Bargain Fiending is Tiring Business and Other News

So, BargainFiend.com is barely a week old now, and is well on its way to being completed.  I need to explore my options for finding a HS or college student to post deals on the site (for cash), and find a way to expire deals more efficiently.  After all, I’m a full time programmer… I can only do so much to keep the site up and maintained during the day.

I haven’t worked on the eCommerce site lately, or on the local ratings site, but I’ll get on those here soon.  Hopefully, those will be successful.   

Apart from the web, in real life news, Katie and I are doing well.  We’re shopping around for some computer furniture for the office (since her Mom is snagging my current desk).   We’re also planning a trip for sometime this summer… Katie’s eyeing Nashville, or Vegas.  I’m eyeing my wallet… since we’ll be going to europe early next year as well.

Lastly, Katie’s uncle and aunt – Chris and Ann – brought their baby (Max) home Friday.  He was born prematurely and was in the NICU for two weeks, but he’s a trooper.  He’s been able to gain weight and keep his temperature steady.  They brought him home and showed him off to the family on Friday, hosting a cookout.  It’s about time things started going their way.

BargainFiend.com is now live

BargainFiend.com is now up and running.  It may have been a little premature to release to the public, but I figure it won’t get any hits for a while…

I still need to add items to the menu, and add article content (which will take a long time to write), and come up with a better way of getting content on the site.  Right now I’m scouring the internet for posts and manually adding the good deals to the site.  It takes a good bit of time to get that done…

The other thing that I realized today is that I need an easy way of ‘expiring’ deals.  I need a css class and a method in wordpress that will let me mark a post/deal as expired and have it switch that post’s css class to expired.  I’ll get to those over the next few days.

Maybe I should have waited to release the site until these things were taken care of, but I was too anxious to get it up and started.  I hope everyone likes it… if not, let me know how I can improve it.  I’m not going to be sensitive about it… It was created in a weekend (thanks to the flexibility of wordpress) and could stand to be improved.

Almost finished with the design of Bargain Fiend

So, in my last post I talked about spending time doing web work on side projects.  Fortunately, the three day weekend has given me time to do just that.

I decided to start off by attempting to modify a WordPress installation to do what I wanted – show short summaries of “deals” on the front page.  Clicking each link should result in the display of the full details of the deal.  Those details include links to the product page, and any information about how to take advantage of the deal (coupon codes, Mail In Rebate amounts, etc.). 

So, three days after starting I’m almost there (the site is still on my local machine only, though).  I’ve styled the main page, made use of jquery to animate the show/hide action of the full deal details and am about to finish up styling the search and single column pages.  I also need to make sure there’s a place for ads – after all, the site is intended to be profitable.  Later, I’ll add some articles on finding the best deal in a number of different areas (travel, cars, cables, etc.). 

So, by the time all this is up and running, I should be able to just make a quick blog post on Bargain Fiend and have it appear as I want.  I’ll probably add forums later, and sign up for some affiliate programs once people start visiting the site more often.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I added a plugin that allows for the functionality of facebook connect on Bargain Fiend.  People can login to see who’s been visiting the site.  They can also share deal links and comment using their facebook accounts.  I think it’s a nice feature, one that people may enjoy… and that may keep people using my site rather than other bargain sites (maybe).

Anywho, I’m surprised that it’s only taken a weekend to get this close-to-done… and that includes most of Friday and Saturday morning’s work being scrapped due to my unhappiness with my own graphic design skills.  It really helps to base a project on a good framework – WordPress in this case… and in the e-commerce site’s case, I’m using Magento.  In both cases, I’m just using pre-existing functionality, tweaking it a bit, and skinning the site to look as I want it.  It’s much easier than starting from scratch… that’s for people with time and/or money.

Web work

After years of ideas, some taken and used by others when I failed to act, I'm finally going to start trying out some ideas of my own online. 

I'll be starting a bargain site, which will probably be a pretty basic website at first in order to get the page out there and moving.  I'll also be designing an e-commerce website for a friend, and if that goes well will try to offer similar services to other businesses with existing retail locations.  A few other ideas will be attempted at some point, a ratings site (vague, I know), an IT problem/solution site, and a political blog where I can wax political without boring my friends and family here on the personal site.  

It's entirely possible that this newfound motivation will fizzle, but for now, I'm tired of possessing skills and the time to make money on my own without actually doing anything toward that end.  I figure I'll be able to motivate myself with any success I see from the first few sites, and that should eventually snowball and carry me through to WORLD DOMINATION.  Actually, I'm just shooting for a nice chunk of side income - I have no intention of leaving my day job.

I've got my server, approval from the wife, the motivation and my big boy pants on, so I figure I'm ready to get started.  

www.PlatePass.com and Hertz team up to take my money

Photo by Everdred

It turns out that the trip Katie and I took to Dallas in April was not satisfied with just being plagued with bad luck, it’s now reaching out from the past to charge our credit cards and raise my blood pressure.

