Over the last few months I’ve tried to be scammed on a number of occasions, all I’ve done to invite them is to have a website promoting my freelance website design services, use ebay to auction an ipod touch and place an advert on autotrader to sell a car. Apart from my own website, the other two events are very regular actions undertaken by thousands of people every day.

Fake Cheques To A Freelancer
I was contacted by email via the form on my website from a guy saying he had a client – a car sales company – that wanted a simple, static website – a brochure style website consisting of about 5 / 6 pages. Nothing too technical or time consuming. So I emailed back my quote and a brief outline of how I work and what I needed from his client. The quote was accepted, along with the promise of the content being sorted out very soon. We exchanged contact and address details, and I agreed to start work once I have the initial content through.

What I got through next was a cheque, for £2,000. This was about 5 times the amount that I quoted for the job Рalso, the cheque came from a company called Blue Square who are a recruitment company based in Bedfordshire. Initially I did not connect the cheque with the car sales job РI contacted Blue Square to find out why I had been sent this cheque as I had had no previous dealings with them. Blue Square asked me to send it to their head office, a few days later I received a letter from them confirming the cheque was fake and thanking me for sending it to them.

In the meantime I received an email, asking if I had received the cheque yet – I replied no, curious as to what would happen. I also mentioned that I do not invoice for the full amount at the beginning of the project. A few days later I got another cheque in the post, this time from the Bank of Ireland and again for ¬£2,000. This time I took it to the police, who confirmed it was a fake – but were unwilling to take it any further as no fraud had taken place because I hadn’t done any work so there was nothing to be charged for.

Next, I got a phone call asking whether I had received the check from his client – it was from a mobile phone and the line wasn’t very good. I said that I had received the cheque, but it was fake. I asked if he knew his client was sending fake cheques – he hung up.

What they wanted was for me to try and deposit the cheque and send them back the balance from my own account in cleared funds – the cheque they had sent would of bounced and I would of lost about ¬£1,500. The whole affair was very suspicious, the cheques for too much money, being posted from South London and the South of France, no compliment slip or letter included with the cheques and the poor grammar used in the emails. I’ve since spoken to an artist client who had a similar scam – but in her case the buyer wanted an original piece of artwork posted, after sending a fake cheque for 3 / 4 times the quoted amount.

Designing flyers, leaflets, postcards and business cards can be a risky business – a single typo, missed by the designer and the client signing it off goes to print, suddenly you have 10,000 business cards that are completely unusable – they have to be reprinted with the cost that comes along with it. Even worse – the client could of started to give out the Business Cards to their customers – who could of spotted the typo, and as a result their first impression may not be positive.

Now, online – a website is designed, built and uploaded to the world wide web. A typo is spotted after being published – within a couple of minutes it can be amended, saved and republished with little cost and hardly any time taken. Now, some initial visitors may have seen the initial typo, but since the update all visitors will see the correct spelling and those early visitors who come back to the website will see the amended version.

On my way to work I drive past a house, the owner currently has their car for sale – I’m not 100% sure what the car is because the only you get is that there is a sandwich board outside with 3 words chalked on;

“Car for Sale”

Now, I can’t imagine anybody driving past being enticed by this sign to find out more – the sign is making the assumption that someone is looking for a car, and the current owner has a possible answer for them. You can’t actually see what the car is – it’s parked down the driveway, partially hidden from sight.

In the offline world, and in this case specifically – facts are required. Car for sale could of been the title that lead into a bullet point list of facts and figures – what is the car, how many miles has it done, how old is it, what features does it have, and how much is it being sold for.

Now, online – as an initial statement, as a domain name – carforsale would be brilliant. Google – the most popular search engine with approximately an 80% market share uses the domain name as one of the most important matches to a user’s keyword search. Although, funnily enough – a Google UK search for “car for sale” does not bring up the carforsale.co.uk website – but this is probably because it’s not a website, just a holding page and has as much detail as the sandwich board!

On the first weekend of the new f1 season the live coverage was on the BBC in the early hours of the morning, so wanting to watch the repeat the BBC’s iplayer was the option ahead; but I didn’t want to watch it on my 12″ PowerBook so I investigated whether watching it on our Nintendo Wii was a option… and it was.

The Wii’s browser of choice is Opera and has Flash already installed so no extra plugins or apps are needed (unlike the iPhone!). The BBC have also added a few extra features and options especially for the Wii along side a very nice set of FAQ’s which solved all my queries. This all lead to being able to watch the 3 hour Gran Prix on demand on our widescreen tv in our lounge.

The only real issue is that you need to purchase (with your wii points) the Internet Browser application via the Wii Shop, it costs about ¬£3.50 – I had already purchased and downloaded the application so it wasn’t a downside for me.

Find out more here; www.bbc.co.uk/blogs, and there’s a little demo of it all in action on youtube here.

This year and in the future i’m going to take small steps to help out the UK economy, how you might ask?

Well, by purchasing web based services such as hosting and domain names at UK companies. Keeping my hard earned money and the money that I invoice my clients with in the UK – no matter how small the figures – can only help. So here are 2 companies that will be getting my business in the future instead of previously used companies outside of the UK.

In the future I’ll be registering all my domain names at Domain Monster, I’ve been using them for a couple of months now – in the past I purchased the domain along with the hosting, but a particular project cropped up where I needed to register a bunch of domains for a single website. Domain Monster’s site is very easy to use, the admin area for editing your domains is simple – yet still allowing you to do everything you need with the domain, and the prices are very competitive.

