The Fabulous Photo Gift Mug

Fed up with slurping your tea or coffee from a boring old mug? Then what you need is a fabulous personalised photo mug.

Our ceramic personalised photo mugs make a great surprise gift idea and liven up any tea or coffee break and they're dishwasher safe.

Unlike some personalised photo mug companies out there who only print one side of the mug, we print both sides (wrap around style) so it doesn't matter whether you've a long panoramic picture or a more square image.

What's more, are competitive price also includes free delivery to any UK address.

So now the next time you're stuck for a photo gift idea or you just feel like treating yourself, try our new photo gift mugs.

Each item is hand printed by us in our own workshop to ensure quality and faithful reproduction of your chosen image – perhaps a family member, a pet, a friend or colleague, even a special occasion or holiday memory.

Click here to visit our photo mug shop page now and place your order.

Passing the 100'th Blog entry

Hi all

Just wanted to announce that the Fabulous Photo Gifts Blog has just passed it's 100th Blog entry.

In the relatively short time that it's been running, we've covered everything from international artwork sales of Purple 13 artwork (by Mandy Collins) to helpful SEO articles for small businesses and even speculated on the next Bond film theme song artist.

Articles have been Dugg, Del.icio.us'd, bookmarked and discussed so a big thank you to all who have contributed to our syndication.

We've also undergone a major re-design to reflect both the social bookmarking features that were recently introduced and the change of direction to incorporate more news from Fabulous Photo Gifts and the gift giving world in particular.

In fact, you'll now find us on a number of Blog catalogue sites including Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogcatalog etc.

Not a subscriber? Why not subscribe now or if you prefer, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed - the url is: http://www.purple13.co.uk/rss.xml

We now look forward to the next 100 posts and sharing them with an even bigger audience.

New Bond film director announced - Amy Winehouse to sing theme?

As if Photo Gifts weren't exciting enough, when we need a little extra excitement in the Fabulous Photo Gifts workshop, we re-count great Bond movie moments ( we're actually a bit of a fan).

So it was great to hear the 22nd Bond Film announced over the weekend to brighten an otherwise decidedly damp couple of days in Derbyshire.

As yet untitled, Daniel Craig will be playing 007 for the second time following his great debut in Casino Royale.

Production is slated to start this Autumn with release planned for November 2008.

Already gossip is hot that Amy Winehouse will be asked to sing the title theme song and her 'nomination' has apparently already won backing from former bond singer Shirley Bassey who has sung 3 bond film tracks – Goldfinger (still the best by far), Diamonds are forever and Moonraker.

The Director for the 22nd Bond film will be Marc Forster – the director of Finding Neverland and Monster's Ball which starred Bond girl Halle Berry.

The Fabulous Photo Mousemat

What better way to liven up your work desk than with a personalised photo mousemat.

Our hard wearing fabric photo mouse mats feature your favourite photograph, hand printed in our own workshops to ensure faithful reproduction of the uploaded (or supplied photo) before being carefully wrapped and posted.

Normal delivery is just 5 to 7 days so its never too late to order a fabulous photo gift mousemat for someone special.

Go on, brighten up a family members, or friends desk and place your order today.

To view full price and product specifications and purchase, click here.

We have more fabulous photo gift ideas on our website at www.fabulousphotogifts.co.uk

We'll be introducing our other new photo gifts from our new Summer line up over the coming weeks - Mugs, Tea-Trays, Placemats, Coasters, T-Shirts, Chopping Boards, Money Boxes, Novelty Jigsaws and more.

Not just Photo Jigsaws (although we are famous for them)

From the lack of recent Blog entries, you'd probably guess we've been busy and you'd be right.

After months of samples, test prints and on-line testing, we're very pleased to be finally able to present to customers a whole new line up of quality photo gift ideas that you can personalise with your own photographs or images and order on-line.

All of our new gift ideas are hand printed by us in our own workshop, to ensure the very best quality and faithful reproduction of your photograph, before being carefully packaged and dispatched.

What's more, our new range of gifts are normally delivered within 5 to 7 working days, unlike our traditional Jigsaw Puzzle range which due to the manufacturing process is normally delivered within 10 to 14 days.

