The Online Home of Peter Claridge

November 12th, 2007

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So I have decided to give up freelancing and forge a career in a ‘proper’ job where one works 9 till 5 (or to 6 in some of the meaner companies). One of the first questions potential employers ask (well, ok, the 4 billion or so recruitment agencies) is…WHY?!

Incase any potential employers are reading this, let me take a moment to explain why I want to move from freelancing to a ‘proper’ job. The answer is quite simple: financial stability.

Freelancing is fun, setting your own hours, working to your own rules, but at the end of the day, you still have no idea how much you are going to earn from one month to the next, you might go a couple of months with very little and the following month take a large order.

Sales was never my strongest point, I prefered to be given the work, beaver away on it and return a new shiney website that exceeded the clients’ expectations.

When you have a fixed income, it helps you to budget and plan ahead a lot better and removes a lot of the stress and worry on where the next paycheck is going to come from.

It’s a very simple reason to be honest with you, but there have been a few problems with making the transistion from freelancing to getting a full time job which I’ll talk about some other time.

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October 26th, 2007

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Today I’m proud to introduce a new “proof of concept” website that for the time being I am calling Kabizzle. Why Kabizzle? No idea, but that’s not what’s important. The important thing is what it can do.

You see, Kabizzle has been born out of my frustration of managing and tracking all the PLR products that I own. PLR, for those of you that are not in the know, stands for Private Label Rights. It means I can take a product such as an ebook or piece of software and call it my own, say I wrote it and put my name on it.

I’m a member of at least a half a dozen monthly PLR sites that each month give you hundreds of new articles, ebooks, software or audio products. I also actively buy PLR firesales from the likes of Jeremy Burns or Edmond Loh. All this means my 160 GB harddrive is close to over flowing and worse…I have no idea what’s on it.

Everytime I create a new product I find myself again and again trawling through my folders trying to find all the PLR products on topics like “SEO” or “affiliate marketing” or maybe “list building”. Days can be wasted as I search through these folders.

So now I have Kabizzle…

http://www.peterclaridge.com/kabizzle

It’s a search engine, just like Google or Yahoo, except that this is a search engine for Internet Marketers.

It allows you to type in a keyword (it’s only a proof of concept site and can’t handle multiple keywords yet) and returns all the PLR products that it knows of that matches your searched keyword.

For each product it tells you from which site it came from (the provider) and when it was introduced. This hopefully allows you to then be able to zero in on the files on your computer. It means you don’t have to go through every folder and every firesale to see if there are any related products, you just pop your search term in and it tells you instantly if there are any available products.

As I have mentioned a few times now, this is a just a proof of concept site and is by no means the finished thing or all working the way I want. It’s just a search function with a few products loaded in to it.

If you are an internet marketer, I’m very keen on getting your feedback, whether you think something like this is useful, would you use it and what extra features you think it needs to make it an excellent resource.

Here’s the link to it again:

http://www.peterclaridge.com/kabizzle

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September 3rd, 2007

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A couple of months ago I launched a massive portal site called HYIPJunction. It had been in development for over 18 months and as I had mentioned in my previous blog entry it was a complete project disaster. In the end it was decided to take it live and open it up to the public with all the bugs and see how it would get on.

Two months later and I want to come back and look at how the site has got on since we launched it. What has been good, what has been bad.

To start off with, I think the site has done better than expected. We managed to get several core features fixed quite early on after going live so the impact of the bugs has been minimal. There are still a host of bugs that need to be fixed and the programmers have been working on them a bit at a time. Mostly though the members have not been complaining or shown us too many ‘new’ bugs.

I’m not sure if we haven’t received many bug reports because the members are apathetic towards the site or if they simply haven’t noticed them. When you have been working on a site for so long the bugs, errors and little annoyances become glaringly obvious, maybe when you are just a user these things are taken to be part of the site. Who knows, maybe the developers of Google’s Gmail fret over a million bugs that they must get fixed, but I’ve never noticed anything wrong with Gmail.

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August 16th, 2007

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A website called LiveBluesWorld.com that I worked on nearly a year ago when i was in India has finally gone ‘live’ today. After around 10 months of development I’m pleased to see that it has finally been launched.

The website is a mega-portal for all things in the Blues music genre. My input was to create the original mockups, offer advice and recommendations on the features and to create the programming requirements document. I completed my work on the project around February of this year and let the programmers get on with it.

My first impressions when I saw the site for the first time since I left the project was: “oh dear”.

Unfortunately they have not followed my original mockup layouts and the whole site looks scruffy and confused (although maybe that’s the idea - who knows?). The design is just…wrong.

There is no definition, no borders, nothing to define that one bit of content starts –here– and another bit starts –here–. There is no focus on what the main content is and what is ‘extra’ stuff around it. There is nothing that particularly draws your eye to any part of the website.

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August 5th, 2007

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Can it be true? Is the British summer finally here…just 2 months late? After having Mother Nature throw everything she has against most of England with the miserable weather we’ve been having lately it seems that summer could finally be raising it’s head.

Here in Brighton (it’s my new home) the last few days have been absolutely gorgeous, in the mid-high 20’s easily. This is what summer should be about, not lashing it down flooding people out of house and home (although if you do insist on building on flood plains do you really have any excuse?!).

I’ve just watched my team, Manchester United beat Chelsea at Wembely in the Charity…Community shield (it will forever be known as the charity shield to me though). It went right down to the wire with United finally beating Chelsea 3-0 on penalties.

Yet again Chelsea played their boring ‘keep possession’ football and don’t do anything clever or creative. United were the more fluid and attacking of the sides and put a lot of pressure on but still we are lacking the deadly touch of a natural striker. Hopefully when he signs, Tevez will help us out a lot. He proved himself at West Ham where he was a star amongst players, but at United he will be a player amongst stars and definitely have to prove himself.

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