Taking a quick look at the logo you can notice that templates.com combines fun with professionalism. Maybe this is why i like it more than TemplateMonster. Template Monster focuses way too much on seriosity and always jumps directly to the point, while Templates captures its customers by using fun elements in its design.

Templates.com has a great variety of products you can choose from, starting from  templates to 3D Models they got ‘em all.

Purchasing goes on a credit basis, 1 credit = 1$, this means that if a template costs 66 Credits than the price in $ is 66 USD.

Templates.com offers full customization of any template to make it fit your website like a glove. Sure it costs some extra $, but you know that you have a perfectly working template personalized just for you, and which will most likely attract new customers. By this way your template won’t be “just an ordinary theme”, it will be YOUR template.

Okay, remember that the title of the post says: “Templates.com - One of the best premium and free templates & resources site” . I always like to leave the best to the end(it’s like when you eat, you leave desert last, and not eat it before the soup).

Templates.com has lots of premium freebies which can be downloaded at no cost, just by registering an account after which you can go ahead and start downloading Free 3D Models , Free Web templates , Free Wallpapers , Free Illustrations .

There’s a reason why i bolded the Free Web templates link. Although they only have 3 free templates the quality of them compensates the quantity. Trust me, you will find that high-quality templates on very few websites on the web.

Simply add the free items to your cart and proceed to checkout. After checking out your downloades will be activated within seconds and you can instantly download them from your Account Download panel.

(click to enlarge)

I noticed that many of the free resources have lots of views and few downloads, for example  a very high-quality free template has like 1900 views and 87 downloads. using some basic maths we can calculate that only 4.57% of those who viewed the template also downloaded it. Maybe they are afraid of registering an account or i don’t know what, but here’s my advice: don’t make the same mistake!

Do you know what day is it today? It’s prize give away day!

Although the digicam’s box got a bit dusty the camera is in excellent shape, and with the warranty seal intat on it of course(the warranty applies world wide, because it’s offered by the producer(BENQ) and you will get all reciepts and legally signed stuff that i got from the store with it)

A total Number of 1771 IDs were gathered and they were all entered in the draw, but there can be only one winner which is gh0ul_1@[email hidden].com

I’ve sent him a mail about 5 minutes ago, and as soon as he replies i will edit my post with more details on him.

Here’s an actual print screen of the draw:

His ID number is 155, for some reason most of the IDs in the top 25 were IDs with digits between 0 and 180, most of the 1000+ IDs got to the middle of the randomly ordered list.

I would like to thank everyone for participating, and keep heads up because in about 3 weeks when i get back home from Greece(i’m leaving on the 11th) a new contest will start!

It was about time!, especially now that i want to buy a few domains. Unfortunately the coupon works for new registrations ONLY, and won’t work for renewals.

The coupon code is: ROSEMONTH

The coupon will reduce the price of a newly registered domain from 9.29$ to 8.41$.

Also, when buying a new domain or renewing/transfering a domain you will get you a FREE PositiveSSL Certificate!

That’s right! You can win a BENQ DC C640 Digicam just like mine in such a simple way!

Before i jump to the point, i want to tell you how i can give it away, and other gadgets as well in the upcoming months: A friend of mine is working at a consumer electronics retailer, and they have the promotion to their employees that they can buy gadgets and items that are sold w/o commission prices and extra fees. So basically he can buy gadgets a lot cheaper that the raft price. This means that every month i will be buying a gadget from him and giving it away to a randomly picked user who will get a number for each entry(the numbers will be shuffled using www.random.org). This means the more numbers you have the higher your chances to win are.

This month i decided to give away a shiny new BENQ DC C640 Digicam which has lots and lots and lots of cool features, and i own one for more than half year and i’m VERY VERY pleased with it. BENQ DC C640 has a retail price of ~120$.

The camera is in perfect shape, in matter of fact i took some pictures with it:

Shipping will be supported by me, and is available almost to all the world. Those of you who live in Africa - sorry guys, i can’t send you the digicam there, shipping alone costs 40$.

How to gain entries?

There are several ways to gain entries:

1) Subscribe to my feed using your email address - 5 entries:

2) Post 4 comments on my blog - 1 entry:

You may post 1comments/day. Well you can post as many as you like, but only 1 will be counted every day. Spam comments will be deleted. You can start by commenting this post (!!! Make sure you use the same email address)

3) Write a blog-post about the contest - 10 entries:

It’s simple. Write a blog-post about this contest(at least 100 words) and link to it. This will get you 10 entries in the contest.(make sure you email me your email address and the location of the post)

4) Stumble/Digg this post - 1 entry

Stumble my post, review it after which digg this post. This will get you 1 entry.(email me your email address and your digg/stumbleupon username).