Our new exciting photo gift line up looks like this: Ceramic Mugs, Fabric Mousemats, Cork Coasters, Serving/Place Mats, Cushions Chopping Boards (round and rectangular), Tea Trays, Ceramic Money Box, Childs T-Shirt (6 sizes), Womens Fit V Neck T-Shirt (4 sizes), Unisex T-shirt (small to XXL) all in 100% combed cotton and a new range of Wooden Jigsaws – A5, A4, A4 'I Love You' message and A4 'Happy Birthday' message.

We hope you're as excited about our new line up of great photo gift ideas as we are and we look forward to serving all your personalised photo gift needs.

We'll be introducing our new line up in more detail over the coming days – right here – so stay tuned.

High praise indeed

"Dear Mandy

I received the jigsaw in the post today and would just like to say how pleased I am with it. It is fantastic and I know will make my father grin when he gets it for his birthday! Thank you so much for the excellent service and wonderful jigsaw.

Kind Regards
E.T"

The above is another recent example of the kind of service that prompts our customers to put digit to keyboard and send such endorsements of our photo gift products and our services.

If you can't same the same about your last online gift shopping experience, then why not head over to Fabulous Photo Gifts now and do some online shopping with a real feel good factor included at no extra charge.

Atlantis comes home

If you are or if you aren't a fan of the Space Program, it's still an incredible site to see tubby space-suited figures floating around in the weightless voids of space.

The latest space shuttle mission is due to land this very afternoon - you can watch it on NASA tv (www.nasa.gov) and we've been flicking between their TV chanel and web design preperations for our own forthcoming launch of a whole new range of photo gifts. (more on that in another blog).

So while we're conducting our own countdown to this weekend, we'd like to pass on our congratulations to the Crew of Atlantis (mission STS 117)and the ground crews working hard to bring them home safe and sound, on another outstanding mission success.

God speed.

Tiswas reunited - did you see?

Did anyone catch the Tiswas Reunion on tv last weekend?

Pure nostalgia – Compost Corner, Spit the Dog, The cage, Phantom Flan Flinger and more.

ATV's Tiswas was the first full length Saturday morning TV show for kids and was produced by Chris Tarrant. It starred Chris himself, Sally James, Lenny Henry, Bob Carolgees and regulars like Frank Carson and Sylvester Mycoy (remember his Werewolf act?).

I watched it with my 11 year old son, not sure if he'd laugh or not. Well, in the end, we both sat there laughing like drains. 25 years on and it was still as funny as I'd remembered it.

A colleague rued that he'd never been allowed to watch it and had to sneak round to friends houses to watch it but keep flicking over to Noel on the BBC just so he could recount what he'd supposed to have watched.

Quite funny really, Tiswas had a slight anarchic feel to it and at school, you were either a Tiswas or a Swap Shop camp.

It all lead to a top 5 TV catchphrases but can you match them to the show they're from? Answers at the bottom (not!)

Compost Corner
It's a good guess, you're not right
Have a look at what you could have won
From Norwich, its the quiz of the week
Only you can see me Jeff

We might be showing our age there a bit and hopefully, not bad taste in TV entertainment.

Leave your own TV memories.

Of course, here at Fabulous Photo Gifts, we're too busy really to have time to watch television, and can recommend a photo jigsaw instead of a few square eye hours.

Link that Halibut

The other day, Purple 13 received an email from someone asking us to engage in a reciprocol link exchange with them.

The email looked legitimate but had a flavour of being generated by some link building software/company – it even had a link to 'link wizard'.

The email read:
Please use the link information provided below:
Site Name: Alaska Halibut Fishing Charter
Description: One of the oldest outfits on the peninsula. Well established, family owned and operated charter fishing. In this business, experience counts, over 15 years of knowledge and expertise to make your trip a success.

Now I may not know everything about SEO but I do know that non related links are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard and can even harm your own standing with Google and others who will dismiss such links as not worthy. Heaven forbid you get classed as a link farm – then just watch your ratings plummet.

I wrote a very polite reply back pointing this out so hopefully they'll learn something and drop their automated link building like a hot halibut.

I did suggest they may wish to link to one of Mandy's artworks entitled 'Strange Fish', you can see it here for yourself.

Admittedly only just on topic but they did ask. We shall not be reciprocating the link on this occasion.

Or perhaps they'd like to remind their UK visitors to order a fabulous personalised photo gift featuring their prize catch on their return to the UK.

My point? Well firstly beware of such emails. I'm sure out of the 10,000+ emails they sent, they'll get at least a dozen yes which they'll consider a success, however, you do fear that these links will do more harm then good to both sides.

