I recently received an email which mentioned theseed.com so thought i would give them a go.

Who are they? - Here is their marketing fluff:

TheSeed.com is a revolutionary online Pay-Per-Lead service. It is true pay-for-performance marketing. You receive business enquiries from companies interested in the services you offer and you only pay for each genuine lead you receive. Our fully automated system offers you true Pay As You Go functionality. You can stop at any time and you can control the volume of leads you receive.

I have been with them for 1 day and first impressions aren’t great. I signed up to a barrage of javascript errors in the admin console resulting in the loss of my profile data on 4 separate occasions. Resorted to editing in notepad and pasting in. This was due to the javascript that keeps a count of number of characters throwing a wobbly.

The main gripe I have is with the category selections. I chose to be notified of web design and development leads. I specifically chose to be NOT informed about e-commerce development. A day later, I received one lead… an e-commerce site. I sent their customer services department an email pointing this out, several hours later and I still haven’t heard anything.

You’d think that having paid money for this lead, they would respond to queries a tad quicker.

More updates to come.

Many years of working from the same room has taken its toll.

I am on the lookout for any office space in the north of Leicester. Ideally, a desk in an open plan office which I could lease.

If you know of anywhere, or have space yourself then let me know.

Update#3 - 25/7/2007 - It just gets worse. Despite claiming to have added free services to my account, I now have in my hands a bill detailing this months charges… you guessed it, I have been charged for everything. They have since credited back the money and I now have to go back to the Retentions department to ask them to sort the discount out… again! When this company was NTL, I called them a handful of times in 5 years, as Virgin Media I am calling them on average 4 times a month. I told you… baboons.

Update#2 - Looks like all is well again, (hopefully). I managed to speak to someone in their retentions department and they have sorted out my account leaving me with what I was promised. In response to queries regarding the actual broadband service, I have found it be on the whole, reliable and quick. Never really had any real problems, the only issues were with their internal billing system.

Update#1 - They have now given me back my phone number. Not even an apology for the cock-up. To make matters worse, the offer of a broadband upgrade from 4mb to 10 (then 20) hasn’t happened. I have been charged for the 20mb line, and the free 24/7 calls to 01 and 02 numbers also hasn’t happened. Basically, the entire upgrade to keep you as a customer offer never happened. grrr…

In a previous post I talked about how much better NTL had become as a result of their buyout by Virgin. Their customer support was near instant and their service worked smoothly… till recently. This story has to be the stuff urban myths are made of.

It started on Saturday, 24th June. At around 3pm I needed to make an outgoing call. I noticed that there was no dial tone. Naturally, I checked wiring and handsets to make sure all was well. Everything seemed OK. I was in a hurry so left to carry out an errand. Upon returning my wife passed on a message. Apparently, a friend had been trying to call and the phone was being answered by a complete stranger.

An angry call to Virgin Media telephone support later at a cost of god-knows per minute from my mobile (which incidentally took me 9 attempts) led me to the conclusion that they are the most incompetent bunch of baboons you are ever likely use. It turned out that, out of the blue, they cancelled my telephone service and had allocated my telephone number to another household. There was no request for a cancellation on my account, yet they decided, to the amazement of the manager I spoke to, to cancel my account.

Not only is the number the contact number for my web development business, it is also the main number for my other business. I managed to speak to the person who currently has my phone number, she told me that this was the second time it had happened to her. The reason they have my number is because their previous number was also as a result of a phantom request for a line cancellation where the number was the main contact number for another company. As with the previous company, she had received many calls regarding work. In her own words, “you have had calls all day”. So much so that they have taken the phone off the hook.

So, as of 1pm the next day, I am still without a telephone line. Apparently, I have to wait till Monday to reverse the change as that is when the dumb-ass telephone department opens.

Oh, did I mention that I won’t be reimbursed for the loss of earnings, time and the cost of calling their support line from my mobile phone? Idiots I tell you, IDIOTS!

Users of the latest version of Simplepie (Version 1.0.1) have been getting errors when passing in the feed url. The error refers to a missing method “feed_url()”. This is due to a change in Simplepie, to set the feed url you must now use “set_feed_url(your rss url)”.

A pet project of mine which I will unleash upon you all soon required the home page to read in an RSS feed. Since I am a CodeIgniter whore I soon learnt that amongst its many libraries and helpers that there wasn’t an RSS reader.

This was easily solved using an open source PHP RSS class called SimplePie. Simply, I can’t imagine ever needing anything else. Not to mention the ease of getting it to work within CodeIgniter. By placing simplepie.inc in the libraries directory and renaming it to simplepie.php, I could now use its methods to parse and display my RSS feed.

Within your controller:

function index() {
	$this->load->library('simplepie');
        //$this->simplepie->feed_url('http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml');
        // You may have encountered an error where it couldn't find feed_url. This is due
        // to a change in the latest version of simplepie. Simply, feed_url is now set_feed_url
        $this->simplepie->set_feed_url('http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml');
        $this->simplepie->init();
        $data['dig_feed'] = $this->simplepie;
}

Passing the $data array holding the parsed feed data to the view template made displaying the data a breeze. get_items() returns all feed data as an array. Optionally, if you wish to only display the first 5 items, get_items takes 2 parameters, the starting position and quantity to return. Passing in 0,5 as arguments returns the first 5 items.

echo "
";
foreach($dig_feed->get_items() as $item) {
	echo "
Show Plain Code]: