Thank you to all of our competition participants this week but there can only be one prize winner. After voting Sam Rudge won with this photo caption “Even after just a few months, Bob began to regret not buying the $10 cable tidy set from Target”. Keep checking back for our next competition.

It’s been a great journey but it’s all over now. Read the full story here.

The new Photoshop CS5 is soon to be released and after having seen the preview on Youtube I gotta say that it’s looking pretty cool. Shadows and objects are easily removed (no need to do this manually anymore) but the most impressive feature is that you can extend your images. Sounds complicated or just plain out incomprehensive? Just take a look at the video and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. VERY impressive and don’t forget to look at the entire video. The object removal/grass thingy in the beginning is cool and all but it’s when he’s extending the images that it gets really interesting.

Perfect if you want that American touch, or if you just want something beautiful and mesmerizing to look at. Download the wallpaper here.

Take me home, country roads… Check it out here.

Great theme if you’re into things of the more psychedelic nature. This HD wallpaper is available in many different sizes – take a look at it here.

This one is the obvious choice for all the Mac-lovers out there. Pimp your Mac with a Mac… Double the fun!

This photo makes me feel very Zen, a big plus when you have a stressful day at work. You’ll find this wallpaper here.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is one of my all-time favorites and it’s not only because of its great content (although it’s excellent) but because of its great design. It’s mainly black and white with some colors popping out here and there. The best thing is of course its typography. I don’t know any other website that’s been as successful as The New Yorker when it comes to transforming a certain typography into being part of their brand.

Let it Bleed

There is just something about this site that’s so very appealing. I’m usually not a big fan of dark websites but if it’s done properly there’s nothing better. Well, perhaps there is – let’s just agree that this is a beautiful site that’s truly inspiring.

Favorite Website Awards

The FWA website is pure heaven when it comes to finding inspiration. Take a look at the “Site of the day”, “Site of the month” and so on… You get the idea. This is the Oscars of web design and it’s probably the best site to visit if you’re having a slow day at work.

So, that’s it. Three websites should do the trick. Still not inspired? Have a cup of coffee and a long walk. Still not inspired?!?!? Hope is over for you…

Super Bowl is as you all know just around the corner, 7th of Feb to be exact, and it will of course be interesting to see who wins between New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts but I know that many people are looking forward to see the ads in-between the game (how often does one look forward to the ads?!!?) as well. The Super Bowl ads are known for being super expensive and also, often, very funny.

This year we will get to see ads by for example Frito-Lay’s Doritos (who topped last year’s USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter), Mars Chocolate, Homeaway Inc, Diamond Foods and of course GoDaddy (for the sixth year in a row). We recently published an article about the GoDaddy girls and say what you want about their ads; they always manage to create a certain buzz (in lack of a better word). It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with this year…

There are times when we all need to come together and do whatever we can to help people that are under distress. Just recently we saw how an entire country got affected, in the most horrible way, by an earthquake. Thankfully people all over the world have raised millions of dollars that, of course, can’t make up for all the human losses but it can still improve the quality of life for the people in Haiti. With a death toll at about 200,000 and with yet another 1.5 million people homeless they really need all the help they can get. It makes me happy to see that some web host’s have decided to help out as well. Hostgator has donated $100,000, GoDaddy $500,000 and SingleHop has contributed with $10,000. I hope to see more web hosting providers making contributions to help out the one’s affected in Haiti.

The good news about this software is that it has a 30 day free trial, and unlike many other pieces out there, it is an actual full trial without any of the “This Feature is Only for Registered Products” or whatever. Installation is pretty straight forward and then the configuration process starts up. Of the monitoring services I have tried out, this one had one of the easier to follow configuration processes and it only takes a few minutes. Once this is finished, the program will populate with details from the server. At this point, those few minutes of work pay off with loads of info (some of which is vital , others may not be of any interest to you).

The server monitor has tons of features to it and can monitor a lot of different things. Here is a list of some of the things it can be used to monitor:
• Event Logs
• CPU, Memory, Network Usage
• Disk Space
• Running Services
• Log Files
• Server and room temperature
• SNMP Object Values
• Running Processes
• Ping Response Time
• Directory Quotas
• Changed files and directories
• FTP Servers
• POP,IMAP and SMTP mail servers
• Web Page content and load times
• TCP port response
• Citrix Monitoring
• And additional resources through user scripts
As many of you likely noticed, we have recently implemented a redesign on our site (at the same time we shifted CMS). So a few of these areas were particularly interesting to check out as I had not done so since things went live.
The page for content and load times is quite nice. In here you enter a specific page you want monitored and it will track the load times over a period of time and allow for the data to be made into a graphical representation. Load times are always of the utmost importance to us, as it is to all site owners, so it is nice to be able to take a look at this data and see how it compares to earlier designs on that page to see what the average response time is. Similarly, the ping response tool was also one of interest to me. It was a pretty straightforward tool with only a few options in it, but it does allow you to schedule a ping test and to graph out the data. The interface feels very familiar and is easy to navigate. Overall the specific tools were very easy to use and their site offers information on how to configure each one if you cannot figure it out on your own.

If you decide to use to register the solution for permanent use, the costs are reasonable. It can be registered for one server at $49, but for larger scale operations can be bought in packages to allow for up to 20 servers to be monitored from a single location. Enterprise licenses are also available if that is of interest to your needs. Before doing any of that though, check out their site and give the software a trial for 30 days.

Not that long ago the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) released a report about the evolution of e-commerce and the online shopping habits of Europeans in 2008. Around 80% of all Internet users bought a product or service online in 2008. This figure was 40% in 2004. There has hence been a 100% increase in just four years all over Europe. Each user has in average shopped for 747€, during the first six months, which means a total sum of 1.3 billion Euros.

The products that people buy are 1. Travel tickets (54%) 2. vacation trips (42%) 3. books (40%) 4. concert tickets (38%) 5. clothes (33%). Out of these online shoppers do 59% consider the brands own websites to be a good resource for information on products, and a majority of people think that search engines is a greater source for information rather than personal recommendations.

This means that we in average trust the Internet more than we trust word-of-mouth. And keep in mind that word-of-mouth is the marketing technique that as good as all experts have proclaimed as the best marketing method these latest years. Maybe the new direction is not that strange either. On the Internet you are able to read hundreds of reviews on a single product. Your friend might be wrong about something but can a hundred people be mistaking?