5) Technorati Favorite my blog - 1 entry

Add my blog to your technorati favorites and gain one extra entry to the competition! (email me your email address and your technorati username).

These are the ways you can gain more entries, if i get a new idea on how to gain more entries i will update this post(mail me your idea, and if it’s used you will get 2 entries).

My email address is tom@thaslayer.com , just in case you missed it in the sidebar.

The contest will end on 30th June, and the winner will be announced on 1st of July. There’s no second place! Winner takes it all!

Good luck to everyone!

Update #1 - 4th June 2008 - In 4 days more than 50 readers have entered the contest representing 286 unique IDs. To get the 5 credits for subscribing to my feed you need to confirm your subscription

Update #2 - 8th June 2008 - You can win 30 extra entries if you mail me your prognostication regarding the number of ID’s in the end.

Update #3 - 20th June 2008 - More than 1500unique IDs are in the competition, hopefully by 30th June 6PM GMT 2000IDS will be entered in the draw!

Update #3 - 1st July 2008 - Winner Announced!

I learn new stuff from lots and lots of people every day, so i decided to give something back to bloggers.

What i’m offering is FREE hosting for your blog on a managed server with the following specs:

- CPU Intel Pentium 4 Dual Core with 4mb L1 cache.
- 2GB(2000MB) RAM
- Linux Operating System
- Latest Build of cPanel
- Apache version 2.2.6 (Unix)
- MySQL version5.0.45-community
- PHP version 5.2.4
- Perl version 5.8.8

The hosting’s features:
- 2 Addon Domains
- 2 Parked Domains
- 3 MySQL Databases
- Webspace (MB): 100 MB
- Bandwidth (MB): 2000 MB
- Email Accounts: 5
- FTP Accounts: 5
- Subdomains: 5

Extras:
- Webmail, POP3
- FTP & Online file Manager
- HTML Editor
- Fantastico : 1 click script installation
- CGI: Guestbook, Counter, Clock, Countdown, FormMail
- Hotlinking protection
- Detailed statistics(Awstats and Webalizer)
- Custom error pages, Cron joburi, .htaccess, .htpasswd(password protect directories)

Absolutely NO ADS!

How can you afford it?

I wanted to offer free hosting for users on my Romanian Webmaster community, but stuff didn’t work out, and the hosting is paid for 6 more months and it’s better to give it away to be used than to stay there for 6 more months.

Any guarantees?

I can guarantee that the hosting will be up for AT LEAST 6 more months. If problems occur i’m not a really nice guy when it comes to arguing.

Also in the past 2 months the host had 64 minutes downtime.

Cool! How to get the hosting?

You can get hosted by posting a comment to this post using the following pattern:

Your Name:

Domain Name:

Niche of your blog:

Also when submitting the comment in the e-mail field use the email address you want associated with your hosting account.

- If you are satisfied with the service feel free to link back to me by adding a link to your BlogRoll

Web Design Blog

- Share your thoughts by commenting my posts

- Subscribe to my RSS feed

Your account will be reviewed in a matter of 12 hours, and you will receive an email with your log-in and other details related to your hosting account.

Back 10 years ago Coca-Cola was a bigger hit than it is today. I remember that i went to a local carnival with my father and sister and how much i enjoyed it especially when dad bought me a bottle of Coca-Cola. It was a uber-powerful brand back then. Being a kid i watched lots of TV and as i recall all Coca-cola commercials were fun and exciting and they got you to watch them to the end. They got that “magical thing” what’s missing from many commercials nowadays.

What i want to talk to you about today is the Happiness factory commercial series made by Coca-Cola.

If i remember correctly the first Happiness Factory commercial was launched in 2006’s winter and it was a 1:31 minute animated commercial showing the road of the coca-cola bottle in an automated drink machine starting from the point when you put in the coin and till you get your bottle of coke. Funny citizens work to get the drink, fill the bottle and deliver it to you.

Here’s the Commercial:

The second commercial is a longer one - it has a lenght 3 minutes and 30 seconds and it was launched in august last year. It is split in parts to reduce the lenght of the commercial(each second of commercial time costs) and at the end of each part is a TO be continued line(good marketing tactics). This will show the worker’s journey to bring the coca-cola making machine back to life. The storyline is great and you can notice that every bit of detail is covered to give the viewer a wider sight and more enjoyment and of course motivation to buy coca-cola and not competing products(pepsi for example)

Check out the Full commercial:

But this is not all! The guys from Coca-Cola also made a fun page for Happiness factory where you can play a game and select the character who’s role you want to play: Worker, Mortar Man, Kissy Puppy, Chinoink or Capper.

