We’re excited to give you blog readers a sneak peek at the new DealTaker look!
(Click to expand)
This is a glimpse of the new DealTaker hompage. The look is very different from what we’ve had in the past but you’ll still be able to find everything that you’re used to in the same place as it always has been.
The new page is designed to help people find what they want a bit more easily and to, hopefully, be a bit easier on the eyes.
These changes will be put in place in the middle of February, and throughout the rest of 2010, we’ll slowly be making other changes so that we can help you save even more time while we are saving you money.
We’d love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to leave any comments, suggestions, praises or concerns in the comments below!
Each week I go through hundreds of emails scoping out sales and coupons. I come across endless images of thin airbrushed women advertising clothing, shoes, lingerie and more. I no longer have that choking disgust of what society deems as beautiful. I’m used to it. It’s in my face everyday. I search. Post. Delete. It bothers me to an extent, but I also realize these women are airbrushed to appear flawless and thinner.
A couple weeks ago I came across one ad that stopped me dead in my tracks. My mouth fell to the floor. Gasp! It doesn’t happen often, but I was speechless. There in front of me was an extremely pale woman who looked completely emaciated. Lay this woman down, put blankets on her and she would look as if she was minutes away from death’s door. I found myself getting extremely angry. Why on earth would a company put a woman looking like this on an ad!
This isn’t beautiful. It’s not thin. It’s disgusting. It’s emaciation. My first thought was that she needs to eat. I’ve seen women like this and most of them survive on a lettuce leaf and half a chick pea. They aren’t posing for company ads. They are sitting in group meetings at an eating disorder clinic. I want to invite this woman to my home, make her a home cooked meal and get her out in the sunlight.
You ordered a gorgeous framed print online and it was just delivered to your house. You’re excited as you peel off the packing tape. You’ve spent the past week bragging that you saved $100 on this amazing piece that will look perfect in the living room. You open the box and take out the packing bubbles anxiously waiting to admire your purchase. You lift it out of the box to examine it. Gasp! The frame is broken and there is a crack in the glass. To say the very least, you’re pissed. What do you do now?
1. Allow yourself to calm down first. Addressing an issue when you’re heated is not a good idea. Once you’re calmed down, sit down and compose a letter to the company. From experience I have found that sending an e-mail to the customer service department yields much better results.
2. Start the letter by saying something nice about the company. I also know, from experience, this can prove to be a bit challenging especially if you’re angry. If you begin the letter by informing the company that they suck and they can all go to hell…well, let’s just say that won’t solve the issue. Say something nice about their site or how impressed you were to find such great deals. Anything.
I am a busy, working mom of three. I love my children & I love working, but when you try to fit anything else into any day, it is nearly impossible. It is like having two full-time jobs and trying to live life on the side. I have to streamline as many of my mommy chores as possible. I have found a way to save time in making out my grocery lists for the cooking I do throughout the week, and it has helped me from forgetting to get any of the ingredients needed to cook! (Which is SO me to do!)
You’vegotsupper.com makes my life easier in this regard. I can pull up a new recipe the family will enjoy (and one that won’t be too time consuming to make) and it will also give me my grocery list. I just X out what I do not need to buy and go on my way. It is very refreshing.
This is my next new recipe I will be trying; Sweet Bourbon Salmon – Servings: 4, Prep Time: 10 min. + 1 1/2 hours to marinate, Cook Time: 10 min.
All things considered, that is an extremely easy main course to make. Once I find the recipe I want, I click the ‘Print My Recipes & Grocery List’ and I’m finished. Easy easy!
Welcome to the third part in this series on how to develop with Kohana PHP V3 (KO3). If you haven’t read the first and/or second parts yet, I would click here and read them before going on. In this tutorial we will be going over how to create a template. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Normally this time of year our house is decorated both inside and out. There are presents under the tree and we’ve had our fill of Christmas movies accompanied with hot cocoa and popcorn. Holiday platters are scattered on the counters filled with every kind of cookie imaginable. We’re usually planning out the final touches on our huge Christmas dinner.
