Christmas is almost upon us again and thousands of unsuspecting family members are going to receive gifts that they will never use. Why people insist on wasting money on crappy ‘novelty’ gifts (rather than just buying you a bar of chocolate if they are that stuck for ideas) is a bit of a mystery…

So, what are the very worst things that could be waiting in a stocking near you this year? What is another reason why you should just going on holiday to italy ski. Well, here are a few of the most horrendously tacky bits of naffness that I have seen:-

· Any USB Gadget.

Yes, this is the modern plague in the world of tack. There is a terrifying array of all kinds of USB novelty devices including; a coffee warmer, a ‘hilarious’ panic button, a dancing robot and a reading lamp. Why the hell would you want to read when you are using a computer?

· Smoking Mittens.

If you enjoy a cigarette then you are in terrible danger of getting one of several piles of poo for Christmas. This one is a pair of ‘specially designed’ gloves that enable you to keep your hands warm whilst smoking a fag in the cold. Oh, dear.

· Novelty Slippers.

This awful trend has mostly died out… The main reason for this is the large amount of people that have fallen down the stairs after getting the ‘ear’ on one foot tangled around the other. But this epidemic has not completely passed; there are still a few examples of sad and cosy footwear for sale.

If you think I’m exaggerating about how many tacky presents there are, then have a look at the ‘Crap Gadgets’ web page; it’s actually pretty scary stuff!

Just came across this contest where the prize is <;a href=’http://www.skiline.co.uk/Italy_skiResorts.asp’>;italy ski<;/a>;.Everybody should really put your names in, this would be an awesome way to spend New Years!

I have been seeing an advert for a gadget called "Powermat" for ages now and I finally got round to clicking on it today. It is a mat (strangely enough) that charges various mobile devices for you such as your iPod, digital camera or mobile phone…

What an absolutely brilliant idea! It is such a pain when you are powering-up different bits of equipment and you have to find the correct charger for each thing. The Powermat means that you are going to find things a lot easier to organise. Let’s face it, when you have a camera, mobile phone, music player and a few other gadgets, you also have a hell of a lot of different adaptors. And it does not take many leads before you end up with what looks like a bowl of electrical spaghetti on the floor near your wall socket!

I like the way that the Powermat website is laid out. There are a couple of drop down menus to select answers from and, when you have done this, it will tell you which of their available products you need to get for charging your device/s.

It is about time that someone stepped up the war against electrical cables! We have got the godsend of Wi-Fi now but there is still much more to be done that will rid our homes of wires. It seems that you only have to put a couple of cables next to each other and turn your back for a few minutes before they become an impossible tangle.

Let us hope that the Powermat will help us to free of homes of this menace!

And to end, if any of you are eager to know, check out the new photos that just went up for pvc banners. That was my trained hand at photoshop!

Did you know that at the start fo 2004 the spam accounted for apporimately 70% of all email sent and this figure is still rising. Spam has been long acknowledged as seroius problem, because of the waste in resources and time, not to mention the scams associated with them.

I personaly have been caught with one phishing scams where I sent money via world pay for a ebay product.

However I personally have been effected by spam in a different way; My ligitamate email marketing is becoming more and more ineffective every day. With ever new scammer who gets his figure on a $15 spamming software, the world email filters get more and more paranoid.

The main point I learn were:

1. Keep the email size over 20K
The majority of spam email are under 20K, so SpamAssassin (A spam killer that works onm a point systyem, get too high a spam score and your email gets flagged up) gives a higher score for a message under 20K in size.

2. Check your list for Spam flag lists.
This has actually happen to me twice, people sign you up to anti-spamming email address to get you in toruble. It is recommended you scan your list for any email address that start with things like: abuse@, postmaster@, or nospam@. Have said that now I have gone on to a confirmation email I haven't had this problem since.

3. Avoid desktop emailing software
The majority of spammer use desktop e-mailing software so to avoid gettign penalised it is well worth picking a clean web hosted software that is fairly well established and used by more high profile clientel. Try to avoid these:

hash 2
jpfree
StormPost
JiXing
MMailer (Gammadyne, 2.73)
EVAMAIL
IMktg
screwup1
GroupMail
VC_IPA

Many companies concentrate their SEO effort on improving the Google rankings of their homepage.  The problem with this strategy is that the home page cannot be all things to all people.  It cannot rank well for every keyword that could drive traffic to you, and it might not be relevant to searchers.  Remember that most people decide in seconds whether the website they have landed on is right for their purposes; they don’t spend time poking around to find out what other information you have.

To get all off the search engine traffic that you can, you need to think beyond the homepage and use interior pages effectively.  You can laser target your interior pages to specific topics that searchers want to read about, instantly convincing them of your site’s relevance and authority. Furthermore, you can attain a high reputation with the search rankings for each individual page; with a good linking system, this reputation can flow between the different pages of your website.

In order to use interior pages effectively, you should:

• Design each page to be accessible and informative to someone who hasn’t seen any other pages of your website.
• Create an easy to use navigation system that encourages visitors to explore your site more thoroughly once they have the information that they came looking for.
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