Archive for the 'Reviews' Category

Mar 31 2008

Website Review: Blurb.com

Published by Joe under Website Reviews

Are you an aspiring writer, blogger, photographer? If the answer is yes then Blurb.com will probably come in handy for you. Blurb.com is a website that allows you to make your own books from just about anything. Whether it’s a blog, a photoblog, a bunch of short stories, poems or a bunch of photos you’ve taken that’s just sitting on your hard drive collecting dust. Blurb.com will print these items and give it that “published look” for a very affordable price. The price for a book up to 40 pages is just $12.95. The turnaround rate isn’t that bad either, the time it will take from sending in your info and having the book at your door step is currently between 10-14 days.

Here’s their current rate for a square 7×7 book:

Page Count Softcover Price Hardcover Price
  41-80 $16.95 $25.95  
  121-160 $25.95 $33.95  
  201-240 $34.95 $42.95  
  281-320 $44.95 $54.95  
  361-400 $54.95 $64.95  

They also offer different sizes such as Standard Portrait, Standard Lanscape or even Large Format Landscape. Of course the price will vary and the bigger books will cost a little bit more.

Another great option is to actually “SELL” your books. If you order a specific quantity they will give you a discount and you can sell your books at 100% profit. Ordering over 10 books will generate a 10% discount, and if you order 400+ books give them a call and they will give you a custom quote.

So given what I’ve seen, I might actually order a book and see how it pans out. It’s just a cool thing to have “my book” on the coffee table when visitors come over and say yea.. I wrote that.

Homepage: http://www.blurb.com

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Mar 26 2008

Movie Reviews: Mad Money

Published by Joe under Movie Reviews

  mad money review at josephestrada.net
Mad Money is a comedy staring Diane Keton, Queen Latifah and Katie Homes released earlier this year.
Its a story about 3 regular working women joining teams to do what no ordrinary women have done before, rob a Federal Bank
The story starts out with Diane Keaton whose a suburbian stay at home wife/mom with financial trouble.  She gets a job as a “janitor” at a Federal Bank to try and make “ends meet”, come on now, a Janitor?  They have scenes throughout the film that showed the home and trust me a “janitor’s” salary won’t pay for that home.  Anyways. the story goes on and she comes up with this bright idea to rob the place she’s working on.  She jut has to find a couple of partners which ultimately became Queen Latifah and Katie Homes.
The movie has it’s funny points.. made me chuckle a couple of times but often times I was trying to figure out what what’s going on?  Is this a drama? action? comedy? just weirded me out a little bit
Overall if you got nothing better to do, bored or just want to watch something without getting too much into it give this movie a try.
I’ll give it 3 out of 5

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Mar 25 2008

Website Review: Entrecard.com

Published by Joe under Website Reviews

entrecard.com joseph estrada review
Entrecard is a free online service that will help in generating free traffic to your website.  I found this site while browsing another blog an I’m glad I did.  In the 3 days I’ve had the service, it has consistently generated traffic to my site on a daily basis.  In case you haven’t tried it out I suggest you do.  It’s an excellent way for a new or established blog to get new traffic.
The first thing to do is go to their website and sign up (http://www.entrecard.com).  Then your account will be activated instantly you don’t have to validate through email etc…
You will need to create your “entrecard” which is a small graphic 125×125 pixels.
They do have default entrecards but I suggest you create your own as this is your “face” on the internet.  Sort of like a internet business card.

The website works like this, you drop your card on another blog on the network and you get one credit.  What I mean by drop your card is that you will need to go to their actual blog, find the entrecard box and click on drop  See screenshot here:

entrecard.com joseph estrada review

Then after you drop, your card will be shown on that blog owner’s, entrecard inbox.  Then if they choose (often times they do) they can click on your card, visit your site and drop their own card.  If they do this you will receive a credit as well.

So for each drop, the dropper and the receiver both get 1 credit.  The difference is that the receiver’s credit is worth a little bit more because this is how entrecard.com calculates how much it will cost for advertisers to advertise on your site.

Now that you have earned credits from dropping and receiving drops you can now use these credits to advertise your blog on other sites.  You do this by going to “campaign” and find the blogs you want to advertise in.  The price to advertise is based on a formula in which they take the average of “receiver” drops that blog receives in the last 5 days and multiplies by 2.

A word of caution though, just because a blog is one of the top and most expensive, it does not mean it’s the “best” blog to advertise in.  Some blogs are just drop crazy and their price escalates because of this.  A good way to tell if a blog is one of these is to go to that blog’s campaign and check the “drop rank”  and if it has these ranks:

Takes dropping Very Very Seriously
Deeply committed – Deadly serious. A drop master
Or something that says “addiction”

You should use caution before advertising on these.
Overall entrecard is a great service and it’s free so go check it out.

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Mar 19 2008

Website Reviews: BlogRush.com

Published by Joe under Website Reviews

Blogrush - JosephEstrada.net Reviews BlogRush
So I was surfing the web a couple of days ago and found an interesting website, Blogrush.com. The website’s main purpose is to drive traffic to your blog by displaying a widget on your site that shows other blogs. In return, you get credits for each time the widget is displayed on your site. W ith each credit, your blog is displayed on other blogs throughout its network. Seems interesting enough so I joined, as you’ve probably noticed from the little blogrush widget on my sidebar.
I’ve been using the site for 2 days and so far my blog have been syndicated 300 times throughout the network. I was a bit surprised by that since my blog is just starting and I don’t think I get more than 100 uniques a day. But that is a good surprise. The reason for this is the fact that the site gives you bonus credits for traffic generated on your site. For example, in the 2 days this blog has only generated 74 unique visitors thus giving me 74 credits. But the site added an additioanl 328 bonus credits, which is a good thing.
In addition, the 300 times my blog has been shown, I was able to generate 3 clicks. That’s 3 more visitors my site would not have gotten if I didn’t join the site. I know it doesn’t sound like much to the “big” blogs out there.. But for me it’s something… the more visitors the betterSo if you haven’t checked it out yet.. give it a try.. you may actually like it.. Oh yeah if you decide to join..