This year things are different. The Christmas tree has already been taken down, the house isn’t decorated, there are no presents and we’re not having a huge traditional dinner like we normally do. We haven’t watched a Christmas movie since the first week of December and there are no candy canes to stir the hot cocoa. To be honest, it doesn’t even feel like Christmas. No, we’re not related to Scrooge. Between working on renovations, packing, moving and taking care of other things, there just hasn’t been time.
None of this bothers me in the least bit. Surprisingly, this has been one of the best Christmas seasons yet. I have learned that Christmas does exist beyond the brightly wrapped presents, cookies, festivities, parties, lights and endless cups of minty hot cocoa. It’s that place where you can take a good look around and see what’s in front of you. It’s that peaceful warmth that surrounds you when you realize that the most precious of all gifts can’t be wrapped and put under the tree.
Without sounding like a sappy Hallmark card, I have found that place. Through the hard work, stress, little sleep and emotional roller coaster of the past few months, I am there. I look at the two renovated rooms that we completed and I’m so proud of the fact that we did it. I look at Mom sleeping on the sofa peacefully and realize that we gave her the gift of security so she can sleep soundly. I think about the people in my life that I am close to who love me unconditionally. I think about a special friend of mine who is always there with my virtual coffee and who listens to me vent without judgement.
I think of all of those things and more. That is Christmas to me. Being too busy this year to partake in our usual Christmas hoopla and gift giving has opened the door for a much greater awareness. It’s been refreshing. I hope that you can take a few minutes this year and open that door to reflect on all the goodness in your life. Look beyond the gifts and plates of fudge and just take it all in. Whether it be spouses, loved ones, friends and family. Take that moment.
The Holiday season is officially here. Amidst the cheer, cookies, decorating, gift wrapping, and parties lingers the dreaded Holiday stress. No matter how prepared you are, it sneaks up on you. You forgot a gift for someone. You ran out of wrapping paper. Unexpected guests show up. You’ve encountered cranky shoppers at a store. It happens to us all. Over the years I’ve established a few Holiday stress busters that work:
1. There is no such thing as the perfect Holiday. If you are aiming for perfection, it’s time to just let go. You are only setting yourself up for failure as well as putting valuable energy into something pointless. Something, or a few things, won’t go as planned. If you don’t believe me, watch the Griswold’s Family Christmas.
So, I turned 30 a few days ago. I don’t feel anything ominous about the 30’s approaching. I also don’t feel some proximal fear of middle age by way of almost turning 30. These are just fears that I’ve heard about.
Sure, my 21 month-old son wears me out once in awhile. I don’t stay up past 10:30 or 11pm usually. I do like to stay home a little more than I used to.
But hey, I went to a rock concert the other night – and I don’t mean Paul McCartney or Coldplay. I still love terribly offensive humor and violent movies. I am always up to date on the latest technology.
Wait, wait. Wait. One observation I’ve always made about people is that the more reasons they give for resisting aging or growing up, the more they are afraid. So I’m going to stop the list I started above and cut this a little short. I have some celebrating to do.
Welcome to the second part in this series on how to develop with Kohana PHP V3 (KO3). If you haven’t read the first part, I would click here and read it before going on. In this tutorial we will be going over how to develop views. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Laughter can heal so much. A true laugh can cause a horrible feeling disappear or just make a wonderful feeling even better. It is a great thing when you laugh so hard that it is a small challenge to breathe. My youngest daughter who is encroaching upon 6 months has become a pro for our family in the laughter category. As our family was enjoying time together and playing a game over the holiday weekend, she decided to join in the conversation. She is quite the speaker, of course, it comes out as “Blah blah blah!” But her talking is passionate and serious!
In the midst of talking, she will stop to make sound affects. She sometimes make the most peculiar faces. While making her latest speech, she started making a face that I will never forget. She has learned to make kissing noises, and while trying to get the noise out she scrunched her face as if she licked a lemon.
