www.dkodigital.co.uk

Do you own or run a small company or small business in North East England?

Would you like a web page to show off what your small company or small business has to offer, with it's own domain name, web hosting, contact details and email addresses, and have it advertised locally in north east england?

If the answer to all of these questions is 'Yes', then we can help you. Read on.

There is a growing need for small businesses to have a web page, to allow them to effectively package their business for others to view. It doesn't need to be a huge, 40+ page website, but rather more an 'extended advert'. If you advertise in the local press and struggle to fit all that you offer into a tiny box for publication, you'll know what I mean. North East advertising is important to North East business.

www.dkodigital.co.uk

Wall of Sound Classic Rock Disco

Was talking to a mate of mine on Saturday night. We were at a local pub, the Greyhound in Ferryhill. Every month Brian and Mark run a disco upstairs in the function room, and last weekend was no exception. They always hand a little chitty out with the date of the next bash, along with other info, including a web address. The problem for them was that the website had been put together by another mate, who'd done it on a free hosting system. You can guess what's coming next, the popups. 

I logged onto the front page, three popups appeared. I clicked through from the doorway page, three more popups descended on me, none of which had anything at all to do with the subject matter, which was Classic Rock music. I became really frustrated and lost interest in the site, so I told them about it on Saturday. I said i'd have a go at sucking the brains out of the old site and i'd then host it at my own webspace for them. No popups. I even purchased a nice new domain name for them so they could get rid of the free hosting url and have a couple of contact emails for themselves.

So, here it is. A little website dedicated to The Wall of Sound Classic Rock Disco. See what you think, and if you're into this type of stuff, why not come along and join in. The next date is May 3rd and it's the 10th Anniversary fancy dress night.

http://www.wallofsounddisco.co.uk

Brian and Mark playing classic and new tracks from the spectrum of hard rock/metal genre.

Classic Bands such as : Whitesnake , Journey , Deep Purple , UFO , Judas Priest , Scorpions , Kiss , Guns N Roses.. etc, along with modern acts such as : Within Temptation , Nightwish , Harem Scarem , The Answer , Disturbed.

FREE ENTRY

7:30pm – 11:30pm ( Unless Stated Otherwise )

Check the dates on the home page for future classic rock nights.

Referrals Competition on the North East Forum

I've been mulling over some ideas for boosting the membership on my forum, and one popular method that keeps being recommended is the referrals competition. Basically, the idea is that members compete against each other to be 'top-dog' and are then rewarded by giving them a prize. I've just installed a new MOD on the forum to allow me to track referrals, so it is now fairly easy to offer this incentive. I've just put out the following message to my members to encourage them to take part.

"At the North East Forum we've just reached 800 members, but we'd like to get past 1,000 soon and grow the community a lot more. Every one of the members will have an email contacts list, personal contacts and email buddies who may also be interested in what is discussed here. We've also just installed a referrals system, which allows us to see if any referrals are being generated and who by. This in turn opens up the possibility of being able to reward members for referring others.

If you click your profile button you'll see that there is now a link available containing your own personal referrals number, for you to send to prospective members - copy this into your emails and ask them to register through this link. When they do, and I verify their membership, you'll be credited with a referral and it'll show up in your stats and under your avatar on any posts you've made. I'll reward the most helpful member three times a year with a cash incentive for referrals (watch out for further details of the reward shortly, it'll be a proportion of our advertising revenue)."

The North East Forum

What a mixed bag!

It's been a busy start to the new month, but like I say, it's been a very mixed bag. We've been to Stockton (Saturday) and Newcastle (Sunday) this weekend, and as it is now April, the weather has started to play silly buggers and pretends it's winter again. There's been widespread snowfall, not substantial enough to cause drifts and whiteouts, but enough to make you think 'Oh come on now, you've had your chance and you blew it, now give me some sunshine and some warmth like we expect from you'. I'm getting thoroughly sick of the Met Office's Sever Weather Warnings, particularly when these days they seem to be issued for trivial things like heavy showers or patchy fog.

As I said, on Saturday we went to Stockton to try to get a present for Den's mam for her birthday. We eventually came out of B&Q with two garden gnomes and a hedgehog. The hedgehog was just too sassy to resist, and will look fine no matter where she chooses to put him. Prior to hitting B&Q, we took a bit of a detour to Staples on Portrack Lane and spend an hour or so mooching around. Nobody really paid us any attention until we wandered into the computer hardware section, then we got a salesman who was pleasant enough, but spent his time trying to sell us something we didn't really want or need. Why do they do that? The greatest thing about Saturday though, was that my team Sunderland have all but secured their future in the Premier League for next season, after beating Fulham 3-1. There's been some nervous times, but they've finally got their act together and won 3 games off the belt! Awesome!

Sunday, was what you might call fully loaded. We got up about 9:30 and the first job was to fix one of the girls' laptops/iTunes that wasn't burning her cds right, then up to Mam's for dinner (and to deliver the now totally familiar Hedgehog). We had our lunch, then spent the next hour or so with my sister, hanging roller blinds in their conservatory. Then off to Newcastle where the kids wanted to get all their merchandise signed by their favourite band (Elliot Minor) before going to the gig at the Carling Academy on the night. We, of course, went along for the ride. We enjoyed it too, they're not bad, that Elliot Minor (sort of a cross between McFly and Green Day). When we came out it was snowing again, so a careful ride home got us in at just about 11pm. The day had gone.

The North East Forum is down!

Anyone currently trying to read the North East Forum http://www.neforum2.co.uk/ , will find that it's down at the moment. There's a rather scary sign saying the account has been suspended, but in actual fact it's been taken off the air until the hosts have checked it out further. Apparently the server is being asked to do DNS lookups by the forum software, and the requests are hanging. This is using up all the available lookups on the server and is starting to affect other accounts that share the hosting. There's absolutely nothing I can do at this end, as suspension of the account doesn't even allow me to open in maintenance mode, examine any of my logs, or turn off certain settings. The support guy says he may try moving the forum to a different server overnight, so if anyone is reading this it's likely that it's going to be down until tomorrow. All I can do is apologise and hope we find the problem quickly.

Update : The site has been moved to a new server, with a later level of php and it's now like lightning. He decided it was quicker to move it than spend days trying to work out what was causing those hangups, so we're cooking with gas again.