Rob C.'s Profile

Great way to lower your energy bill - I wish there were more companies like this out there which are helping the environment, saving people money, and have a great product. If you live anywhere near their headquarters, I would recommend taking a look at what they can do for you. If everyone did something like this our world would be such a better place to live.

redoctane ...from DDR to guitar hero revolution - These guys are born out of silicon valley and I remember ordering a DDR pad from them back in the day. They used to make the best DDR pads around. This is the company that came up with the idea of making Guitar Hero. They manufactured the plastic guitar and then hired Harmonics to make the software. Genius idea. Redoctane owned the rights to the name guitar hero, but Harmonics kept the rights to the actual game mechanics. Later Harmonics was bought by MTV and that is how RockBand was created. MTV predicts that new songs being sold will be sold via downloads like RockBand and that will be a major source of revenue for bands since everyone just shares MP3s these days. And, we owe this entire revolution to this company...Red Octane. You can say what you want about their customer service, etc etc etc...but these guys changed the music industry.

I use genuine fractals for upscaling without loss of sharpness - I have been using GF for years and now with the most recent upgrades it works better than ever. Whenever I go to print anything larger than an 8 x 10 on my 12MP DSLR, I use GF and you can really tell in the larger print sizes. Definitely worth it for 20 x 30 prints for those of us who do not have 22MP DSLRs.

love feedburner for my blogs - I am a publisher who uses Feedburner and I love how it burns blog feeds directly from blog installer without loosing subscriber base. When customers subscribe to my new feedburner address the service starts tracking subscriptions which apparently is known as burning feed. I use Channel feeds for channels as I run a small operation compared to large publishing houses that make use of megafeeds for the entire network. I find Feedburners blog listing to be slow in syncing to the rest of the account and feed foundry is sluggish. Feedburner provides good Customer support and is easy to use. I like the look and feel of the RSS page and get good stats on my feeds.

web hosting company specializing in Miva Merchant - I took a look on the Miva Merchant forums and found this thread;
http://extranet.mivamerchant.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12414&highlight=host+suggestions
Which basically said that www.hostasaurus.com is one of the best web hosting companies if you are going to use miva merchant.

If you use Miva Merchant, make sure your hosting company has lots of experience with them. - I have used miva merchant for years and the problem I have always run across is that the hosting company MUST be an expert using their miva merchant software or you WILL have problems. Lots of hosting companies claim to support miva merchant, but in my experience most will not waste too much time solving all of the miva problems. So, be really really careful if you go with Miva that your hosting company has lots of experience with it.

apollohosting has poor miva merchant interaction - I have had a site hosted by apollo that uses miva merchant and I pay extra for them to be able to support it. When they moved servers something happened and I haven't been able to fix my ability to use miva merchant since then. Apollo is unable to help us and now I think I have to switch to yahoo shopping or something like that. I am planning to just ditch apollo hosting and go elsewhere. So, if you plan on doing ecommerce with them, look elsewhere for customer support. The good news is they don't have much downtime and they servers do seem to keep running all the time.

Xdrive is an AOL company and they created what is now the best way to back up files and have remote access to all of your important files. They use adobe air as the website/desktop interface which makes it really slick and easy to use. You just drag and drop files just like on windows. Great deal for free. 5GB goes a long ways when you just are uploaded documents. For larger files the 50GB for 99 bucks a year is the best deal around.

great company for adding web 2.0 features to your existing website - These guys made<a href="http:// mojopages.com" target="_blank"> mojopages.com</a> which I always thought was a good idea. Too bad Yelp killed them. Still ya can't blame the design company.

UI and website design firm - I would recommend anyone who is creating a new website to try going with a firm that focuses on UI design and if you need more backend support than the UI people can do, then outsource that separately. The problem I see with going with web development companies that are one stop shops is that they are not always the best at UI design. And, in the end, UI design is THE most important factor in creating a site.

blinkinteractive is the firm to contact for UI design - This company was highly recommended to me by a colleague who has extensive UI experience.

better than BHphotovideo - They often have better deals than BH...I always check here before buying from BHphotovideo