SUNDAY... Coffee and Cake

Sunday - Coffee and Cake
weekly musings, articles and mostly babble...


BAD PC I have just spent the past half hour in fear, but I think things are ok. My computer decided to pick it's usual time of convenience to crash and thus frighten the life out of me! But it seems to be behaving itself now so I'm not on my guard so much! Yesterday I spent the morning trying out a new traffic site called Traffic Swarm which promises traffic on a credit based system. Where like Link Referral, you spend a bit of time each day earning yourself some traffic by doing a few things it suggests for you to obtain this reward. Credits on Traffic swarm are earned in a similar way by clicking on other peoples listed sites and gaining "x" credits for a single click. These credits are then, from my understanding used as a payment (ie: 1 credit-1 display of your listed link) to show your ad around to other Traffic Swarm members. There are other ways to obtain credits, and to be honest I'm still trying to "get" the whole process so if you are interested check it out. However! I do suspect that a site I clicked on has probably left spyware on my PC (hense the crash) as it was happily chugging along as it does normally, up until yesterday. I don't think it's Traffic Swarm at all, but I will say that some of the listed sites are a bit of a surprise when you click on them. One's generally that a person wouldn't normally visit. Don't worry they're all family friendly... but worrying I think a lot of them are scam friendly! So it is wise I'd say to catagorise what listed sites you would like to search through in your members area if you plan to join. You can do this thank goodness, but initially I wasn't aware and obviously did my duties before finding out. Currently doing a virus scan so I'll know soon whether my PC is diseased, or just has the hiccups. If it's free of any problems then I will learn a bit more about Traffic swarm and update you all next week about it :)

HidenSeek In my usual daily scour of Etsy blogs, a couple of days ago Gilliauna on Etsy sent a post to a thread of mine in the forums which was a big old shock to the system as an independant artist, and one that I thought was worth spreading the message about as we are all in potential headway of a situation as sad as the one of HidenSeek on Etsy. And goodness me I would totally HATE to be in her shoes right now. Any artist's biggest fear is to have their work stolen and reproduced by another for their own profiteering. Plagiarism. I know it's something that is easily done, and very difficult to discover unless you go out of your way to find out regularly (near to impossible) or you just happen to find out randomly as did *Hidden Eloise* of HidenSeek. Not by just any old Joe, but by a major company. Her story is here on her blog, and so far in the past week she has gone from an impossible small fry battles big momma and gets nowhere scenario, to having the backing of fellow Indie Artists (and other angry dude(tte)s) in a big old internet campaign against Paperchase which thankfully seems to have gotten her some positive results, and to my knowledge now, the establishment and admittion that her work WAS used lets say as a "template" for another persons own designs (Paperchase only "bought" the designs in good faith... urrgghhghg). To me that's still copying! But the admittion is there at least. I have been keeping track of her story on her blog, as well as leaving a comment of support and writing an unimpressed email to Paperchase. I would urge you to check it out as its something I think that handmade artists everywhere need to be aware of for their own work, and to support our fellow artist with this struggle. Plagiarism besides being uninspired and deceitful, is so wrong and unfair to those whose soul stirred ideas or concepts getting taken away from them and credited elsewhere. Her blog displays her most recent post so you will have to track back a few days if you want to read from the beginning!

Finding Yourself in a Treasury... Without being told??? Hmmmm... Up until this week I used to wonder how the heck alternates would know they were alternates in my past treasuries before I got the chance to tell them! There was no way they could know because they would only appear if moved into the main part of a constructed treasury... until I discovered Craftopolis this week. OMG where has this site been in my Etsy days??? It has this fabulous tool that you can use to see if you're in any current treasuries as either a main or alternate, and you can even count down to an open treasury slot on the TREASURY CLOCK! ohhh yeah! wonderful! I check it every day, because a lot of the time I'm never informed about treasuries I'm in, which is fair enough even though I do try and tell my treasury-ettes. But yeah check it out!

I think that concludes today... wow I'm chatty lol!

moonangelnay x