My own clickbank/adwords story: I had heard good things about clickbank, despite being filled with spammy stuff. I found a product I had personal interest in and was actually pretty cool, signed up for adwords, and submitted an ad to be ran. A day later and I'm banned from adwords never to have an account with them again because I was advertising this product.
Unlike your experience, it happened to me so fast it made my head spin. I called support, and they said they couldn't even talk to me because my account was banned. I emailed an explanation to start their appeals process, and was shot down incredibly fast.
I really need an account now, but I'm not allowed to... So yep--it does suck to be us.
I'm a big fan of their free e-mail forwarding and customer support (they got a domain back for me that I had let expire out of its grace period).
But, I'm surprised so many people tolerated godaddy for this long just because of their control panel. Every time I have to go in there and help a client/friend, I begin to feel like an idiot almost immediately. It's impossible to find anything intuitively and I feel like their design changes every few months.
Namecheaps panel isn't pretty by a long shot, but it's so clutter free I just don't care.
Not to defend them, but GoDaddy's iPad app is pretty good, and I use that rather than their control panel whenever I can. I am fed up with them for other reasons, so this comes at a good time.
I've long been fascinated by the making of physical products. It seems to much harder than software. I feel like I can make bits dance from my keyboard, but assembling atoms is much harder. Any chance you could write a blog about how you made this, the challenges, and the like? Also, possible to bootstrep your way through it?
I gave a talk at the Hacker Dojo recently about starting up a hardware company. They posted a section of the talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afH8KGv0W24 Happy to chat about this kind of stuff eric AT getinpulse.com
I've had a gmail account since the service started, and I have an email address thats just my first name--a very common first name. Because of this, 15 email addresses are associated with mine (as in, I can reset their passwords and what not). Not really the same kind of deal, and it doesn't really affect me--just the people who signed up with my email. Just had to rant about it.
Over the years I've bought a few laptops off ebay that have worked out very well. Dual core Dells with two gigs of RAM are in the $300 range. Sometimes the batteries can be iffy, but otherwise they work out great.
It makes sense that the sports genre was chosen. With scores, winners, teams, tournaments and the like all being mentioned in pretty much every article out there, it stands to reason that it would be fairly easy to parse them all and get good data. I'd imagine tech and celebrity writing would also work well.
Political stories have such a wide range of views, this approach would produce gibberish until you sort out all the articles on a left-right scale.
I enjoy reading about education here in the US, and in other countries. It's all well and good to compare our system to others. But, I can't help but wonder what the chances will be that the system here will ever actually be reformed.
It's conceivable that they don't store passwords in plaintext. They could be hashing the last 4 digits separately... but they are probably store passwords in plaintext.
I have terrible vision, and utilize the browsers zoom function a lot. On their new site, I can zoom without having to do a lot of horizontal scrolling (just in Firefox though, doesn't seem to work as well in Chrome). So, aside from the aesthetic for the masses, there's an element of accessibility here that shouldn't be overlooked.
I agree, except that they totally break zooming on mobile devices (or at least iPhone). I hate it when I rotate my phone and the text reflows at the same size instead of zooming to fill the wider viewport.
On the plus side, you don't have the issue of links breaking because they send iOS devices to their mobile ghetto that ignores everything in the URL after the domain name.
Unlike your experience, it happened to me so fast it made my head spin. I called support, and they said they couldn't even talk to me because my account was banned. I emailed an explanation to start their appeals process, and was shot down incredibly fast.
I really need an account now, but I'm not allowed to... So yep--it does suck to be us.