When I went to pay our credit card bill from our Dallas trip, I noticed a second, strange charge for $9.00 to WWWPLATEPASSCOM (and a subsequent $2.25 a few days later, just for good measure).  I went over to their website, thinking maybe my wife had charged som ething she hadn’t mentioned to me. 

Apparently, www.PlatePass.com is a company that provides a “service” that allows people to be charged electronically for tolls incurred on toll roads.  Certain roads are equipped with gear to take pictures of your license plate and relay that plate information to the tollway authority, at which point they will bill you for your toll charges.  If it’s a rental car, they send a bill to them and in turn bill the renter. 

No one at the rental booth told us that we’d be getting this “service”, and we were never offered a way to opt out.  Plate Pass says it was in our rental agreement (a signed agreement is being sent by mail to us, since we’ve thrown it away by now, so I can verify this) where we should have been notified that we would be responsible for any charges incurred. 

Katie and I weren’t even aware we even went on any toll roads (and are still doubtful that we did), since we didn’t see any toll booths.  The PlatePass people informed us that the roads might not have had booths, but that it still could charge… without a sign or anything, I guess. 

It really burned me up when I got further into a conversation with the PlatePass customer service people.  They insisted that we’d been on the toll roads, that it was us, and that we were obligated to pay for this service because we’d signed the rental agreement.  I asked if she could refund the administrative charges at the very least, since it wasn’t made clear that we were going to be charged fees in addition to being charged for using unfamiliar roads which may or may not have been toll roads. 

She said they can’t refund customers because they’ve signed rental agreements, which is kind of like saying that Best Buy can’t take returns because the customer purchased a product from them once before.  It makes no sense.  Because we signed an agreement, they CAN charge us, but that doesn’t mean they CAN’T refund us.  The agreement (buried in a rental agreement) that we had to pay something (which we knew nothing about), doesn’t have any bearing on whether a company CAN offer refunds.

Apparently, she didn’t have the authority to offer refunds of any kind, and when asked whether there was a supervisor or anyone else there who had the authority to help me, she said no.  My only option, according to PlatePass, was to contact the North Texas Tollway Authority for images of the rental car’s plates. 

After a few minutes, wherein I questioned the ethicality of their business model (akin to auto-renewing trial subscriptions, hidden fees, surcharges, etc.), we ended the conversation without resolution.  I honestly think they hand-picked this lady for the special way in which she conveys apathy.  She had an amazing way of saying ‘We’re right, you’re wrong.  You’re the three thousandth person I’ve had to talk to today who didn’t read their rental agreement and thinks this is unethical’, with her tone alone.

Anywho, I wanted to get my frustration out on the web for anyone else who’s been surprised by this practice.  Like many other people, I’m tired of having to keep my guard up at all times to avoid being nickel and dimed.  Granted, I did (or my wife, in this case) sign something without reading it, but to be fair this service is new to rental cars and should’ve been properly explained.  Additional services should be opted into, rather than being forced to opt-out of these things… it’s just dirty what companies will do for a buck these days.

If I get resolution, I’ll post the process for that here on the blog.  If not, join me in my burning desire to stop doing business with companies who opt me in to tangential services without a clear indication of such. 

Fiber Optics – Coming To Shreveport… Never

So, I’ve come to terms with the fact that Shreveport may never get fiber optic internet services.  My grandparents (in their 80’s) currently have Verizon FIOS in Texas.  If they wanted to, they could be surfing the internet at breakneck speeds… hosting servers, downloading Hi-Def content… all without a problem – assuming they knew how to do so.

Me, I’m limited to a choice between ATT DSL (<6Mbps down/768Kbps up) and Comcast (<12Mbps).  Both are close to $70 when all is said and done (you have to get phone or cable along with internet to get their lowest price).  My grandparents have the option of getting 20Mbps down/20Mbps up for $65.  Other cities, such as Wilson, NC have municipally owned fiber optic networks – where the city owns and runs the cable, internet and phone company through a publicly owned fiber network – have unlimited local and long distance + 81 channels of cable + 10Mbps down/10Mbps up all for $99.95/mo . 

Of course, this city owned fiber network is meeting much resistance from Time Warner, etc., who are lobbying to pass laws making this kind of great service illegal.  After all, who can compete when a company is offering legitimate, reasonably priced options?   Reasonable prices stemming from competition would be downright un-American.  To American things up a bit they decided to try to force people to have one legal option - them, with their high prices… They’re also pushing internet caps on those of us who have no other options (did I just link to the Huffington Post?), since their networks are so congested with people actually using their internet connections.  I digress…

I actually would consider moving to a city where they had a service like this if I weren’t happy with my current job.  It’s just such a nice service to have, especially being someone who is technologically inclined.  Setting up a server from home, hosting multiple web sites as a side business, etc... would be no problem.  

Like I said, I’m resigned to the fact that it will be a very long time until we have those services here in Shreveport, if ever.  Unfortunately, our city is set on building Convention Centers that no one wants to use, instead of things that may attract younger, wealthier taxpayers such as a Dog Park or adopting advanced technologies… it’s sad.  Congrats to those people who do, however.  Your government clearly works for your interests, instead of just using your money for theirs.