SlyCat's Journal

Too tired to write a decent update on Eurofurence today, hopefully I'll make up for that tomorrow.  In the meantime, as I got paid today, I thought I'd make an order with American Soda.  They must have been reading my mind as they emailed me a 15% off voucher today which could only be used today if an order of Mountain Dew was included with the order.  Ended up ordering 24 x Stewarts Birch Beer, 24 x Sioux City Root Beer & 12 x Jolt Blues for myself, a further 24 x Stewarts Birch Beer and 24 x IBC Cream Soda for another guy at work and the 24 x Mountain Dew for Bungle.  That lot came to a total of £100 with the 15% off.  However delivery seemed to be free this time round, probably cos the order was over £100.  In addition to that, as a freebie, I've got a box of Lucky Charms coming.  To top it all off, I get a further 10% of the undiscounted amount (a further £11.77) back as I used the affiliate link on my root beer site.  I think I've done pretty well out of that lot... it's always nice to know you got a good deal on something.

Incidentally, the total I've got for affiliate linking via www.root-beer.co.uk now stands at £40.62.  And that's accumulated in only a month which is pretty impressive.  Hopefully, I should actually receive the money at the end of the month.  Be nice to see if I could keep up that amount of revenue just from people clicking a link and buying stuff, however I think around £20 of that must have been from orders we made in the office.  Still, if anyone wants to import some drinks, I'd really appreciate it if folks clicked the link from my root beer site :D

I've made a few minor changes to www.root-beer.co.uk - I've updated the fact that Sainsbury's are now selling half decent root beer and also I've introduced affiliate linking for American Soda.  So, if anyone reading this ever feels like they want to buy anything from American Soda (which includes non root beer stuff like Mountain Dew), could I ask you very nicely to do so by clicking the root beer bottle on my site first.  It costs you no more to do so and I get 10% of the sale! :)

It's been a long time coming, but I finally took the time to get the look of the site updated.  Have a look at the changes now at http://www.root-beer.co.uk/.  Thanks to miyabisan, I've got the CSS positioning working rather than using tables for the main layout.  I've also added google ads on the right, just in case :).  It's starting to look rather spiffy.  Only one side effect I need to work out how to fix; as I use styling on A tags, my references to a name="blah" causes the on hover to underline the titles...  Might make further visual improvements soon.  Maybe people will start using the forum now, or maybe I over-estimated the potential interest in the subject!

On the topic of root beer, I received a shipment from American Soda last week.  It contained 24 bottles of IBC Root Beer, 24 cans of Black Cherry & Vanilla Coke, 1 pack of Mint Oreos, 2 Tootsie Rolls, 2 packs of Big Red gum and a free bar of Milky Way Midnight. The root beer is absolutely delicious, possibly one of the best I've tasted, probably second only to the micro brewed stuff I've had before.  The Coke is quite nice too, quite a distinctive taste.  More distinct than the cherry & vanilla Dr. Pepper I've had before.  Most of the Mint Oreos have now gone, as I've used most of them to make the best Oreo milkshakes known to man :D

I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep but I had an overactive mind thinking about things.  I was randomly thinking about copperfeel's petition to get Root Beer in the UK and how I could help raise awareness as the petition's still only got 25 signatures.  I thought that I should put my web skills to use and make a site to inform people about where they can get root beer in the UK (natively and importing) and also offer a discussion forum for root beer fans.  I've been thinking it all through in my head, and I can picture how I want the site to be in my mind.  As such, I got out of bed and registered the domain and made a holding page.


As I only just registered the domain, it'll take 24hours for most people's nameservers to update, however I've taken the first step and I'll be doing more work on it over the coming days.  Will be nice to have a little web project to keep me occupied. Hopefully for now I can get some sleep at least!