I am one that could go on and on about my kids and all of the wonderful things that come with them, but I try not to shove it into people’s faces too often. But this particular instance, I had to share. As our baby girl realized this face was funny, she continued to make it and just enjoyed us watching and laughing around her. Laughter is a wonderful tool in life. I am glad my children are so good in helping us use it!
As I sit here and type this I’m still in a tiny bit of shock that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It seems like yesterday we were outside digging up the garden for late Spring planting and getting the outside ready for Summer. My flowers had started peeking through the damp ground and the leaves on the trees were bursting with bright shades of green. Now, the trees are bare, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and a month from today it will be Christmas.
This year we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving with “sistacuzz” and her beautiful family. It will be a small crowd of about 8. I am truly blessed to be able to share my Thanksgiving with such wonderful people who, over the years, have become my family. Through the years we have shared some amazing moments, been through rocky times when life has thrown us curve balls and been there to support each other when life has gotten a little too loud. I am thankful that they welcomed me into their life.
Thanksgiving is a time where I reflect on the many blessings in my life. It’s so easy to get caught up in the stresses, the rush and the daily routines of life. Sometimes I forget to take a few steps back, breathe and take a good look at all the good things. This year has been a whirlwind of unexpected changes, especially the past few months. Last year I never thought that a year from then I would be tackling renovations, a new home owner, and moving.
Today and tomorrow we are taking a break from renovations and the exhausting task of moving our belongings from this house to the other one. It’s our time to take those few steps back, breathe easy, reflect and let the dust settle from the usual, everyday routine. Although the house is a mess from packing and boxes and totes are scattered in the rooms downstairs, it still somewhat resembles what our home used to look like. The Christmas tree is lit and I’ve got my favorite music playing. I have my huge cup of spicy black chai tea sitting beside me. Life is good. And, for so many reasons, I am blessed.
Most of you are probably rushing around trying to get last minute Thanksgiving preparations done. If you’re hosting this year’s Thanksgiving dinner I’m sure you’re feeling a bit of stress. Or, maybe, you realized you forgot a key ingredient to one of your Thanksgiving recipes and getting a root canal sounds more appealing than rushing to the store. It happens to all of us, however, step back, take a deep breath in and slowly exhale. Take a minute. Take a look around. There are a lot of things to be thankful for.
And with that, from all of us here at DealTaker, we want to wish you and your family a warm and happy Thanksgiving.
So you might have read my aricle on frameworks and/or my series of tutorials on Kohana PHP 2.3.x and you are wanting more. Today, I drop the old 2.3.x and bring the new and shiny! So I bring you information to get you started with Kohana PHP 3.0! WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Do you remember this movie? It’s one of my favorites.
I want to challenge you to do something for someone else this Holiday Season, expecting nothing in return. Prepare a dinner for a family, give a gift to a child that won’t be getting presents this year, serve dinner to the homeless…give back any way you can, it doesn’t have to be big! One of the greatest things about life for me is helping others. Experiencing and seeing the joy on their faces when they are told their next meal is taken care of is gratifying.
I am not only challenging you but I have taken this challenge on myself and hope to make an impact on a young women’s life who is pregnant with her third child. She can fit all her belongings into the run down car that she drives to and from work. She is stuggling to survive in this world alone with three children. She has been chosen by my small group and I to sponsor this year for Christmas. We asked her this week if we could help give them a Christmas and she has already thanked us about 5 times…can you imagine her relief? The basics for her and her children will be taken care of this Christmas all because of the willingness to Pay it Forward.
Boy, am I glad we didn’t buy a house. We’d been looking since August and were scrambling to beat the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit deadline of Nov. 31st. For the record, it takes 30 days to close on a house in the best of circumstances, but the average is closer to 45-60 days. Just before Halloween we found out that my wife would be losing her job at the end of the year.
A couple of days before we found out this distressful bit of info, our realtor brought to my attention that we’d been shown 137 houses in three months. We’d made five offers, all of which had fallen through in negotiations. Her tone conveyed that we were running out of options if we wanted to beat the deadline.