Give me a little love by clicking on my referral link ..

if you don’t mind..

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Mar 18 2008

Blog Reviews: Dooce.com

Published by Joe under Blog Reviews

Joseph Estrada Reviews Dooce.com
I’ve recently stumbled upon Dooce.com which is a blog written by Heather B. Armstrong. She is a 30-something stay at home mom living in Salt Lake City. She is married with one daughter and has with two dogs.
Her blog (http://www.Dooce.com) has been running since 2001 and has won several awards throughout through the years in the blogosphere world. This year alone she swept through the 2008 Weblog awards (http://2008.bloggies.com) by winning the following awards:
Best American Weblog
Best Designed Weblog
Lifetime Achivement
Weblog of the year
I haven’t gone through each post she has written since she’s been around since 2001. But with the ones that I’ve read I’ve been impressed. Her writing is to the point and she holds nothing back. In fact when she first started her blog she was fired from her previous job. She was a web designed in Los Angeles at the time.
Her blog features a daily photoblog, a daily chuck photo blog, a daily style photoblog and a regularly updated blog.

The daily photoblog shows her life journey as she sees it posts anything from a icy winter day in salt lake to a book of disney books in her daughters collection.

The daily chuck photo blog is a daily updated photoblog of their 6 year old “supermutt” There’s some weird and interesting photos in this section of her website. Definitely worth the look. More recently however, the section has been run by her new puppy a an Australian Shepherd named Coco. So maybe she can re-name this section Daily Chuck & Coco or something like that.

The Daily style section showcases her sense of style as she photographs items they have collected throughout her life.

This blog is truly a work of art and anyone who is remotely interested in blogging, photography, family or in life should definitely give it a visit. In fact I think they already do.

My Rating: 4.5/5.0

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Mar 17 2008

Movie Review: JUNO

Published by Joe under Movie Reviews

Juno Poster
I haven’t heard of this film until last week when my wife asked me to find Juno’s OST. After finding and listening to the soundtrack I was really impressed and asked my wife what the movie was about. She gave me her summary from the advertisement she’s seen and we decided we were gonna watch it this weekend.
The film stars Jennifer Gardner and Jason Bateman as a couple that couldn’t conceive and was looking to adopting a baby. Ellen Page plays the pregnant teenager “Juno” who decided that she couldn’t abort the baby but also could not take care of it herself.
The story starts when Juno turns to the local Pennysaver in hopes of finding an advertisement that will solve all her problems.  And low and behold she finds a real elegant photo of Jen and Jason and knew just from the photo alone that they were the ones that will be raising her child.
The film was well written and original. There were great lines in this film and Ellen played the teenage pregnant role part to a perfection. Jennifer played the desperate woman who needed to be mother part great as well. There was nothing predictable about this film as you were often left wondering how it would end. Would Ellen give the child to the couple or is she gonna feel connected to the child and decide to keep it herself?
She then realizes that she in love with the boy that got her pregnant to begin with who was played by Michael Cera (from Superbad).  This of course causes more twists and turns to the plot. This makes Juno confused but yet through all these emotions she still manages to keep her composure and go on.  Let me say that although it may sound like real stressful time for Juno she did not let it show.  In fact she was the life of the film that gave it a comedic twist.
The ending was an unexpected one to say the least. I was really impressed with this whole film and will definitely recommend it to anybody out there but specially if you have a daughter, or a teenager at that. So go out and check this film out.. it’s definitely not a waste of time. I’ll give it a 4.5/5.0

One response so far

Mar 09 2008

Review: Last.FM

Published by Joe under Website Reviews

lastfm.jpgLast.FM has been around for awhile and is considered the main player in the evolution of the online music social revolution. I am a late bloomer as far as being a user as I only registered back in December of 2007. But I’ve been a loyal user since my discovery. Last.FM has a ton of features and once you have registered you will be greeted with a myriad of choices on what to do to get started with the revolution. The main feature that draws me to the site is “Scrobbling”. Basically Scrobbling is Last.FM’s way of logging the music you play within your Media Player (iTUNES, WinAmp, Media Player etc..) and create charts based on what you’ve listened to. But as I just mentioned they have alot of things going on for the site.
The following are some of the features I use and have found valuable are:
  • Last.FM client – This is an external program that will run in the background and will scrobble the songs you play. The client also has a plug-in that will scrobble items you play on your iPOD. This is the feature that I really benefit from, since I listen to most of my songs away from the PC.
  • Charts – After scrobbling your music, last.FM creates charts that you can modify and browse through. I find this feature interesting, I can go back a certain week/month and see which artists, songs I listened to during that time period.
  • Neighbors – Last.FM will generate 50 neighbors (other users) each week for you based on the musical taste that you have scrobbled.
  • Friends – This is after all a social network. Making music buddies is a breeze, you can request a friend request to a random user, neighbor or anybody that you find interesting. You may also get friend requests from people.
  • Widgets – An awesome feature that Last.FM offers, you can have your recently listened tracks show up on your facebook, myspace, blog etc…
  • Journal - You can also create a musical journal from within the website.
  • Groups – You can join or create your own.
There are a ton of other things that the website offers and all this is free and and really addicting. I’m still in the process of fully discovering the site. So far in 4 months of listening, I have listened to a total of 4882 tracks, my top Artist is Jack Johnson who I’ve listened to 349 times.
If you haven’t started yet, I’d say go ahead and start scrobbling. It’s fun and pretty much addicting.

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