RainCalendar.com – The Free Rain and Weather Database For Farmers, Students, Schools and Weather Watchers
Here is a Rain and Weather Calendar I have just made for Farmers, Students, Schools and Weather Watchers.
It is totally free!
Please share with your friends!
Rain And Weather Calendar Screenshot
I decided to design the Rain and Weather Calendar, because I feel it would be of excellent use to mainly Australian Farmers who rely on the Weather for their crops, such as Wheat, Barley, Lupins, Corn and all other seed crops, so they can hopefully have a successful year from their crops, thanks to good and reliable rains and sunshine.
With the way Climate Change is affecting the Earth, I think it is imperative to track rainfall statistics, so you can compare this years rains, to next years and the many more years to come.
I carried out some research on the internet, for other rain and weather calendars, which are similar to mine, and I just cannot find any, apart from the normal paper calendars that you hang up on your wall and never use.
I also feel that this calendar would be perfect for kids, students, teachers and schools for an education tool. Kids just love the weather, and this spreadsheet would be perfect for a year long science project for students aged anywhere from 10 years of age, up to 17 years of age.
The Rain and Weather Calendar has taken many hours to design, but no matter how many hours and days it took to get to the stage where I am happy with it.
Thats why this calendar is free, so it can help farmers, educate kids and students about the weather.
So please feel free to download the calendar, if you do use it, please let as many of your friends know about it as possible.
Please feel free to pass this link on to all your friends, whom you feel could make some use of this weather calendar
If you are a school teacher, and feel you could use this for your kids science projects next year, please let me know that you plan on using it, as I would love to know that it will be used for kids to learn about the weather!
Thanks Everyone
Billy
Australian Web Hosting – Why Hostgator is the best
I have been with HostGator.com now for around 5 years and no doubt they would have to be one of the best website hosts in the world.
I seen have so many Australian Webmasters get ripped off when it comes to finding a decent website host or a good place to register a .com or a .com.au domain name.
Why pay $15AUD a month for a 100mb hosted website at Westnet when you can go to hostgator and pay $7AUD a month with Hostgator with unlimited space?
Don’t get me wrong, westnet is a great company, but I would never host a website with them.
I just did a google search for Australian Web Hosts and this is the prices I found for their Small Hosting Accounts that these Australian Website Hosting Companies offer as follows:
Web City $6.95 per month based on a 12 month sign up contract – their downfall: 50 GB Traffic/Bandwidth (per mth)
MD Hosting $2.42 Per Month with 250 MB of Webspace and 1GB of Traffic / Bandwidth
Web Hosts Australia $12.00 Per Month with 1000MB Storage and 2000MB Bandwidth
Aus Web $16.50 per month with 1000MB Storage and 5000MB in Bandwidth
Redrook $11.00 per month with 10mb disk space and unmetered Bandwidth
Hostgator.com offers the hatchling plan of $6.95 USD per month with is roughly $9.15 AUD, but compared to the above plans, none of these Australian Website Hosts can offer what HostGator.com offers in terms of value for money.
I know its good to support Australian Companies, but in these days of recession and economic gloom and doom, webmasters need to save their money, and put those savings towards site upgrades, design fixes and much more, even if it means that money goes overseas.
Host Gator is based in the United States, it is one of the worlds best and well known Website Hosting Companies.
I highly recommend you try out HostGator.com you won’t look back.
If you would like Domain Name Advice, I urge you to read my article on Australian Domain Name Registration
Here is a list of the sites I host with Hostgator.com
Does your Business Use PayPal.com?
Do you run a Rural Australian Small Business? And you use PayPal.com to receive some of your payments? If your a Small business, whether your online or not, this may be of interest to you and it will save you money from PayPal.com’s ridiculous fees.
Many people do not know about a great feature on PayPal.com which is called “PayPal Mass Pay” I have known about it for a while, but I actually forgot about it until last night, when I bought something for 350USD and had to pay via PayPal.com, and the person I bought the item from requested I pay for it using the Mass Pay feature on PayPal.com so they could save on fees.
