Enkay Blog

Photograph Of The Year 2007

I recently accepted a review offer for the 2007 Photograph of the Year Contest that is being held at PhotographyCorner. They are giving away prizes worth $20,000 to the winners. The first place winner gets a prize package of $5000 that includes several giftcards and subscriptions that they can make use of as they enjoy their hobby of photography. Anyone can register for the contest and there are a few simple rules that you can see while you are on the page. I decided to blog about this because I do use my camera very often and take several pictures every so often. I have decided to submit a photograph for this contest and maybe for those of you who are also into photography can take advantage of this great contest also. There are no fees to enter and submitting the photograph is as easy as following a few quick steps. The contest has several sponsors including the highly popular smugmug.com. Entries are due by January 15th 2008 and voting will begin on January 18th. The winner will be announced at the end of January. You can also swing by the Photography Corner Blog for a good read. Once again, if you are into photography, I would suggest just going ahead and making a submission. You never know, something that you have captured could be treasure!

HowTo: Tutorials & More!

I received a review offer from howto.fm. As the name states, the website lets you find guides relating to “how to“. It is actually a directly that lets you submit your articles and tutorials relating to several different types of categories.

You can submit an article as long as it is your unique content and not published anywhere on the internet. They also have a free content section where you can get free content for your own website which sounds like a neat idea.

They also have an article submission page which lists certain criteria before you submit an article. Submitting an article also seems easy to do and there are several aspects of submission that are monitored to maintain the quality of the articles on the website.

The first thing I had to do was see whether or not they had a blogs section which they did. The section contained 2 posts that were posted just a few days ago. The one thing that bothered me about the article pages was that sometimes a page included all 3 250×250 Google Ad blocks that converted a large area of real estate into ad space. Secondly, the text of the articles is quite small (8-10px) and it really starts to bother your eyes after a while. I would highly suggest making the font atleast 10pt so that readers will not have a difficult time reading the articles. As for the ads, it might be a good idea to have consistency in ad placement on all of the articles.

The overall design of the website and the layout of the inner pages looks really good to me. I personally think that the concept of the website is quite good but is similar to some of the other websites that I have heard about.

As far as content goes, the articles look to be in good shape. Sometimes it felt that the writing was a bit unprofessional or a little amateur but it could be that the author of the article has their own style of writing that I am not accustomed to.

In Mozilla it seemed as though sometimes there were errors in coding that caused the top navigation buttons to shift further down or certain images to display incorrectly but hopefully those issues will be addressed soon. The website seems to be doing quite well with over 350 articles submitted since November 2007 which is a good statistic.

I really look forward to seeing how well howto does. I think the website has great potential to serve as a great place to read and obtain some good articles. I also believe that there are certain internal issues that need to be resolved and I am sure that they are aware of that and are working on getting it fixed. I really hope they are able to use my suggestions to improve their website. Hope you guys liked the howto.fm

Print Me A Label, Will You?

Have you ever wanted labels to put on an item or package you were shipping to a customer so that they remembered who shipped the package to them? Well, Frontier Label is here to solve that problem. They allow you to create a label of your choosing in several different shapes and sizes.

This service is similar to creating a personalized t-shirt but it involves a little more work. Frontier Label offers almost 600 different label sizes and usually takes 3 days to create the labels before they are shipped. They also offer a one day processing time guarantee that costs a bit more but it may be worth it if you are in a hurry.

They also have a really nice website which was highly impressive. Their online quote is actually an instant quote which seems quite accurate and is good rather than having customers wait a day for a price quote. They use the some really high quality machines to print and laminate the stickers and their quality seems a lot better than most I have come across. Their labels are not too expensive ranging from $.35 to $1.25 per sticker.

They even allow returning customers to reorder the same stickers using their online system which saves their customers a lot of time by not having to recreate the sticker again. If you go to their website, they will even send you a sample pack so that you can compare their quality to those of other companies that you may have seen. They also have a live chat or 1-877 number in case you need help so you can get help when you need it. I think you should definitely check out Frontier Label if you wish to take your business to the next level. They have quality products at great prices!

Google’s New Scrolling Ad

I noticed an interesting ad by Google on this blog. As many of you know, I use Google Adsense on this blog and lately I noticed a new ad show up on the blog once in a while. This ad is different from most because it has a scroll bar on it allowing you to scroll through the ads to pick one that interests you. I decided to blog about this because I haven’t seen any other blogs notice this so to start off here is a screenshot of the ad with the visible scroll buttons on the bottom.

What seems interesting is that how many people will actually be interested to scroll through an ad manually. I would have thought that an automatic scroll every 30 seconds or so may have been more interesting but that could get annoying if you are on a page for a longer period of time. The idea of the manual scrolling ad is a little confusing to me specially since most people will see a static ad and click on an ad if they are interested however, how many people actually are willing to browse through a scrollable ad to pick one they like. Anyway, it seems like something new that Google is going to try and lets see how it works out for publishers and Google. Have any of you seen an ad like this one elsewhere?

Wheres My Private Jet?

Sometimes when you wished that you could go see Aunt Anne in New York, you hoped that there was a way to get there without having to worry about an overbooked flight. Well now that solution is here in the form of Private Jet Charters. I really like this concept of having to charter your own private jet. New Flight Charters has the largest quality selection of local private jets and aircrafts. Several aircraft owners and FAA charter operators usually look to New Flight Charters for help on a regular basis. They offer round-trip and one way pricing options.

They offer several luxury private jets and let you pick the aircraft that you wish to travel in. They are one of the oldest private jet charter agencies and have made chartering a jet safer and easier since 2003. They offer no pre-payments and no membership fees. All you do is select your aircraft/price options and pay after the trip. They have an accident free history and their core standards are of service and safety.

I went ahead and took a look at their pricing and the lowest per hour cost starts around $950 with their highest topping at around $7000 an hour. Sure, that may seem pricey but you do get a really high quality and you get to your destination safely. Just have a look at this price quote:

Houston, Tx —- Los Angeles, CA —- Austin, Tx

The previous flight plan carried 8 passengers in ultimate luxury for around $20,000 which is around $2500 a person, which seems quite reasonable when you think about it. You can also look at this price quote.

Los Angeles, CA —- Las Vegas, NV

That flight also carried 8 passengers and cost $3,300 and thats around $415 a person which is very reasonable.

Their list of clients is pretty amazing ranging from the office of President Clinton to Mexican President Vicente Fox. They even carry several specials on a daily basis which is very impressive. So, if you need to get somewhere in a hurry and the first class cabin doesn’t have any more room, consider New Flight Charters at about the same cost or even cheaper!