Negotiations. If there was anything during these hard times I’d heard over most of 2009 with regard to home buying, it was: “It’s a buyer’s market”. “If a seller can’t pay your closing costs then they’re being unreasonable”. “NO ONE pays list price on a house nowadays”. None of these suggestions came directly from our realtor, but she also didn’t disagree with them. And so we approached our offers with these jewels of advice in mind.
It just never worked out the way we heard that it would. On two of the houses, the sellers were insulted by our offers of a few thousand below list and closing costs – so incredibly insulted that they considered not even counter-offering. Hey, we were just entering the negotiations expecting the seller to counteroffer, not trying to lowball them. But on all of the five houses, there was just no compromise. We’d been told that paying list price was just ridiculous, yet any time we entered negotiations the sellers seemed unwilling to come much off their list price even if their home had been on the market for 30, 60, 90 or 180 days!
I’m so glad we didn’t jump into a mortgage just to beat some deadline. Was our negative first-time homebuyer experience in this economy just a result of an unfortunate series of unreasonable sellers? Or was word of mouth wrong about it being a “buyer’s market”?
I’ve never considered myself high maintenance. I’m not one to blow hundreds of dollars on shoes and handbags. In fact, I hate shoes. I don’t make regular appointments at the hair salon for pricey colors or cuts. I don’t get my nails professionally manicured and my makeup collection isn’t top of the line. However, I am a girly girl. I make sure my nails are polished everyday before work (yes, really) and I have a fresh coat of gloss on my lips. I have a pink calculator. I searched like a mad woman trying to find a matching pink trash bin for my office (go ahead, laugh). You get the picture.
For the past couple of months we’ve been making renovations on a house that we’ll soon be moving into. The 2 rooms upstairs has been our main focus for now. In the beginning I maintained my girly girl sheek, but as time went on it slowly became apparent that it wasn’t working out. If I was going to get down and dirty I needed to let go of a few daily routines. Reality is we need to get these two rooms done before we move. Trimming some time away from tackling renovations to do my nails, hair and whatever else was not an option. I didn’t dare. I would have gotten “the look.”
The movie Dodgeball was a hilarious portrayal of a game most of us played as kids. I did not know how serious it was for adults until the DealTaker/Media General team took to the court in Richmond- Go team!!
And the trailer for the movie for your viewing pleasure…
“If you can dodge a wrench – you can dodge a ball!!”
Today is Veteran’s Day. A day when we pay homage to all of those brave men and women who have answered our country’s call to arms. Now as a youngster, I can vaguely remember the war in Vietnam but it was sort of on the edge of my consciousness and I remember my Grandfather telling me stories about World War II but none of it seemed real to me. It was just something I heard about, after all nothing was going to happen to America and no one I knew would be going to war (ah to be young and naive).
Well September 11th changed all that. Never in my life time did I imagine that I would need to be worried about this great country and NEVER did I think I would see my friends leave behind their loved ones and their life’s to go to war. Now whether or not you agree with the politics behind all of this is a mute point. The fact is thousands of Americans (some of them my very close friends) are answering this country’s call. They believe so strongly in what this country stands for that they are willing to die for it.
So is one day enough to say thank you to these folks for their sacrifice? NO! We need to be thinking of them and keeping them and their families (because they too have made a huge sacrifice) in our minds and our prayers everyday (I’m probably more than a little biased here but you get the point). Get involved, volunteer, let our armed forces know that you appreciate them. There are hundreds organizations – Adopt-a-Platoon, US Troop Support, USO etc – that could use your help to support our troops.
While it’s important to nationally recognize past and present soliders, I want you to take it a step further, go upto military personnel wherever you might see them and shake their hand (I always do this when I see them in the airport. They look at me a little funny when I first approach them but they appreciate the fact that I take the time.) Tell them thank you in person. It means a great deal to them that you recognize and appreciate them. After all they are fighting for our freedom and democracy.
We were just talking about Black Friday yesterday and it got us thinking about how many questions there are.
Some people who will read this post are Black Friday veterans who already know a thing or two about the day. We’d love to hear from you about your best tips, lessons you’ve learned and what confused you the most when you were staring out.