So I sent them $350USD and the only fee they had to pay was only $1! Thats a big saving, normally it would of cost them $14 in PayPal.com fees … in these days of financial burdem, that is definately a good saving!
Mass Pay Link on PayPal.com Webpage - Bottom Left of Page
But the Mass Pay feature comes with a catch! It is free, but your customer need to have a Premier or Business Account with PayPal.com.
IF YOU WANT TO SAVE ON PAYPAL FEES, FOR THIS TO WORK FOR YOUR BUSINESS YOU NEED YOUR CUSTOMER TO SEND YOU THE PAYMENT VIA MASS PAY! SO PLEASE GIVE THE BELOW INFORMATION TO YOUR CUSTOMER!
Mass Payment
According to PayPal’s mass pay instructions, you are supposed to create an Excel file with the payment information and save the file as a text file with tab separated values, but there is an easier way of doing this, and I do it using Notepad, the program every computer has.
I. Open up notepad (or any text/ascii editor)
II. Type the following information, separated by tabs (use tab key, not spaces).
An example of a payment text file:payment@yourbusiness.com.au 999 AUD
or
In Notepad type payment@yourbusiness.com.au press tab key 999 press tab key AUD
Save the notepad textfile as anything you’d like, e.g. “masspay” and just try to remember where you saved it for later.
III. Log in to your PayPal account the usual way, but instead of sending a payment the regular way, look for the small link on the bottom of your screen that says “Mass Pay”. Found it? Good, now click it.
Mass Pay PayPal.com ScreenShot 2
Mass Pay Screenshot 2
Mass Pay Screenshot 3
IV. You are now one step away from doing a mass payment. Browse to find the text file you just created in notepad and upload it to PayPal as directed. Type in the e-mail address you want the receipt to be sent to and perform the payment by clicking the button.
The PayPal recipient (YOU! )has now received his/hers/your payment and it only cost you $1 in fees, instead of 4% !
I hope the above information on PayPal Mass Pay, it is a fantastic way that your small rural Australian business can save money, especially when large PayPal.com transactions occur, deals involve adding the 4% fee to the final sales price. Over a long period of time, you have the chance to save your business thousands of dollars!
Please Bookmark this blog entry so it will help other small business owners using paypal throughout Australia!
Is your Website stuck in the 90’s?
You might think you have a great looking website, but in fact you may just be losing customers without knowing it, because your company / small business website may be in an urgent need of a complete makeover.
Trust me I have learnt the hard way, when I first got into the internet back in the early 2000’s, I created a few websites that made me some good money, but the designs were just terrible, and I am to blame mostly for that, because I designed them using Microsoft Frontpage, and I was new to web design, and when I look back on my previous websites, I cringe with embarrassment!
They were truly were amateurish websites, that at the time I thought were brilliant! Loaded with animated gifs, smileys, large text, small text, massive photos and much more. Then one day woke up, thanks to my introduction to vbulletin forums an easy to use script which has everything you need to run a good website, just like wordpress, the script I use for this blog.
It amazes me the amount of times I visit websites that look as though they have been created in 1996, and have obviously been made using programs such as Microsoft Frontpage and so forth. I’ll give you some examples of what not too do when creating a website for your business. Please feel free to click on the below example links to understand what I mean, all links below to the websites are safe to open. (There is alot of links below and they will open to a new page) What not to do when running an online small business / company website! The Top 22 Website Mistakes
- Don’t put too many photos on one page, still will slow down your website and potential customers will lose patience and go to a competitors website, just remember, not all internet users have Broadband.
- Stay away from Animated Images, Smileys, Patriotic Animated Flags and things which will make people feel embarrassed for you! True!
