Digitalquill

One of the reasons I have been quite on this blog (and on Earning From Affiliates) is that I have started yet another blog.

On The Allotment blog is a blog about all the activity on my new allotment plot. I have taken the tack of using it to record everything that happens on the plot.

To do this I intend it to be very visual, rather than having lots of words in the blogs, so this weekend I produced my first ever video blogs. I really went to town and produced three in one weekend. Go over to On The Allotment and have a look to see what you think.

I used YouTube and created a channel specifically for the blog. It was very simple to do, I have  Sony HD camera, and was able to upload the files directly from the camera to YouTube in HD format.

Ideally what I need to do is find some software that will allow me to edit those files. I was able to do some simply trimming and joining of the clips using the camera but I really want to do a better job with things like audio balance and putting intro clips and copyright notices onto the clips.

You may also be interested to have a look at Earning From Affiliates where I have just posted a blog post about the marketing of this new blog and how the posting of the Video Blogs and the use of YouTube has had a positive impact on the numbers of hits to the blog.

I have suffered several computer failures in the past month or so, including a big failure of my web server. This has caused allot of problems for me personally and my businesses.

I have therefore been looking at online backup services which seem to have been popping up all over the place recently.

My first port of call was the most well known one from Amazon S3 however their payment options do not suit my requirements, so while searching I found Memopal.

After signing up for their free trial, I was quickly impresses and signed up for their 150gb service which should allow me to backup most of my important stuff.

The service comes with a client which you install, the windows client has a GUI which is easy to use and setup, you just choose the folders you want to backup and it just does it in the background, it monitors those folders for changes or new items and backs them up as well.

It also keeps revisions of your files, although I have yet to test this.

They also have a linux client, which can be run from command line. This is ideal for backing things up from my NAS drive and directly from my web servers.

The system is fairly quick althought I have asked it to backup my 60gb digital photograph archive which says it will take over 5 days, whcih I gues is not bad, and this will only be an issue at the start as it catches up with the archive of files.

In the lead up to Christmas I have been bidding on a number of items on Ebay. I have been frustrated by the number of canceled bids and ending of auctions early. It seems that if the seller is not happy with the value that the item is selling for that they think they have the right to cancel the item and re-list it int he hope it will make more the next time round.

I thought that bid on an item constituted a legal contract between the buyer and seller. If the seller wants to ensure that they get a certain amount for an item then they should enter a reserve price at the outset of the auction.

It seems that you can no longer pick up bargains on Ebay as sellers simply cancel auctions if they do not archive a large enough sale price.

I suspect that this is due to Ebays affiliation with Paypal that relies on a percentage commission of the sale price, meaning that if items achieve a higher price, Ebay makes more money.

Frustrated…