Watch very carefully who you link to, ask questions and don't be afraid to say no.

If we can save just one Halibut, then it'll be worth it.

Fabulous Photo Gifts on Technorati

Technorati Profile

Image upload FAQ's from Fabulous Photo Gifts

Q) My photograph won't upload.

On very rare occasions, customers may experience difficulty in personalising the gifts in their shopping basket on Fabulous Photo Gifts. If your upload isn't working, try our handy tips below or just contact us for help and advice.

From our experience of those customers, we've put together the following tips to help make your image upload successful.

When personalising your gift during the checkout process at Fabulous Photo Gifts, when your image upload is successful, you'll see a little confirmation “Upload Successful” in the top left hand of your screen, the product picture will change to a small version of your own photo and the status will change from personalise (in purple) to personalised (in green). If you've personalised all the items in your basket, you'll then be shown the checkout button so you can enter your card details and complete your order.

If you don't see the confirmation message, change of product image etc or you get an “upload failed” message, then it's usually due to one of the following 4 reasons:-

Your Internet connection speed may mean a large file takes a long time to upload. Have patience.

Your connection to our image server 'times out' before the upload has completed. A slow connection speed in conjunction with a large image file may cause this – try again or try making your file size smaller.

Your image file is too big. We can accept file sizes up to 10Mb, however, many Internet Service Providers may cap your outgoing file upload size to smaller sizes than this. Try resizing your image.

The most common reason for a failed upload is when your file name has corrupted. This usually happens when a file name has a space or non-conforming character (e.g a slash /) in it. We usually recommend opening your image and SAVING AS giving your file a title like jigsaw1 and saving as a .jpg format. This usually resolves most uploading issues. Don't worry about the file name – we don't receive the file name so it won't affect how your order is processed. Our uploading program assigns its own 10 digit unique number to each image.

If you still struggle to get your image upload to go through, we can try one of two things.

Either email us your intended image and we'll email back a small thumbnail of the image that you can then use to process your order and payment. We'll tie up the original image visually from the small upload and process as normal.

Alternatively, print off our postal order form and send your order, together with your print or CD to us for prompt attention. If you're intending to scan your own photo and then send it, make sure you scan at 300dpi and check your scan at full print size. You'd be amazed how often 'home scans' show dust and other marks on the image that we cannot remove.

We offer a free scanning service using the latest scanning equipment and software and would rather scan your photograph for you then receive a poor quality scan we can do little to adjust. (Maximum scanning size is A4)

We suggest if you are sending prints or CD's that you send them by recorded delivery as Fabulous Photo Gifts cannot be responsible for any lost or damaged material until it's in our signed for possession. We return all photographs and CD (if required) by recorded delivery. (We charge a £1 extra for this postal service but this just goes towards covering your return recorded delivery cost. If you do not require your print or CD returning, just omit the £1 extra postage cost).

Make sure your photograph is packaged well in stiff backed envelope or similar to avoid damage.

Please don't be tempted to print off your own copy from a scan – very often we receive 2nd generation prints printed on normal paper (not photo glossy etc) and this again will affect the overall quality of your finished photo gift.

If you are having difficulties getting your image to upload, or you require any other information or help, please do not hesitate to contact us, either by email: enquiry@fabulousphotogifts.co.uk or by telephone: 0845 003 4118.

We're friendly, knowledgeable and have many years experience in image manipulation and digital photography. We want your photo gift to exceed your expectations to the point where we always try to remove any red-eye or other obvious blemishes, tonal corrections, contrast and colour etc as part of the service.

Q) Another question we're often asked is “How can I check the file size of my photograph?”.

This is a bit easier. Navigate to the folder where your digital photo file is stored. Then right click on the photograph file itself and select properties. This will tell you how many Kb or Mb your file size is. Remember, there's a 1000 Kb's to 1 Mb.

You can check out more frequently asked questions – real questions from real customers – on our helpful FAQ's page. Click here to visit it.

You'll also find helpful product specifications including printable area etc on our product specifications page.

We're shortly be adding a whole new range of photo gifts including mugs, mousemats, coasters, tea trays, chopping boards etc and we'll be updating the specification page with these new products also.

The Vikings are coming

We promised to keep you up to date with any sales of Purple 13 artwork or licenced stock photography and no sooner do we promise then we have to deliver.

Mandy received word today that another of her Viking photographs has been chosen for an educational publication.

