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16th July 2007
I have decided to remove the prize draw fund from the site and instead donate
all funds to charity. I have mainly decided this due to the limited growth in the funds.
As you can see I have changed the two figures on the top of the page to indicate the total pending for donation
and that already donated.
Some charity is going to be in for $700 very soon. If you would like to suggest the recipient, please email me.
Jon
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12th July 2006 Dear All I received a thank you letter / receipt from Macmillan Cancer Care today. You can get to it from a link on the funds page. It's not mind blowing stuff, but we have managed to give away $460 so far and more is on the way with your continued use. In general, however, usage of the site has really dropped off, so jump back on it all and set it back to your home page. Go and tell everyone about it and lets get things really moving again.
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22nd May 2006
Wow, that was the week that was. As some of you probably saw, disaster struck me with the failure of a hard disk. It all started fairly innocuously with my laptop refusing to start. Having worked for about 8 hours on a document, I decided to take out my laptop hard drive, connect it to my server and get my document off it. Then I would simply re-install XP. This should have been no problem because all my other data sits on my D drive and is fully backed up to my server.
All sounds good I hear you say. Unfortunately in the process of connecting the hard drive to my server, I connected it the wrong way round and blew the hard drive to smithereens. To add insult to financial, and aggravation, filled injury, I also managed to blow up the drive which contained my backups.
Anyway, some clever people at work managed to recover most of the data from my laptop drive, and all I was left with was the Search4Aid automation scripts. I have just re-written these, so need to go through the painful process of getting it to work properly. So If you suddenly see several million pounds appear in the prize draw fund, chances are we haven't suddenly gone global, but the scripts are messing about.
Anyway, back to the purpose of the site. I have not got around to making the donation to Macmillan, but will do shortly. I will post the receipt on the site, provided they give me one as promised.
Jon
email sent 15th Jan 06
Dear All Email from 3/1/2006 Dear All 21st December, The automatic update script went mad and started adding other web site revenue to the Charity fund. I think it's fixed now, but only time will tell.
Email from 19/12/2005 Dear S4A
people email sent to all registered users on 5th November. Happy Bonfire Night All, The search page is much faster to load now, you will notice the Amazon and
eBay link comes in a bit later. Canada and US eBay affiliation is now working - I had to mess about with the layout a bit to get
the Canada search to fit eBay Canada and eBay US have now accepted our affiliation. I
will try to get that done this evening so that our Canadian and American
users can help by using us for eBay too. The login page has been tweaked so that you can just press the enter
key now instead of having to press the login button. We have just earned our first 17 cents commission from eBay. Thanks. If it has been a few days since you set your homepage then you should
set it again so that you don't get the initial redirect page. The
actual homepage is now
http://www.search4aid.com/search.cgi Made a little tweak to improve the initial load of the page. I though the fund meter had stopped working, but it hasn't we are
just stuck at $39.97 - Where is that elusive 3 cents We now have affiliations with eBay Australia and eBay UK. eBay
Canada and eBay US need us to grow a bit before they will accept us as
an affiliate, but I will try again in a few months. Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk have allowed us to link to them, so don't
forget to go there via us. As you can see we are a dynamic site now that automatically changes
depending on where you are coming from.
Amazingly enough, Cancer research still haven't got back to me yet regarding the $200 pledge. I will contact them again tomorrow to find out when and how to give them the money - I wouldn't have thought that part would have been hard.
One of our crowd wrote to me with some suggestions for the next charity to receive, I thought I would create another voting page with a number of charities on it and ask you to vote again. If you have a suggestion of a charity to be included then drop me a line saying which charity and ideally, if they have one, a website address so I can put a link so others can see what the charity is all about.
There are a few new people on the mailing list, so I have to mention to them about please tell your friends about Search4Aid, we need as many users as possible.
It is looking fairly much like a whitewash in favour of waiting to draw the charity fund so unless the votes change dramatically over the next 2 weeks that's what I will do.
Somebody wrote to me and suggested that I add another option of putting the prize draw fund into the charity fund. My answer to that was, I think that should be an individuals choice and when it gets drawn the winner can offer to do that.
Enjoy the rest of January
January has arrived and Search4Aid is ticking along reasonably. I had a
suggestion from Gary (one of our registered users) to put some stats up
on the site about hits and registered members etc. So I have done that
on the
funds page. On the 31st of December the registered users reached the
nice round figure of 50 users. Welcome Jim, thanks for being number 50.
So January.......... that's officially the time when I was going to
decide whether to give up or keep the site running. In truth, I had
hoped for considerably more users and a much greater sum raised, but, I
do think its worth carrying on for a while to see if it can keep growing
after all she is only 3 months and a bit, and crawling quite well for
that age.
The question of what to do with the prize draw fund is running through
my mind. It's not very impressive and at a guess, will not have reached
$30 by the end of January. As this is your site as much as mine I plan
to put up a voting page asking all registered users whether I should run
the prize draw at the end of January, or wait until it gets a bit
bigger. This will become available on the 6th January after I take the
Xmas decorations down.
I wish you all a great 2006 and start it off with another plea for you
to get your friends, relatives and acquaintances to use Search for Aid.
If you can also ask them to register on the site so that we can see how
well we are really doing. I don't spam that much after all, and I will
never pass on the email addresses.
I guess this will be the last email before Christmas and likely this
year.
It's my birthday today and have hit the "life begins at" mark. Good, I
can't wait to see what it's like. I am hoping that the site will hit the
$200 mark today, somehow a fitting birthday present from you all.
It's looking pretty well like that will be the donation amount to Cancer
research so we need to find another charity. There are so many causes
out there, that it is difficult to know who to donate the next lot to. I
was thinking of creating a voting page so you can choose where you would
most like the next donation to go. So please write back to me with some
ideas of which charities to include.
So what's new......
Well, you can't really see any difference, but some of you, well one of
you actually, has been on my case about the fact that the cursor gets
put in the Google search bar too late and that you end up with half a
URL in the Google search. This had been really annoying me too, and I
managed to fix it about a week ago. Hopefully now, by the time you
manage to click in the URL bar, the code that places the cursor will
have already run.
I will sign off now, with a thanks to you all, and best wishes for the
Holidays.
Jon
Well I am really happy with the way things are shaping up. We are now a group of 34 registered people, and we hit $50 a couple of days ago.
If you had been watching closely, or loaded the page at exactly the right times, you would have seen some very strange figures in the fund meters on top of the page. We went from "$47" to "$" to "#value" then finally "$23" before I got it working again properly.
I had a response from ****** *******, who have said that they would be delighted to receive the money, but have advised me that I cannot actually say on the site where the money will go until it goes. If the law is an ass then surely this rule proves it. Anyway, just in case I have removed the name from the funds page, but nothing changes.
Many thanks to those who have written to tell me about problems you have experienced with the site and general suggestions for improvements. I really appreciate this kind of feedback.
Well that's it for now, I am about to get ready for a huge fireworks party that a friend is organising. I love fireworks!! Please don't forget to keep pushing the site whenever you think about it.
TTFN
Jon