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Summer-wear: Swimwear

If summer is here can beach outings and pool parties be far behind? And if you, like a lot of other people have been trying to get into shape for the summer, flaunt your newly toned body in some great swimwear available online.

There are a lot of online options and if you want to go in for discounted swimwear most online stores have a clearance section, which I usually make a beeline for, as is my wont. If, like Oprah, you are chary of showing off your midsection, skip the bikinis and take a look at the tankinis (tank top and bikini bottom) or the one piece maillot styles.

Green swimming costumeI found Swimmer’s Choice to have a good range of products, most of which I found to be quite reasonable. They deal in Speedo, TYR and Dolphin brands, and I am a bit of a Speedo loyalist I have to confess, with their smart, no frills designs. I liked this one piece at $28.95, they have a wide range of items for under $30. Their range of trunks for men and children are also reasonably priced. Their clearance section was empty.

Halter tankini swimwearIn style swimwear has an extensive clearance section with some nice varieties, some a little daring for me but I liked this halter tankini with a side tie bottom, which are sold separately ($57 for both).

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Tips to Save on Gas

High Gas PricesIf like me, the current prices of gasoline are pinching your pocket, then maybe it is time to assess whether you are indulging in any wasteful driving practices. There are a lot of ways you can increase your mileage and cut down on your total consumption of gas.

Don’t Drive: This is the most obvious way to cut down on gasoline consumption. If you can, walk or use a bicycle for running errands. A surprising number of things can fit into a bicycle carrier or basket. If you have to go a good distance, consider taking the bus or other public transport before backing the car out of the driveway. At the very least try to combine several errands into one trip so you save yourself gas as well as money.

Drive at Optimum Speed: Drive neither too slow not too fast. Drive at a speed that is optimum for your particular vehicle. Some vehicles show the economy zone on the speedometer; stay within that. And be consistent and steady in your driving don’t keep braking and accelerating unnecessarily.

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Discounted Kids Toys

Long summer months mean that kids have a lot of time on their hands, so parents need all their imagination and creativity to keep the kids occupied gamely and out of mischief. Toys can be tricky, they should be age appropriate and ideally they should be both interesting and instructive for the kids. You can search by category, such as educational learning toys or video games, or you can shop by age to see all the toys that are applicable to the age of your child.

empire discountThis site, a toy wholesaler is a good place to find some toys at a substantial discount. This item seemed like an interesting activity for older children, a wire writing system (costs $24.99 but is available at a 45% discount) with which you can make your own jewelry. On the same page, there are links to several other related items like a bead making craft set, a beginning to knit craft set etc., all of which are offered at a discount.

Order these water squirters for the next time you decide to set up the kids pool and have some of their friends over. They will have a great time squirting one another with this item which costs you $21.60 for an assorted case of 9 units.

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Half Century Milestone

Hey guys, this is my 50th post. It has been a long journey – time consuming but fun. I have made a lot more acquaintances and interacted with some very interesting people.

In the last six months, the blog has grown tremendously. Following are some stats at the time of writing this post:

Technorati rank: 199,227

Google Backlinks: 481

Yahoo Backlinks: 34465

Google PR: 3

Over 5000 unique visitors in May till date.

What do you guys think? How are these stats for a 6 month and 50 post old blog? What other stats would you like to see? Do let me know your thoughts. Thanks for all the love and support.

Home Office Bargains

In my last post I talked about some ideas that I had about setting up a home office. Today I want to look at all the different options for decorating, or as in my case, redecorating your home office.

Now as I said in my last post, it is a good idea to find a reasonably secluded location for your home office. But if that is simply not possible, it may be a good idea to set up a kind of shed in the backyard which you can then set up to use as a home office! These are admittedly not cheap, but they cost less than a room addition, don’t require contractors and can be assembled and ready for use in one to four days. Cedar shed has a great selection of ready to assemble backyard sheds which you can use as a home office.

The next step would be the appropriate furnishing for your home office. The basic requirement is a desk or computer work station and a comfortable ergonomically designed chair. Be warned that if your work involves long periods of sitting at your desk, a well designed chair is a must, if you are not to be beset with problems such as backache and all manner of other discomforts!

Hooker Furniture gives you a lot of home office options but the items were not priced on the website and you are asked to feed in your zip code to find a dealer.

Computer DeskOffice Furniture is a site that offers an extensive range of home office furniture. They charge $159 for this very smart and well designed computer desk. I liked their executive desk for $329 which is a simple classic style.

Office chairKeeping in my mind that a work chair should always be a swivel and tilt variety I also liked their range of office chairs, which start from $98 for this nice black office chair.

Computer deskWholesale Furniture Brokers is another site with an extensive range of home office furniture. I liked their computer desk with bookcase for $179.

I really enjoy the option of working from home and these days it is surprisingly doable!

Web Hosting for Our New Blog

Encouraged by my blogging venture, my better half has decided to start one of his own. A dear friend had helped me out with the technical aspects while I was setting up my blog. Now this time, we decided to manage everything on our own. Learning the tech aspects needed to be done sooner or later. After all, I had to manage GreatPricesHere myself in the future.

So we began reading about booking a domain and hosting a website and everything else that goes with it. Words like Name Servers, hosting plans, MySQL databases, downtime, support tickets etc started making a lot more sense to us than they ever did. We got a lot of information from this web host rating website. They rate web hosting providers based on user reviews. We learnt that a multiple domain hosting account is much better since you can add unlimited websites to the same hosting account later thus saving money in the long run and having better manageability. A cheap web hosting is not necessarily bad and an expensive one is not necessarily good. The idea is to find a cheap and good web hosting provider! The writer definitely thinks like me!

