By importing LeapFrog products from the USA you can save substantially.  Lets look at two of the very latest LeapFrog Products on the market in the USA, the LeapPad Explorer Learning Game System and the LeapPad Explorer Tablet.

For the following price comparisons we have used the prices at the Australian Online Toy Store Toysparadise.com.au. Prices at traditional bricks and mortar stores will be much higher again.

LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer Learning Game System

The LeapPad Explorer Learning Game System is available now at ToysParadise.com.au for $139.95 which does not include shipping but they do provide free shipping for orders over $150.

The Game System is available from Amazon for $65 ($USD69 = $AUD65) including shipping which is a saving of $74.95 and equates to paying 115% more for buying in Australia.

]]> http://glennbatten.com/leapfrog-leappad-explorer-learning-tablet-and-game-system/feed/ 0 http://glennbatten.com/import-android-tablets-and-save/ http://glennbatten.com/import-android-tablets-and-save/#comments Sun, 29 May 2011 00:03:39 +0000 Glenn http://glennbatten.com/import-android-tablets-and-save/ Tablets are the most sought after gadget this year and whilst the iPad has been around longer the latest  are hitting the market now are highly sought after.

Save Money By Importing Your Android Tablet

The two hottest android tablets right now is the Motorola Xoom and the Acer Iconia.

Motorola Xoom Android Tablet

You can buy the Xoom 32gb wifi model for $869 in Australia but at ImportUSA.com.au you can import your own from Amazon for a fraction of the price.

As at the 29th of May 2011 you can import the same model from Amazon thought ImportUSA.com.au  for

When you convert that to Australian Dollars at today’s exchange rate thats just  $565.40 a saving of a massive $303.60 by importing the Motorola Xoom yourself. That works out that you save about $35%

]]> http://glennbatten.com/import-android-tablets-and-save/feed/ 0 http://glennbatten.com/private-members-only-website-using-wordpress-3/ http://glennbatten.com/private-members-only-website-using-wordpress-3/#comments Sat, 07 Aug 2010 06:08:28 +0000 Glenn http://glennbatten.com/?p=144 I was recently asked to create a private website for about 100 members. The website was to be a private collaboration and discussion website and with the right plugins I found that WordPress worked out as a fantastic solution.

The Atahualpa WordPress theme is extremely flexible and suits the purpose of a private website perfectly

Basically the brief for the website was :-

• Private website with password protection
• A CMS based system
• A section for feature articles
• A forum for open discussion between members
• File library
• Free or very low cost

WordPress was my obvious choice but I was initially uncertain whether it could all come together into a cohesive combination that worked well together.

I used the Atahualpa theme because of its sheer flexibility.   It has over 200 theme options which means you can really setup the site or any individual page just how you want it without delving into changing code or creating templates yourself.

The main two stumbling blocks appeared to be privacy factor and the forum.

Most popular forums such as phpbb, vbulletin or invision do not integrate with WordPress and would require two separate logins. That really would fracture the user base who was not too technically savy so this concept was discounted pretty quickly.  I  initially looked at buddypress but it appeared it was difficult to lock down effectively without fiddling under the hood.

Simple Press WordPress Forum Plugin is extremely flexible and powerful option with full integration with WordPress

The next options were BBpress and Simple-Press which both integrated with WordPress albeit in different ways. Simple-Press is a true plugin whereas BBpress is a seperate program that integrates with a wordpress installation.  After investigating I decided on Simple-Press because it was significantly more feature rich and seemed a better forum experience.  BBpress default installation is quite a basic solution and customising it meant changes to code rather than a configuration panel.

Simple-Press also automatic creation of forum topics for each blog article including reciprocal links to direct readers from the article to the discussion of it in the forum (and vice versa). With this feature turned on I actually turned off comments on the blog articles so all feedback and discussion was held in the forum.

With Absolute Privacy a new user to your blog cannot login after the register till they have been approved.

With the forum component decided on the next hurdle was the ability to lock down the website.  I tested quite a few privacy plugins for WordPress but settled on Absolute Privacy. This plugin slightly alters the registration process so that a user is allocated the status of “unapproved user” and requires approval from the administrator before being able to login to the system. The system handles custom email messages to the user and the administrator informing them of the processes along the way. This way we could leave the registration ability of the site open rather for new users.

Absolute Privacy also allows you to allocate particular pages as public and viewable by anybody so you can have a public front end and a private back end.

Importantly the Absolute Privacy worked perfectly with Simple-Press and locked down all the forum access as well. Simple-Press has its own security built in which allows you forum privacy when installed on a public website but in this case we wanted an open forum once the users logged into the site.