Being published worldwide and with a print run of 50,000, the image on the inside cover has been licenced for the next 3 years.

This is Mandy's 5th licenced sale from her Viking shoot, the other 4 sales all being used in educational / historic reference publications.

So it's away to the Fjords, avoiding any references to Kirk Douglas or Tony Curtis along the way.

Mandy Collins is the proprietor of Fabulous Photo Gifts – specialists in personalised photo jigsaws and has long pursued her interest in photography and creating abstract art from those images.

You can view some of Mandy's work on her art website – www.purple13.co.uk. Purple 13 is her studio name. Here you can view over 500 completed works and purchase them in canvas, print or framed finishes.

Are you using auto discovery for your RSS Feed?

Auto Discovery? What's that?

Well until quite recently I thought I'd done everything right by creating an RSS Feed etc, but I was wrong.

You see, there's a little snippet of code that allows browsers like Mozilla and Safari to auto detect when your website has an RSS Feed and display the little orange icon in the url address bar.

This makes it extremely easy for visitors to add your RSS Feed to their reader.

Making it easier should equate to more traffic for your feed...

So 'how can I get this wondrous feature?' I hear you ask. I've pasted the code below for our own website - you'll just need to amend the url for your RSS Feed and the feed description.

Alternatively, you may wish to use an online service like feedforall to generate the code for you - just type in your title and url and hey presto, some nice code to copy and paste.

The code needs to go in between your <head> </head> tags.

Here's the bit of code i used:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Fabulous Photo Gifts - News, Features, Gossip, SEO articles" href="http://www.purple13.co.uk/rss.xml" </a>

Click here to add the Fabulous Photo Gifts RSS Feed to your reader.

Why Social Bookmarking is so important - part 2

Seo article

Why Social book marking is so important

Watch out, watch out! No there’s not a Humphrey about (a Humphrey was a red and white striped straw that used to roam in gangs looking to pinch kids milk in the popular ‘70’s milk TV adverts – gave kids nightmares for years), but rather a much larger straw intent on drinking up as much online content as it can and blowing it back at you ‘in your face’.

The ‘straw’ of course is Google.

With the not so recent acquisition of Utube and the more recent acquisition of Feedburner, there’s no doubt in my mind anymore that Google is building towards a global domination of serving information the likes of which have never been seen (if you don’t count the World Service broadcasts) only it’s not London calling. This time it’s a different tune altogether.

At present, you can perform searches on Google, Google Blog search and Google image search. There are other bits waiting in the labs you can play with but these are the main three.

With the more recent purchases, I reckon Google is hurrying along plans to present a new kind of search engine where when you type in a search query, the results presented will be a mix of listing, blog and images all rolled into one.

Personally I think this would be a mistake.

It’s OK if you’re searching for something really off-beat but for every day search’s, what it will do is mean you’ll have to use longer search queries to get to the meat of what you’re looking for. Searchers are going to have to be a lot more specific in future.

I’d prefer it if Google developed a new interface whereby a search result is broken into 3 vertical frames – general, blog and image all within the same page. From that you could then click on which ‘field’ you want to explore further but perhaps the other ‘fields’ could minimalise rather than disappear altogether.

This will have huge implications for PPC campaigns as I suspect you’ll have a choice of which ‘frame’ you want your campaign to appear in and depending on the field, I suspect you may pay a premium.

Of course the scenario I’ve painted above will have huge implications for SEO to. It’s not hard to imagine that multiple frame ideas will result in less results per page and those early page positions will be keenly contested.

Which brings me back to my original question - why social book marking is so important.

If Google does adopt a model like the one above, then a ‘web presence’ simply won’t do anymore. Webmasters and SEO’s will have to adopt social book marking techniques like Blogs and RSS feeds, building up networks of followers on the likes of Digg and Del.ici.ous to get their content syndicated as much as possible.

Because Google will roll out search results based on social recommendation and relevancy, and content alone (whilst good content will always have a place) will become less important than the number of people regarding it as important.

If you haven’t already started then now is a perfect time to start socialising.

Get a Blog, get an RSS Feed on your website and start publishing to the masses. One comment I hear and read time and again is ‘what would I write about?’ I won’t bore you with the answers here – many people, better qualified than I have already answered that one. In a nutshell, anything that you think someone out there might like to read and share with others. New products, Q & A on your particular field, the office cat even. And if you still can’t think of anything, then turn your staff loose – they’re a creative bunch – you’ll soon find you have everything from pot roast recipes to how to deal with a scraped knee at the park attracting an audience.

