Surpass News : Your Voice
In January 2007 we created a “I wish Surpass would” board in our forum. As of today the board has received 1,176 bits of commentary. The point behind this board was to collect suggestions from our clients to improve their Surpass experience. So far it has been one of the most valuable things we have done for the future of the company.
In early 2008 we had a thought to upgrade the idea and create a Digg-style page to replace that board. The page would have been separate from the forum, thus gaining more exposure, and everyone could vote the most wanted features to the top. This was not released yet but remained a very important idea that we needed to develop. To our surprise, we found a company that is offering this service already which is really impressive. It’s called UserVoice and is exactly what we were going to do in-house. But we like to use and promote third-party services as much as we can if they are truly useful and innovative. UserVoice definitely belongs to that category.
You can find our new suggestion board at surpass.uservoice.com. The feedback button has been placed throughout our website. We are now more open to suggestions than ever before and can keep track of them much better.
Thank you for your feedback and attention. We invite everyone to submit ideas right away.
Mad at me?
I hope not! I went on a trip back home and arrived back to Orlando today. I had the chance to reconnect with nature as you see above. But in the process I missed Things We Love Thursday and did not brainstorm for today’s Freebie Friday. I will make it up to you, starting now!
Need a little creative relaxation? Look no further than Sumopaint. Give it a try and see what you can do.
And I’ll be returning to our normal blogging schedule on Monday. Thanks everyone for subscribing to our cool finds and giveaways.
WordPress Wednesday : A Classy Theme
If you’re looking for a sleek, news type theme, we think Arthemia is for you.
Useful Tuesday : Online Photo Editing
Online photo editing is just the way to go these days, as many applications find themselves a home on the web and off of your hard drive. This blog post has some interesting examples of what online tools can do! The photo above is one of their examples.
Money Monday : How Do You Spend
Just something to think about for today from the article, Spending on Happiness:
“One of the most puzzling paradoxes in social science is that though people spend so much of their time trying to make more money, having more money doesn’t seem to make them that much happier. My colleagues Liz Dunn and Lara Aknin—both at the University of British Columbia—and I wondered if the issue was not that money couldn’t buy happiness but that people simply weren’t spending it in the right way to make themselves happier. Liz had the great idea to explore whether, if we encouraged people to spend money in different ways, we could uncover the domains in which money might lead to happiness. We conducted a number of studies—from national surveys to a field study in which we examined how the manner in which employees at a Boston-based company spent a profit-sharing bonus impacted their long-term happiness—in which we showed that money can buy happiness, when people spend that money prosocially on others (giving gifts to friends, donating to charities) rather than on themselves (buying flat-screen televisions).”
Freebie Friday : Free Chick-fil-A
The first two people to leave a comment on this blog post each receive a $20 gift certificate to Chick-fil-A. So hurry and comment to get your chikin!
Things We Love Thursday : Muppets
Especially celebs who look like muppets. How can you resist checking them out?
WordPress Wednesday : Power Your Storefront!
Can you power a storefront with WordPress? Of course! With WordPress, you can do just about anything these days. Check out The Market Theme for their details on how to do it right!
Useful Tuesday : Flash Photo Gallery
There are many Flash photo galleries to pick from but hopefully this one is new to you! It does show a tiny site logo in the corner but many free galleries do to help out the developer.
Money Monday : BambooInvoice
I almost typed Monkey Monday. Moving along, here’s a simple, quick, PHP5 based invoicing program called BambooInvoice. Let the demo speak for itself!
WordPress Wednesday : Last.fm Plugin
Do you like-a-WordPress? Do you like-a-last.fm? You’ll like-a-this! Sorry, this quote is from their site and I just couldn’t help it:
WordPress + Last.Fm = iLast.Fm! We make your blog a lot more fun, like a music!
Useful Tuesday : PHP Widget
”PHP Function Reference (PHPfr) is a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that provides fast lookup of information about the PHP web programming language.”
Money Monday : Stop Driving
Just kidding! But it is a great way to save money if you can find a different way to get around. Fuelly is a great site to help you keep track if your gas purchases and driving habits!
Freebie Saturday? Wallpaper!
Sorry that we missed posting on Friday - we were going to give something for free from us (Surpass) but needed to think a little more! So here are some gorgeous desktop wallpapers. Download them here from a mysterious server in Romania.
Things We Love Thursday : Tacos
Specfically loaded tacos from Chipotle.
More Smashing Themes
Smashing Magazine continues to release great blog themes, this time collaborating with Design Disease to push another great look for your WordPress blog.
Toodledo
”Toodledo can be easily integrated with many Calendar applications, including Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal. You can also integrate Toodledo into your Google start page with our Google Gadget, or integrate Toodledo into the Firefox browser with the Firefox Extension. Toodledo can also integrate with your email inbox. You can easily send yourself a copy of any folder, and you can even receive daily reminders of important tasks that you should work on. You can also add a task to the website by sending an email to Toodledo.
Using Twitter.com you can interact with your to-do list via your Instant Messaging client or cellphone. Developers will be happy to know that Toodledo has a fully featured API, so you can write your own software to interact with your tasks in ways that we have not imagined.
If you want to use the same login and password across many different websites, you can use OpenID. Toodledo fully supports OpenID. “
Wow! Get to Toodling!
Haiku Contest : Win a Kindle
We’re feeling peaceful and zen like.
Give us a great haiku about Surpass Hosting and win an Amazon Kindle to further enjoy poetry and reading.
“The most common form for Haiku is three short lines. The first line usually contains five (5) syllables, the second line seven (7) syllables, and the third line contains five (5) syllables. Haiku doesn’t rhyme.” Here is an example haiku:
i love you surpass
you make my sites go so fast
happy webmaster
Just post your entry in this thread, then on August 29th we’ll all vote for the winner. It’s a community feeling.
(Haikus don’t have to just be about love, maybe you’re mad at us right now for some reason, like how we ran out of shirts. : ( We’ll get through it if so. Just be honest in your ‘ku and you will be rewarded.)
Money Free Weekend
Usually we talk about saving or managing money today, but what about not using money at all? This blog post has 100 ways to spend your weekend without spending.
“...lots of people have sent me ideas for activities for money-free weekends, plus we’ve uncovered a bunch of our own. At the same time, many readers have asked for a master list of all of these ideas. So, here we go - one hundred fun ways to spend a money free weekend.”
Introducing Freebie Friday
Thanks to a brainstorm in Surmunity and an idea from Fury, we’re bringing you Freebie Friday. On select Fridays we (Surpass) will offer something free and who knows what it will be! On others we will find interesting free services or things to download. So the only way for you to know what you have a chance of getting for free is to subscribe to our blog. Just use the two links to the left - you can get alerts by email or RSS. Easy!
To start things off, we thought some of you may be feeling creative this weekend. Time for some graphic design? Check out 21 hand-picked, free textures (compiled by Speckyboy).
W3C valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Document validates as CSS3.
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