- Ensure that the font on your websites Font is in one style, such as Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana, or Arial Fonts
- Ensure the size of the Font is reasonable, not too small or not too big, the best font sizes to use would be in my opinion between 10px to 12px
- Stay away from Highlighting your Font in bright colours Like this! or if you do, only do it once if you feel you really have to. Not 20 times or more!
- Don’t have a stupid Song playing or loading as soon as someone visits your website, like this website
- Ensure that your website is correctly titled in the Header / Metatags in each page, like this page not like this page (note how it says newpage.htm in the top of the browser? You need to understand that If you have something like that in every one of your websites webpages, then how the hell will Google or Yahoo and other major search engines pick up the content of your page? Now if I was the owner of that website, I would put the following in the metatags: “Scenes from Steamboat Springs, Colorado” that way you will get more traffic to the page. That is one of the biggest mistakes website owners make when developing there websites, they just expect that people will come, but you really have to tweak your website with the right keywords, metatags and so forth.
- Avoid titling your main page Index.htm like this page why? See above point!
- Make sure you link your important keywords. For example “This Rural Australian Blog is for Rural Australians” that way if someone enters “Rural Australian Blog” in Google, then you have a high chance on being number one in google results
- Try and avoid Scrolling Text Marquees in huge letters going across your website, I use it on my website Beaut Utes and it works wonders, it is a great way of getting your customers instant attention
- Avoid having Counters on your web page, no one cares how many hits your website gets!
- Don’t Type Like This … I have a bad habit of doing that, typing each word with a capital letter
- If you cannot touch type without looking at the screen like me, sometimes you will type out a huge story and then you will realise THAT EVERY WORD YOU HAVE TYPED OUT WILL BE IN UPPERCASE or lowercase! hOW DO yOU RESOLVE THAT? (Deliberate typing example) How do I Convert Upper Case to Lower Case
- If you are selling a product, then make sure you list the price of that product, there is nothing worse when you find a great product you need, find the website that sells it, but you need to contact them for either a quote or a price check. That is one way t0 lose sales and customers.
- If you website is a .Net please make sure you register the .net.au the .com and the .com.au, it amazes me how many people don’t do this and then a competitor or domain cybersquatter will get the name for you and profit from it and you will once again lose sales and customers. Please read my article Do you own YourBusiness.com, YourBusiness.com.au or both?
- Make sure your company domain name is easy to spell and easy to remember. Short and Sweet is the key to a good domain name!
- Try and avoid loading your website with to many advertising banners, people are not stupid, and there is actually a term called “Banner Blindness” which means, people no the banner is there, but are that used to seeing them on all websites, that their eyes just tune out to the banners and ignore them.
- Avoid having too many links on the same webpage (like I have on this page) that will open in new windows, people hate having new windows open up on their computer, it’s almost annoying as those “Pop Up Ads”
- Avoid having Pop Up Ads! Pop Up Ads are just as bad as having Spam arrive in your inbox!
- Answer your customers! This means you should answer their emails quickly, ship their orders quickly and like I said previously, list the prices of your products!
- Avoid spelling mistakes and spelling error mispronunciations, did you know definitely is one of the internets most misspelled words?
- Avoid Flash Introductions! No one wants to see a stupid flash intro!
I could go on, there are so many more examples of what not to do with your website. If you are unsure about the current look of your website, and feel you need help, get some reviews done of your website at some of the many excellent website design forums that lurk on the internet! I hope that the above information has helped you in someway! Here is some websites that I have come across recently and the current website designs are well and truly stuck in the 90’s To see how your website may have looked in the 90’s go to Achive.org If you ever need a great website designer, Mark Bolyard is your man!
He is my right hand man and the man I turn to when I need website design help.
Beware of the Dreaded Harvey Norman Flexirent Salesman
Read this first before considering Flexirent!
Unfortunately about a year ago I got a $4500 LG laptop and a $2500 Nikon digital camera on Flexi Rent, thanks to being sucked in to it by some Harvey Norman salesman. I am a pretty bright guy, but at the time, I wish I was a bit brighter …
Here is my Flexi Rent Horror Story!