Don’t worry if you don’t speak/read english too well, the website is available in many languages to give everyone the possibility to enjoy it.

Before applying for a character’s job you can test them out. Before applying for a job you will need to sign up, but you have to get approved by mrs Karen, the recruiting manager of the happiness factory.

I don’t want to spoil all the fun so i’l let you discover the game’s features and the enjoyment that it provides.

The Mozilla Store is having its first-ever t-shirt design contest. Your creation could become the official Firefox 3 shirt.

Contest holder: Mozilla Foundation

Contest webpage: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/tcontest/

Contest Type: Design/Illustration

Deadline: Sunday March 16th 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST)

Prizes: 1st place: Worldwide recognition for designing the official Firefox 3 T-Shirt + a free Firefox 3 T-Shirt + 250$ Amazon.com voucher.

2nd-5th places: A free Firefox 3 T-Shirt + 50$ Amazon.com voucher.

The contest idea is simple: use your creativity and create a firefox 3 T-shirt just like you imagine it. It’s true that those who are Illustrator experts or can draw professionally have higher chances of winning, but who knows?, you might be the winner.

The 1st prize is a huge prize even though it doesn’t involve much money. Just by adding the shirt’s design to your portfolio you can attract lots and lots of customers looking for custom T-shirts. This means that money will roll in by itself. Cool eh?

Before even starting to design the shirt make sure you read the Guidelines. Also check if users from your country are eligible to participate(some countries are restricted)

You have to submit your design for review in the Flickr FF3 design contest group. The top 5 designers will be contacted via flickr to supply the high-resolution SVG file. After that their designs will be posted on the Mozilla Store for voting. The firefox users/fans will choose the winner!

All i can say is good luck and i can’t wait to see the winning design.

Vixy.net is a free service that allows you to download youtube videos and download & convert any FLV video.

You are most probably familiar with those websites that allow youtube video downloads, BUT after you downloaded them you need a FLV player or a special program to convert them to the desired video format.

Those sites only convert the youtube URL to the file’s path and give you the download link directly from youtube, meaning you don’t download the file from their server.

Vixy.net is way different, the service pulls the youtube FLV file other desired FLV file and transfers it directly to the server where it is converted to the file format you selected. This isn’t an easy task and eats lots and lots of bandwidth, good thing the service gets donations(if you use the site donate a few bucks for the great service).

About one year ago i accidentally got on the site while i was searching for a program to convert flv files, from that point i started using the service and removed all other “Download youtube videos” type of sites from my bookmarks.

What file formats does it convert the FLV file to?

1) AVI for Windows

Audio Video Interleave, known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a standard container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.

The quality and resolution of the file is the same as on youtube.

2) MOV for MAC

The QuickTime (.mov) file format functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (for subtitles, for example). Each track either contains a digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific codec) or a data reference to the media stream located in another file.

The quality and resolution of the file is the same as on youtube.

3) MP4 for iPOD/PSP

MPEG-4 Part 14, formally ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003, is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images.

Better compression rate, the quality and resolution of the file is the same as on youtube.

4) 3GP for mobile phones

3GP is a simplified version of the MPEG-4 Part 14 (MP4) container format, designed to decrease storage and bandwidth requirements in order to accommodate mobile phones.A 3GP file is always big-endian, storing and transferring the most significant bytes first. It also contains descriptions of image sizes and bitrate.

NO comment, i didn’t use this feature.

5) MP3 Format(Audio only)

MP3 is an audio-specific format. It was invented by a team of European engineers at Philips, CCETT, IRT and Fraunhofer Society, who worked in the framework of the EUREKA 147 DAB digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. The compression works by removing certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people.

Now this is the coolest part of the service, dayly i see numerous comments on youtube videos: “what’s the song’s name? where can i get it?”

If you use Vixy.net then you will never have to ask this question! just select the mp3conversion feature and download the file.

The big disadvantage is that the mp3 is in MONO version, you can use various freeware programs to convert it to stereo.

Conclusion: Vixy.net is the ultimate online resource for FLV file conversion and download, the whole system is automated and one click away from you. Why use 2-3 programs to replay and convert FLV videos when you can enjoy this great service?