Absolulute Privacy allows you to lock down the rss feeds but I wanted to still allow them but keep them private. The answer was the Feed Key plugin which sets a unique key for each user. Simple Press also has feeds for the posts and comments in the forum but thankfully it already had its own feed keys so all RSS feeds where now private.

So far we have used the following plugins:

• Absolute Privacy
• Simple:Press
• Feed Key

The rest of the plugins I used for the site included

• AVH Extended Categories Widgets – Always a favourite and it allows you better option to display the blog categories
• Better Tag Cloud – This also provides a much better tag solution than the stock cloud.
• Flexi Pages Widget – This extends the page menu system beyond the basic widget available for WordPress.
• Contact Form 7 – I used this to allow members to send information and files to the website administrators
• Enhanced Recent Posts – Great way to re-introduce prior articles of relevance
• Events –  I originally used the plug Event Calendar plugin but found this plugin much better and easier to work with. Event Calendar required events to be posts and they kept on inteferring with other parts of the site. Events allows anybody to add to the site calendar (selectable in options) and the events can link to third party websites or existing posts or pages on the private site.
• Google Analyticator – You just have to have a Google Analytics plugin installed.
• TinyMCE Advanced –  This plugin adds a few extra features to the TinyMCE editing panel that is not on the default version.
• Use Google Libraries – This allows the brower to load some of the larger javascript libraries from Google’s CDN servers rather than from the website. Chances are many browsers already have these libraries cached and if they dont the downloads can happen in parrallel to the rest of the site content rather than lengthening the queue.
• WordPress.com Stats – Gives you some quick pageview stats to check rather than loading up the full version of Google Analytics
• WordPress Backup (by BTE) – Lets face it, nobody does manual backups all the time. This plugin zips three seperate files sets. The uploads, plugins and themes and stores them on your hosting account. The plugin will then email you the files or you could use a scheduled ftp transfer to retreive them.
• WP-DBManager- This plugin is amazing. From its control panel you can optimise your wordpress database, save a backup or  schedule a regular backup. You can download or restore any of the saved backups and setup automatic emailing of the backups. There are advanced tools to allowing you to delete tables, run SQL queries and much more.
• WordPress Download Monitor -  The role of the File Library was handled by this plugin. It allowed file security so you have to be logged into an account to get access to the file as well as the ability to setup different categories and keep download statistics.
• WP Issuu – This allows the embedding of online documents so they can be read right on the screen.
• WP Render Blogroll Links - I used this to turn the standard links feature of wordpress into a links libarary for the membership.
• My Brand Login – this allows you to “brand” the login screen with your own logo rather than the standard wordpress logo.
• Subscribe2 – This allows email notification to the sites members when a new article is posted.

All these plugins work well together and everything works. I wish I could show you but its… ummm… well…. PRIVATE  :)

This is why your typical website designer struggles with websites for real estate agents.  Running a property listing database is not actually that simple and syncronising with the a range of portals is quite complicated. Your typical real estate website providor for real estate agents provides template websites only. These are typical cookie cutter sites exactly the same as hundreds of other agents and whilst they “get the job done”  they do not provide exception results. If you want to create a custom site the options were very limited until now.

Zoo Property provides the simple task of running a property listing database for an agent and syncing those listings with all the major real estate portals.  This allows a webdesigner  to worry about the actual website itself rather than the complexities of the property listing database.

Zoo Property provides a simple api interface for web designers to connect with their system.  They also provide a range of plugins for use in the WordPress CMS and blog system.

So at work we are undertaking a new First National brand update at the moment and we are looking at updating our website around a Zoo Property and WordPress solution.  I will end up writing a full article on the experience  for the Business 2 blog but I can confirm that everything is going well. Zoo Property does not limit your web designer to use WordPress but because they provide a range of WordPress plugins it speeds up development time and has allowed me to create a  website with very little effort.  They really are natural fit and we should be launching the new site soon.

The solution at the time was to whip up a website at australianrealestatesoftware.com to prove the concept and test if agents would use it.

The test proved both successful and unsuccessful at the same time. For a minimal effort it got quite a reasonable level of traffic for specific targeted audience.

Unfortunately because I did not want to invest too much into the first version of the site in case agents wouldn’t use such a directory I chose to only create a very basic site. This lead to people finding what they wanted through the search engines but not really browsing the directory for other solutions available.

The other week I decided to give the old girl a bit of a tart up and moved everything over to a wordpress installation. The wordpress CMS allows me to quickly and easily provide advanced functionality. So now the site not only displays a funky new look but visitors can now leave comments and easily rate particular solutions as well. At the bottom of every entry is a list of other software or solutions in the directory that might also suit.

Visitors can now even subscribe to updates either through RSS, email or twitter.

