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I've finally got around to fixing some issues with the bigclive.com website.

All image links to the old photobucket archives are now pointing to my own hosted space, so the watermarks have gone.  (There's a very annoying story behind those watermarks.)

Adverts have been removed from the pages completely, just like the site originally started off.

It's now HTTPS which means I should be able to link from YouTube descriptions to files without triggering a security warning.

Other than that it's still the same "snapshot of a dial-up era" website.

Comments

Anonymous

https keeps google happy

Mike Page

It must be very satisfying to get rid of adverts.

Anonymous

If only it was possible to keep the shop open. Some form of a third party fullfillment warehouse that centrally ships maybe?

bigclive

It felt squirmy adding them in the first place, but did bring in enough to buy me a coffee and cake at the weekend in that era. (About £10 a week.)

bigclive

I really should look at opening it again, but shipping to the USA has become a nightmare after the last US president decided to do "anti Chinese" things. They had a knock-on effect for all countries and it resulted in the USA having its own special massively inflated shipping cost guide. You literally have to weigh and measure every item sent in a single order and package them as multiple astronomically expensive shipments. It's not just expensive, but extremely time consuming. I ended up making a significant loss on several orders before just closing the shop down.

DC Allan

most useful. 2x👍

Dave Matthews

Nothing wrong with dial-up era sites, they are simple, fast, quick to load, and do the job nicely!

Anonymous

Thanks Clive great update

tim1724

In turn the UK has also made it nearly impossible for small businesses in the US to sell things to customers in the UK. (Any shipments valued between £0.01 and £135 must have VAT collected _by the seller_ and sent to the HMRC quarterly; the process for companies outside the UK to do this is just as byzantine (and expensive) as you'd probably imagine.) This of course has been a boon to companies like Amazon that have done all the work and thus make their services that much more attractive for sellers outside of the UK. I know several people who run small online businesses who now simply refuse any orders from the UK unless the customers order more than £135 worth of products, so they can ignore all the VAT collection hassle.

bigclive

Also note the declared image sizes so that the page doesn't bounce up and down. eBay could learn from that with their adverts that make menus move while you're using them.

Johnson Lam

Usually watermark use as preventing people stealing your work and claim as theirs.

bigclive

In this case it was because Photobucket employed a rogue individual who cancelled all existing contracts and then held the customers to ransom with exorbitant fees to make their images visible again. It backfired on them, but they then watermarked all the images with their logo if you didn't sign up to a new contract. Given their previous stunt I had no desire to get involved in a new contract.

Anonymous

You should change the link to youtube to use the newer name ...youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom/featured Also update the link you have in the youtube "about" page to replace http by https. Consider adding a redirect on incoming requests to http://bigclive.com on to https://bigclive.com. I hope you have an automated mechanism to keep the certificate uptodate!

Anonymous

You need to go through all the html files and remove the explicit "http:...bigclive.com" prefix in all the anchor urls, href="...". For example in bigclive.com/guides.htm the urls should look like HREF="/newrgb.htm", not HREF="http:...bigclive.com/newrgb.htm".

bigclive

Yeah, there have been lots of changes made in the past that need to be filtered through.

Tom.D.Gamble

It would be interesting to discuss the website and various issues in the stream tonight, perhaps hear the story with the watermarks. Maybe even a ‘munion to bigclive.com ??