There are a lot of factors that you can check to determine whether a particular web host is going to provide good service or not. These web hosting articles are a great help for anyone wanting to know about how and where to host a website. They guide you through the procedure of finding a good and cheap host that will ensure least downtime and excellent support.

GreatPricesHere is hosted with BlueHost. I have had a good experience with them so far. The downtime has been negligible. If you, my readers, have ever noticed a snag in my website, had an error thrown up when you try to load it, or find it loading extremely slowly, please do let me know through your comments. Now since I understand all this tech stuff much better, I’ll try to do something about it.

Having a Home Office

Home office bargainsWith the Internet giving us opportunities for staying connected like never before, more and more of us have the option of working from home! If you are in the daily grind of commuting to and from office, battling heavy traffic and spending that most precious of commodities, time, on travel, then you need to ask yourself the question if it is possible for you to work from home.

If it is not possible to work from home all the time, perhaps you can reassess the time that you need to spend in office, whether you need to go in everyday or if it is possible to go in once or twice a week while still being able to accomplish the bulk of work from home. Because, remember time saved is money saved and the amount that you will save on actual travel costs is a bonus! If you don’t already have an office set up at home, you may want to keep the following in mind:

Pick a Space: A small, unused room in your house could work, or even part of a room can be used if you don’t need too much space. Think of what you need to set up an office away from office in your own house. Perhaps a desk, ergonomically designed chair, some storage shelves and drawers may be all the furniture that you require. Mind that you don’t pick a space where most of the family hang out at all times.Tthat will make for too much disturbance and you’ll never get any work done! Some seclusion is a good idea.

Work out what you actually need: Before you go on a shopping spree, assess what is required. Sometimes you may overlook an unused item that is already there in your home, which may fulfill your purpose. Perhaps there is an unused chest of drawers or a set of shelves that you can set up for your home office. Then if you realize that you really need to get some additional items to set up a work station at home, make a list of those things.

Look around; consider used furniture: Flea markets or furniture consignment shops can give you some great deals. This online Yellow Pages site is arranged city wise to give you quick and accurate access to the items of your choice. Consider taking on furniture that high end hotels are looking to dispose of because they tend to redecorate every few years. Sometimes similar deals can be got from offices who are redecorating as well.

Since I am looking to redecorate my own home office, I will write about any bargains that I find in my next post.

Save on Groceries and Eating Out

In all likelihood, when you go shopping for the big ticket items you do your research carefully, compare prices, look for the discounts and take your time making up your mind. Do you do the same for your everyday shopping as well, your grocery and other daily requirements? You should give that equal consideration, because this can also save you a significant amount of money, if you shop smart! Coupons on the internet give you the convenient option of simply printing out the coupon that you need.

Discount GroceriesThere are many sites devoted to coupons and other rebates that are available online, so that at this rebate site, you simply fill in your zip code and press ‘go’ for all the rebates and coupons available in your area. So when I filled in a New York zip code I was redirected to this site which has coupons related to all manner of items: clothes, food and dining, groceries, home and garden, health, books, pets, travel, sport etc.

Restaurant discount couponsRestaurant.com is a site that helps you find rebates on eating out. By feeding your zip code, you find a restaurant of your choice within the given radius (one to thirty miles etc). You can also purchase and give dining out gift certificates, for $10 you get a $25 gift certificate. You can buy, customize and email or print and personally gift a certificate from this site.

Registering here claims to gives you access to over 70 deals and over $150 in savings! Sample offers on this site include, savings on frozen vegetables, buy a chocolate bar and get one free etc. This site offers links to all kinds of grocery coupons for little savings: $1 off on turkey bacon, $5 off on a floral bouquet etc. Cool savings is also a site devoted to saving you money, which will send you daily emails about their offers. Walmart, Betty Crocker, Target, Pampers are some of the brands that they offer coupons for. So next time you go shopping, remember to print some coupons and take along with you!

Printer Cartridges at Unbelievable Prices

I exhausted my HP printer ink cartridge today. So, of course, the bargain hunter that I am, I decided there just has to be a better option than buying cartridges from HP or BestBuy at their price. I chanced upon a really great website.

This website can help any office or home owner with a good use for their printer a lot of money. InkjetDeals.info lists a number of stores that sell good quality Inkjet cartridges at a small fraction of the cost of the original. To top that, they also provide coupon and discount codes for these stores that help you avail an even lower price. You could get a further discount or save on shipping. So overall, you could get an ink cartridge that is as good at about 20 – 30% of the price of the original.

I found the best code for myself. An All Ink Coupon Code giving a 15% discount on any order of any amount. That’s the one I used to order my stock.

Another plus is their section on Printer related articles where they give you Ink Saving Tips and help with Troubleshooting Printers. For instance, did you know that when the cartridge is apparently empty, you should take it out and sway it a bit? This helps you use the last bit of ink. I tried it with my printer cartridge (the one I had exhausted) and it did print some more pages before dying out completely. They also have a section telling you about the top 6 brands of printers.

Finding sites like these really makes my day. If any of you come across other sites that offer great stuff for a low price, please let me know and make my day!

Free Shipping on Patio Furniture

Patio FurnitureA quick note. Just came across this site that has a special offer for the summer. They are offering free shipping on their Patio Furniture until the 23rd of May. That’s a saving of $100 – $150 on any set. They have a great range at wholesale prices, which is now even more inviting with this offer.

I was already in love with this bedroom set from their site. I hope they have a sale on their platform beds next. Also worth checking out is their collection of recliners.

If you find any other furniture sites offering discounts, do leave me a comment.