Google have their own Blog creator – Blogger.com. Its easy to use and moderate comments. Once you get into it, you’ll find there’s loads of help on the net for customising and adding functionality as well as making book marking easier for readers. Little things like adding a Digg this to the bottom of each post puts you one step (or should that be click) nearer to getting your content syndicated (linked to). You might want to check out this excellent ‘how to’ from a fellow blogger as well as an earlier ‘how to’ post I wrote about adding Socializer and Digg It to your Blog

I know there are other Blog building programs and sites out there – I mention Blogger because with it already being by Google, it already fits into the way they do things so would be that much easier to integrate results from etc. A bit too grassy knowl conspiracy for you? Ask Mulder and Scully. The truth is out there.

Also, try adding other blogs and feeds to your own group of interest. You’ll find that eventually, you’ll get a link back. Leave thoughtful comments on other pieces you come across and before you know it, you’ll receive a comment back.

Try to be transparent – it’s all to easy to only allow ‘good comments’, however, done right, a negative can still be turned into a positive – always try to respond to a negative comment so that other readers can see you’re sincere and not afraid to be taken to task. It will create a stronger positive reaction to your company and Google will love it because people are obviously reading your copy.

One example of this is a recent piece I discovered on a car retail dealership training website which stated customer complaints solved on the spot created more brand loyalty than a satisfied customer. Check out the full piece here: www.edt.uk.com/index.php?ref=news#customer

Finally, remember that not every piece you write has to be shoving a selling message down the reader’s throat for your product or service. I have read that SEO articles are particularly bad when it comes to attracting visitors – there’s so many of us out there you see, but I don’t declare myself a SEO expert. Rather, I’d wish to offer my take on things and offer practical advice and I won’t recommend anything I haven’t done myself.

Apart from all the rumours circulating on forums etc, one small clue as to this possible socialising outcome is a small application in Google Labs called Google Sets (http://labs.google.com/sets).

You’re invited to enter 5 keywords and then Google will go off and predict other ‘keywords’ for that set. Clicking on them then brings up a list of search results.

Perhaps in the final version, this will pick up on blog labels???? An interesting thought.

And here’s another, With Google getting even larger, how much longer can it claim its impartiality? With products like Google checkout, any other business would obviously push it’s own customers above others – that’s good financial sense and although Google wouldn’t seem to be short of a penny or two, executive toys and new acquisitions don’t come cheap.

Jonathan C Crouch

About the author – Jonathan is an I.T professional, living and working in Derby. He is also the web developer and technical ‘guru’ for Fabulous Photo Gifts – an online personalised photo gift company run by his partner Mandy Collins. His most recent project was a web design for a family whose twins were diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Check out there helpful website at www.twinswithsma.co.uk or subscribe to their new blog – http://twinswithsma.blogspot.com

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Using Socializer on Blogger - how to guide

Hi.
After struggling to get the code exactly right to create a social bookmarking link using Socializer on my Google Blog, I thought others might appreciate a copy of how I did it and the code I used.

Despite coming across a number of helpful Blog entries, I still struggled. Hopefully, my own aid below will help you out.

1) In your blog under the TEMPLATE tab
click on ADD PAGE ELEMENT
Give the page element a title, e.g Social Bookmarking links

2) In the main body window of the element, paste the following code:

<a href="http://ekstreme.com/socializer/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpurple13.blogspot.com%2F&title=Fabulous Photo Gifts - News, Features etc"><img src="http://www.myurlhere.com/Socializer16.png"> Social bookmark this Blog</a>

You'll see that url=http (etc) features the slashes so you don't need to retype the http:// bit of your URL when entering it. E.G this blog url is http://purple13.blogspot.com, but the cut and paste code already deals with the http:// so you just need to add the rest.

Don't forget to add your own URL here in place of the Purple13 one!!

The image link is wherever you've uploaded your own socializer logo too. For this you will need to have a server where you can upload image (Flickr, etc.) and also need to know the URL of that image. You can grab a copy of the icons (small or large) from http://ekstreme.com/socializer/.

Hope that helps. Now i've fulfilled a self made promise to help others by publishing this as soon as i'd found out how to do it myself.

Socializer allows you to socially bookmark a website or blog to your preferred bookmarking site rather than the website or blog having to create bookmark links to all the bookmarking sites seperately.