Cheapest .com.au domain names

I buy a lot of domains for clients and search engine optimisation campaigns and I've done a lot of searching, so I thought I'd post a brief review of .com.au (Australian dot com au) domain companies for 2 year registrations:
* SmartyHost - $20
* Jumba - $22
* Hostess - $25
* Domainworld - $25
* Crazy Domains - $25.90
* Web City - $34.95
* Planetdomain - $35.55
* Cheap Domains - $38
* Netregistry - $44.95

I've had a couple of poor experiences with Planetdomain, but SmartyHost has been outstanding.

How to get PayPal to validate as XHTML

I've been building XHTML strict websites for some time now, but only just started using PayPal on my sites.

Well I pretty soon discovered that the code that PayPal supplies does not validate out of the box.

But after a bit of massaging I finally got it to validate just fine, using some of the tips in this thread.

Cheap Web Hosting that I recommend

I often get asked about cheap web hosting.

Well the hosts that I use are:

* WebHostingBuzz - great support, very cheap web hosting
* Smarty Host - good local Australian support, reasonably cheap hosting
* FreeHostia - A great free option but requires delegation to the server

But I'll let you know if I change my mind .... ;)

URL cannot contain a google host - My latest Adsense headache

So with the release of Google Knol, it appears that Google Adsense are no longer allowing you to track Adsense revenue for their web applications, which of course includes the popular Blogger tool ....

It is very disappointing to discover when I already have several sites tracked under Adsense.

When you go to add a new Adsense Channel for Blogger or Knol, the following message appears:
"URL cannot contain a google host"

I have checked the Google blogs and support and they don't mention anything of these new restrictions.

A real shame and very frustrating indeed.

Easy Social Bookmarking using AddThis or ShareThis

Social bookmarking can drive more traffic to your website with people being able to tell others about your site by word-of-mouth. There are plenty of applications online, like Delicious, StumbledUpon and Newsvine to name a couple.

One way to make it easier for people to bookmark your website is to make it convenient for them to do it and offer as many popular social bookmarking options as you can.

This can make it difficult with a lack of available screen real estate to work with.

Fortunately there are plenty of drop-in applications out there.

The most popular is "AddThis" and I personally like to use this. It is responsive, looks great and can be easily added to Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace and a whole range of other Web 2.0 applications.

Another popular option is "ShareThis", which tries to use an icon to make it familiar. Unfortunately, unlike RSS icons, there isn't really a standard icon for social bookmarking and more people use AddThis at the moment, meaning that the ShareThis icon is unlikely to take off.

But check out the AddThis facility that I've used at the bottom of each post.

Figured a workaround for Google Adwords My Client Center

After agonising over no support from Google regarding their My Client Center not sending request emails to clients, I discovered that only once you have set up your client's first campaign through their login, it will prompt them to accept the link invitation. While there isn't much documentation on this from Google, it worked.

Still waiting to hear back from since the issue was "escalated" some time ago though in their last email they indicated that the problem was "of some concern" to them.

But at least I'm able to now use Adwords for my clients, though having to request their login details to do it, does kinda defeat the purpose of the whole My Client Center concept ;)

New Facebook review - in a word - " it sucks"

I've tried hard to like the new Facebook. I sampled it for a couple of weeks when they first introduced it, but decided it wasn't for me and then reverted to the old, familiar style.

You see, it just didn't let me easily access the applications, the wall, my news feeds, groups and all the other things I used to like about Facebook. It used to be on the one handy page, now in their pursuit of cleanliness, the interface is in fact an ugly mess.

About a week ago, Facebook, probably the most popular social networking application among adults, forced their new design onto their millions of users.

Well it seems that I am not alone. A protest group within Facebook called "I hate the new Facebook" has over a million members !

The Facebook people just can't seem to turn a trick. They've been criticised for privacy issues related to their news feeds and their horrible use of social advertising.

My use of Facebook is getting less and less, while I have been using applications like Linkedin more. If it wasn't a place where I have all my old contacts, I would have stopped using it long ago. Bebo and MySpace are unfortunately not for me. Come to think of it, should any new social networking application that is half decent has the ability to import my "friends" and contacts, I'd be to it in a minute.