I was a WP Designer Themes Club member where membership was only US$5 per year and we were promised free access, download and use of exclusive WordPress themes throughout the year of at least one new theme per month.

WP Designer had a pretty good concept whereby the brainchild, Small Potato, who is also a WordPress theme designer himself, proposed to combine effort with a handful of WordPress theme designers to come up with at least twelve new WordPress themes per year.

With membership at US$5 per year to the WP Designer Themes Club, I felt that it was a pretty good deal since I have fifteen WordPress powered blogs and having access to exclusive premium WordPress themes, I felt it was well worth the money.

However, Small Potato sold his website, along with his WordPress themes club and members for a small fortune, believing that the new owner will continue running the club in the same spirit and offering new premium WordPress themes to us members.

As far as I know, the new owner, after many long months, started refunding members their US$5 fee. Strangely, today, I received an invoice from WP Designer asking for US$5. Sigh. What an oversight!

If you remember, a couple of months ago, I had a terrible fall out with the webhost of my friend. He now knows that each time he purchases a new domain name, he is to make sure that there are no hidden charges and that he will be getting what is stipulated in the domain name and web hosting package. Most importantly, he now knows that he MUST have the domain name registered under his own name.

My cousin, Jasmine, asked me if she should set up a website after learning that I have one. I said she should because living in the UK, she could easily buy domain hosting that is not only affordable but user-friendly and comes with adequate customer support, especially for a new webmaster like herself.

One thing I like about UK-Cheapest is that they make sure to list the prices that we are paying. There are no hidden charges to surprise us at the end of the year, they allow us to make unlimited changes to our website using their friendly web building tool, unlimited nameserver changes, unlimited email forwarding addresses and many more features which other webhosts may impose charges on, like my friend discovered, unfortunately.

If you are in the United Kingdom and looking for a webhost, the good news is that your purchase of web hosting with UK-Cheapest will come with a free .UK domain name of your choice for two years. This domain name will be registered under your own name. Isn’t that great?

So it was as if it wasn’t enough to have a computer down. It’s Ok, I still have the use of another desktop computer, a laptop, an iPhone and a mobile device. Just when I wanted to work on the computer, my internet line went down. It’s OK too, I have my back up internet line in my Celcom 3G.

But what do you know? That wasn’t enough because I can’t seem to get some websites to open. Some were fine, though. Anyway, I called up Streamyx at 100 from my homeline but darnn it, even that 100 line was down! Could you believe it?

I thought that maybe I should just give up the crap and go work outside. I took my laptop to Big Apple to steal their wi-fi. Their line was fast even though I had to share with a couple of other people.

Guess what? I STILL could not work because now, my own server was down. What the hell??? After trying to access my own blogs for over half an hour to no avail, I gave up and headed up.

My Streamyx connection was back but my server was still down. It was another 30 minutes or so before I could get some of my work done for the night. Damn pissed because all of these took me 3.5 hours!!!

If you have been following my blogs long enough, you would have heard me time and again lament my lack of creative juice. I don’t even know why because some members of my family are very creative; good enough to make a living from it.

Today, I stumbled upon this social network called gre.at that is especially built for designers. This is a place where designers could showcase their work, network, share and participate in community contests to win prizes and even cash. A member recently won $100 in the 6th design award!

From what I understand, there will soon be a marketplace where designers could sell their services to buyers. Frankly, as someone who has no creativity at all, I am looking forward to this the most. You can be sure I am looking to commission work to designers of scrapbooking elements, WordPress themes and website templates for my online store and personal website. Yes, I know, I could easily find these for free on the web but they are never what I want.

The thing I like most about Gre.at is that even though there are many designs submitted, it is really easy to follow the progress of the website as a whole in the activity page or follow the work of my favorite designers.

If you like, you could also browse through designs randomly by viewing those with the highest votes, those that have been viewed the most or even those that are most discussed. This is very helpful in website navigation since there are so many new designs submitted at all times.

If you are a designer, I suggest you create an account with Gre.at now because surely they have more great things to come!

One of my computers has gone down again. Actually, it has been rather cranky for the past few months. Almost every time I turn it on, I have to do so twice because it showed the Blue Screen. I shut it off and could then successfully turn it back on again.

After months of such irritation, I couldn’t turn it on at all this morning so I decided to send it to the repair shop. I go to this shop regularly not because they have exceptional service, and in fact, some months back, they completely wiped out my data after failing to back up my files before running a format. You can be sure that I was pissed off and I made no secret about that.

The pure reason that I continue going to them is that they are open until 9pm and they are open for business even on Sundays. The others close so early that I haven’t even gotten off work yet.

Anyway, you know such shops, their staff turnover is very high. I see new faces all the time. So this morning, there’s this new girl there who attended to me. Although there were old staff too, they didn’t attend to me because they always make the newbies work, in a way, that’s how they learn on the job.

But this girl, she doesn’t know English too well, and wrote Blue Screen as Blue SKRIN. Desktop was spelt DEKSTOP among other misspellings. As a customer, how am I supposed to have confidence in their work? I hope that the technician, when he sees that work order, knows what I want specifically and will give me a call FIRST before working on it!

Gmail has added a new feature to Gmail Labs where Gmail users are now able to view multiple “inboxes” in the same page. Their definition of inboxes here means different labels and pages that you could find on the sidebar of your Gmail main inbox.

From what I tested just now, I would rather open these various labels and inboxes, if they were that important, in different tabs on my browser. Opening multiple “inboxes” in the same screen would be too crowded unless one has at least a 24in screen.

The good thing, though, is that we have total control over how these multiple inboxes are displayed, in what order and the number of messages to display. Still I don’t use Gmail that much to consider this an important additional feature to use on a permanent basis.

One thing I miss about Gmail after their recent updates with their labels and buttons is the Web Search. I used to use this search feature often enough right from my Gmail, but now the web search button seems to have gone and the only search available is mail search. I hope the developers of Gmail will bring this back.