I went to Harvey Norman one day looking to get a new Laptop, the previous Laptop I had was a Toshiba Satellite Notebook, and a great little laptop which never let me down.
I was looking for a Laptop that I could use for my websites, my personal use, and also I was after a good laptop to play games, such as Call of Duty etc.
So the Harvey Norman salesman recommended I go for a LG “LW70 Express” laptop, and informed me it would be perfect for gaming. (I will never get a LG Laptop again either! LG Laptops Suck also) Lifes Good? Yeah right!
I highly recommend Toshiba Laptops and Notebooks! That is what I will get again when I can afford it!
All of the previous Laptops I had purchased from Harvey Norman were purchased by myself using the AGC Interest Free option they had, by which I had no problems using and had paid off the laptops well in advance of the Interest Free period, usually within a year.
From Day 1 until now (4 years later) I have had continuous problems with my laptop and no matter how much I tried, Flexirent would not replace the laptop with a new replacement laptop.
Here are the problems I have had with my LG LW70 Laptop:
1. Continuous daily “bluescreen” computer crashes
2. Daily Infinite Loop Crashes
3. Unable to play “any” games on the laptop – Computer Crashes
4. Unable to watch DVDs on the laptop – Computer Crashes
5. Loss of use of certain keyboard letters, space bar, shift keys at least 5 times a week etc
6. Overheating battery problems
7. Melted laptop battery – wrote to LG, they could not care … they should of done a Product Recall!
When I sent my Laptop for repairs to Flexirent, they would not provide me with a replacement laptop! They said they fixed it, nothing was done.
I paid around $600 out of my own money to get repairs done as a last resort, wasted my money, could not be fixed.
However as I say, I got sucked in to getting this laptop using the Flexi Rent Option, thinking that if I went with Flexi Rent, I would get all of my money back in my Tax Return.
This is what I learnt using Flexi Rent,:
1. I am a dumbass for being sucked in to go with Flexirent!
2. Harvey Norman will try and suck you in by telling you about the massive tax refund you will get .. how the **** can you get a massive Tax Refund by Flexi Renting a washing machine!
3. Yes it is a “Rental Agreement” You don’t own the item, you rent it and you rent the item at very high monthly rental rates
4. Using Flexi rent is like a personal loan for a $10,000 car, after three years of flexirenting you pay triple the price of the original value of the item, except unlike a car loan, once the item you have flexirented for 1 to 3 years has expired, you still do not own the item, Flexirent owns the item and always has owned the item, if you want to own the item, you have to “payout” your flexi rent to get ownership of your item.
5. I had 6 months left on my Flexirent for my laptop, to gain ownership of my laptop, I had to pay $3000 for complete ownership…. After 3 years of flexirenting my laptop and Nikon camera
6. Yes $3000 is ridiculous, but when you run an online business, such a BeautUtes.com you have a lot of important stuff on your computer. And I just did not want to go through the hassle of transferring all my files to a new laptop.
7. Maybe flexirent is good for some people. But it sucked for me!
8. Flexirent Customer Support Sucks!
9. Flexirent Lies to you
10. Harvey Norman make huge commissions when selling Flexirent
I would warn you to seriously consider going with flexi rent, cause it sucks! If you go with Flexirent, make sure you know you are stuck with a big debt for the next few years, you cannot pay it off early, if you do, you pay a fortune, you pay double if not triple the value to own it.
It may be good for tax reasons, but I’ll never again go with flexi rent, their customer service sucks and if you have a problem with the equipment, they could not give a flying shit about it, they just pass you onto to someone else and that person passes you on again, and again and again.
Thank God, I am no longer with flexirent, I have learnt my lesson, it was like a 3 year prison term!
What a rip off!
Beware of Flexi Rent and Beware of the Harvey Norman Flexirent Salesman!
Please also read this excellent blog about urging caution in regards to using Flexi Rent