The change has already proved to be highly successful and the average number of pages viewed per visitor is now 5 times more than the previous design.  If you are an agent and you know something that should be in the directory and isn’t, let me know by submitting the details.

Amazon.com has just announced that the Kindle ebook eReader will become available in Australia from October 19, 2009 for just $USD279. (Note… this seems to have dropped now to $USD259 which places it as the same price as the US version).  With shipping and currency exchange that places an absolutley amazing piece of technology in your hands for about $340 Australian which is just a fraction of what Australian retails are trying to sell less functional ebooks readers for.

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The Amazon Kindle fits up to 1,500 books

This is the news that many have been waiting for and the availability of the Kindle will allow Australia to catch up with the US in terms of ebook sales. Amazon recently announced that for every 100 paper books sold they now sell 35 ebooks yet in Australia the ebook readers have had very little exposure.

eBook readers, or eReaders as they called, are the future of reading books and magazines, textbooks and newspapers. The eInk technology in modern ereaders allow them to recreate the pages of a book with the added ability of being able to carry a whole bookcase around with you in a unit that weights a fraction of the weight of a new release. The Amazon Kindle will hold about 1,500 books. How long would that take you to read?

We purchased an eReader about 5 months ago now but the prices in Australia were that high we had to import it from Europe. In the past couple of weeks we were involved in the purchase of another ereader as a 40th birthday present for a friend and prolific reader of novels. In just two weeks it has changed her whole reading experience as the Kindle is about to do for thousands of Australians.

Watch this Introduction Video of the Kindle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKUKQ7QqOHw

Amazon’s Kindle is the worlds most popular eBook eReader but until now it has not officially been available to Australians. Whilst it was possible to import the Kindle into Australia after you purchased it in the US you could not take full advantage of it because is Whispernet connection was not available in the US. Amazon now sell an International version of the Kindle which for $USD20 over the price of the US version gives you access in most of ht world including Australia.

Advantages of the Amazon Kindle over other ebook ereaders

The 2nd generation Amazon Kindle eReader

Whispernet is the first of two things that set the Kindle apart from other ebook readers. A usb connection is standard for transferring books to an ereader and a wifi connection is now becoming possible but Amazon has always thought big, real big.

When they released the Kindle it had an always on data connection though the mobile phone network much the same as many smartphone can access the internet. The best part was that you dont have to pay for this data connection as the price is factored in when you purchase your books. Of course another advantage is that you don’t ever need a computer to purchase and download new books.

With the Kindle you can finish up on one book, load up the bookshop browse the best seller list, pick another book and download it in around 60 seconds. In fact because you can access many of the worlds best newspapers, if you leave it on your bedside table you have the mornings newspaper downloaded and ready to read when you wake without taking on a frosty morning to find your paper in the lawn or making yourself presentable for the neighbours.

The the Kindle also automatically downloads posts from your favourite blogs and gives you free access to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia.

The other advantage that the Kindle has over any other ebook reader is it has access to the Amazon bookshop which holds over 350,000 titles and rising. Prices for new releases for Australians will be $USD9.99 which pitches a new release at just a fraction of what Australian books sellers sell them for. Older releases are even cheaper than that.

The Kindle is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it is certainly the best option for most avid readers. Similar to many movies and tv shows being illegally available there is an underground market on the internet for enovels and ebooks. These often come in a wide variety of formats that the Kindle can’t handle and is better suited for the Chinese Jinke range of eReaders which is sold under many names such as the BeBook, Hanlin and EcoReader and can handle dozens of different formats.

But will you like reading on Kindle eBook eReader?

eInk means that an eReader is more like a book than a computer. A computer screen is back lit but an eInk screen is not. If you are reading an eReader at night you have to have a light on it just like normal book. Reading a computer screen in full sunlight is impossible, but not so with an eInk screen. As I mentioned we have had another eReader ourself of just under 6 months. eInk does such a great job of simulating a paper page that in the first week or two you often find yourself trying to turn a physical page.

Kathryn loves the ebook reader so much I have yet to read anything on it myself. She simply won’t put it down but since it was her birthday present, that is probably fair. Our 2nd ereader will be the Kindle and maybe I will be able to use that! Our friend who received a reader for her birthday was a prolific reader before we even showed her ours but now she had her own she finished 9 novels in the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charmaine Harris in 12 days. That’s as a good a testimonial for using an ebook reader that I have seen.

If you love reading, then you will love an eReader and especially the functionality and ease of use of the Kindle now available for Australians. The saving in books alone make this an amazing investment and your making a green statement saving all those trees!

Australia only gets the standard Kindle so far which is perfect for reading novels. The larger DX version is better for newspapers. If you are interested in the Kindle you can check out the Amazon website and order yours today.