Others may be brand new to Black Friday. Some many not even know what Black Friday is. To those, let us know what most confuses you or what you’d like to know more about.
Leave your questions (and answers) in the comments!
You may have noticed over on the DealTaker home page that our logo has gone black. That’s because it’s November and for bargain-hunters everywhere November means just one thing:
Black Friday.
DealTaker has long been a go to destination for Black Friday information and I think that’s because of the enthusiasm everyone here has for this time of year. There’s a real hubub when a new ad comes in. We all get excited and everyone from the content team, to the merchants, marketing and the developers get chatty when a new ad comes in.
We’ve done some things this year to help make the Black Friday information easier to find. First of all, check out our new and improved 2009 Black Friday Ads page. There’s always a lot of information coming from lots of different directions so we’ve done our best on that page to keep it organized and easy to find. On the left hand side is a list of all the stores that we had ads for last year. As the ads come in a check mark will show up next to it. Click on the store name and you’ll find all of the ad info (including product lists and ad scans when available).
On the main page you’ll also notice that we’re aggregating all of the Black Friday coupons that come in from merchants as well.
This week is always a busy week as tons of new ads come in, so check back regularly for all the most up to date info. And know that when a new ad comes in your trusty DealTaker staff is just as excited as you are!
Each week I go through hundreds of emails scoping out sales and coupons. I come across endless images of thin airbrushed women advertising clothing, shoes, lingerie and more. I no longer have that choking disgust of what society deems as beautiful. I’m used to it. It’s in my face everyday. I search. Post. Delete. It bothers me to an extent, but I also realize these women are airbrushed to appear flawless and thinner.
You ordered a gorgeous framed print online and it was just delivered to your house. You’re excited as you peel off the packing tape. You’ve spent the past week bragging that you saved $100 on this amazing piece that will look perfect in the living room. You open the box and take out the packing bubbles anxiously waiting to admire your purchase. You lift it out of the box to examine it. Gasp! The frame is broken and there is a crack in the glass. To say the very least, you’re pissed. What do you do now?
Normally this time of year our house is decorated both inside and out. There are presents under the tree and we’ve had our fill of Christmas movies accompanied with hot cocoa and popcorn. Holiday platters are scattered on the counters filled with every kind of cookie imaginable. We’re usually planning out the final touches on our huge Christmas dinner.
The Holiday season is officially here. Amidst the cheer, cookies, decorating, gift wrapping, and parties lingers the dreaded Holiday stress. No matter how prepared you are, it sneaks up on you. You forgot a gift for someone. You ran out of wrapping paper. Unexpected guests show up. You’ve encountered cranky shoppers at a store. It happens to us all. Over the years I’ve established a few Holiday stress busters that work:
As I sit here and type this I’m still in a tiny bit of shock that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It seems like yesterday we were outside digging up the garden for late Spring planting and getting the outside ready for Summer. My flowers had started peeking through the damp ground and the leaves on the trees were bursting with bright shades of green. Now, the trees are bare, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and a month from today it will be Christmas.
I’ve never considered myself high maintenance. I’m not one to blow hundreds of dollars on shoes and handbags. In fact, I hate shoes. I don’t make regular appointments at the hair salon for pricey colors or cuts. I don’t get my nails professionally manicured and my makeup collection isn’t top of the line. However, I am a girly girl. I make sure my nails are polished everyday before work (yes, really) and I have a fresh coat of gloss on my lips. I have a pink calculator. I searched like a mad woman trying to find a matching pink trash bin for my office (go ahead, laugh). You get the picture.
Today is Veteran’s Day. A day when we pay homage to all of those brave men and women who have answered our country’s call to arms. Now as a youngster, I can vaguely remember the war in Vietnam but it was sort of on the edge of my consciousness and I remember my Grandfather telling me stories about World War II but none of it seemed real to me. It was just something I heard about, after all nothing was going to happen to America and no one I knew would be going to war (ah to be young and naive).