Next up is hosting, previously I’ve only swayed away from my previous host once and it wasn’t a great experience – so I wasn’t sure about this one – but I searched high and low, and it wasn’t until I Googled specifically for Wordpress hosting that 34sp.com showed up. I have just registered my first website with them and so far it has been a breeze. A competitive price to begin with, a easy sign up and purchase system next and good upload speeds since have made me so far a very satisfied customer.

Global economy crisis? I’ll be looking a little closer to home from now on.

The term passive income is something I’ve noticed around the freelance and design blogs websites for a while now. It’s a way of earning money from something that can be created, and once it exists income (hopefully) can trickle in from either subscriptions of customer purchases – this obviously depends on what the product / service is.

2009 is the year that I kick off my passive income project, and the product? T-Shirts!

I’ve wanted to print custom T-Shirts for ages, I designed a couple for a club night I promoted a couple of years ago and they were really cool – in my opinion. I got another T-Shirt that I designed printed up for a Christmas present and that went down really well with everyone that saw it – I was really quite proud at how well it came out.

Because I can design and build websites, the online method of selling the T-Shirts will only cost my time to initially set up and hopefully not too much time to run – hence the passive part.

Yesterday I purchased the domain name and hosting for Worm Sign T-Shirts and I’ve so far designed 3 of the 12′ish designs I’m hoping to launch with. At the moment I’m not putting too much pressure on myself to get it done because I’m really enjoying the fruits of my labour, I have a deadline in my head and it’s realistic – but I’m not going to stress over making it, because ultimately I want this to be a fun project as well as a serious money making machine – can it be both of those things? We’ll see.

I’ll definitely be adding more posts about this project on this blog, including a few designs as they get finished and progress on the website as a kind of case study.

I’ve been called an attention seeker a couple of times over the last few months, and I’m not 100% sure that it fits into my character. Close friends think I’m the exact opposite – fairly shy actually. But if you look at what I get up to online, then an attention seeker I might be.

The 70 odd friends on facebook will probably testify that they know exactly what I’m doing at any given time, as facebook allows you to import ‘feeds’ from other social websites such as digg, flickr and twitter. So via their news feed they see what I’m currently doing via twitter.com – as this updates my facebook status, they see the websites that I’m viewing when I create a book mark at del.cio.us, or when a news items get dugg at digg.com, recently taken photographs get published to flickr and blipfoto.com and the music I’m listening to gets listed via the scrubbling function at last.fm.

All these websites, added together and tracking my habits would definitely allow anyone to see what i’m up to during the day. but, there is one additional piece of information that would be vital to stalking that is not currently getting monitored – my location. there is one piece of technology that would i love to own that would do this for me – an apple iphone. geo-tagging your photographs is already possible with the right camera – the longitude / latitude is embedded into the jpeg’s EXIF data, some twitter application on the iphone will record your location, and there are some micro-blogging sites such as brightkite.com that make your location and geo-tagging the major part of it’s service.

So, in the future – and not the distant future – it will be a case of what am i doing, what am i listening to, what am i reading and where am i doing all these things.

my previous blog was managed with wordpress 2.0.5 and originally setup in december 2006, a long time ago – especially in the blogging world. there were 1 or 2 bugs appearing in my blog, such as duplicate contents on single pages, and after looking through the wordpress support forums an update was recommended.

i backed up the database using the option in the wordpress panel, i also logged into php admin on my hosting and performed a mysql dump of all the content. i then downloaded all the files connected to my blog via ftp. i was happy with my backup.

the update is pretty simple, it was just a case of replacing all the files – except my edited theme and uploaded images and content. i then logged into the wordpress admin panel as usual, it informed me that i needed to update the database, which it did without a hitch… at the time and finally, all i needed to do was update the few plug-ins that i am using – which downloaded and installed the updates automatically.

the only thing that went wrong were my categories were lost, wiped out. unsure why, but i’ve since had to place them back into the database and link all my posts to categories again. i only have around 60 posts so it hasn’t taken long, but it’s still a pain. there is a fix, but i couldn’t get that working, more information here on how to restore your categories after an update.

i’ve been ignoring my blog, but i’m going to try and post more often – i’ve also had a little tidy up as i realised there’s a load of broken links and missing images on some older posts. i’ve also trimmed down on the categories – there were 11, which is far too many – there is now 7 tightly packed categories for my observations and commentary to be housed in.

i didn’t really get into the bbc’s hit comedy gavin & stacey until the second series, but by the end of this last series i thought it was a cute little show that i really quite enjoyed – but i did start noticing a lot of similarities to a little tv show from across the pond.

nessa is phoebe stacey’s best friend is nessa, she’s a little odd and has an eventful history full of relationships with celebrities as well as some really important / bizarre jobs. phoebe is a little odd, and although she does have a more realistic, but still bizarre history, she still has those relationships with famous people that crop up in conversations that are then never to be heard of again. they have both been pregnant too.

gavin & stacey are ross & rachel gavin and stacey are the central characters, they are the ones that push the story lines along, they are also the least interesting out of the bunch – and it’s the same with ross and rachel in friends. if you did a poll of who your favourite characters were then these 4 would finish bottom, they are probably the most ‘normal’ but that’s not what we watch the show for – it’s the odd bunch around them that make each show tick.

smithy is joey this is a slightly trickier one, but food is their common obsession, they’re also not the cleverest of characters in their respected shows. if a joke is going to be aimed at someone’s lack of intelligence, then smithy and joey (both end in y’s too) are going to get it square in the chops. they both have dominant and fairly masculine sisters as well, although joey does have a lot of sisters so maybe that’s clutching at straws a little.

there are quite a few differences, and i’m certainly not saying that the creators of gavin and stacey directly copied friends, but the latter is probably one of the most popular comedy sitcoms that television has ever known – so a little unconscious inspiration can’t be faulted.