How to complain about paypal in the UK

November 26, 2008 By 316 Comments

If you’ve found it impossible to complain about Paypal, you’re not alone

Have you had your account frozen by Paypal who refuse to release your funds no matter how much of the requested information you supply them?

Have you had a scam pulled on you and found that not only has Paypal sided with the scammer, but they’ve frozen your account or closed you down altogether?

Are you going insane just trying to get a real human being to answer your calls? One who doesn’t treat you like an international criminal when they finally deal with you?

To most people, it seems as though Paypal is unregulated. It appears to be able to do anything it likes and there’s nothing the individual can do about it. Back in 2009 I tried to find out who regulated Paypal in the UK and didn’t get very far. The FSA said that it did regulate Paypal and the Financial Ombudsman Service said that they would listen to complaints about Paypal but nothing seemed to happen and the problems just got worse.  A couple of years ago, the FSA dropped out of the picture and Luxemburg regulator CSSF took over.

I chose the title of this post carefully “How to complain about Paypal in the UK” because I knew full well that this information wasn’t easy to find. Paypal certainly weren’t telling anyone who regulated them. My original post started getting lots of traffic and plenty of comments.

The stories that you’ve left here are unbelievable. Unbelievable that a business can operate this way and get away with it. Read them and get a sense of how angry people are at this rogue business.

Until recently, this was just a tale of frustration and disgust. But that looks like it might be about to change.

Take PayPal to the County Court and win!!

Thanks to contributor Duncan who alerted us to this September 2011 story from The Independent about a UK woman taking PayPal to the County Court and winning. The judge ruled that it was unlawful for PayPal to continue to hold her account funds after she provided the required evidence. 

I’m going to try to get in touch with this lady, so more details (hopefully) to follow.

Register your frustration where it will make a difference – Facebook

Got a problem with PayPal freezing your account? Join the Facebook group now! It’s brand new but it will quickly become the place to turn up the pressure on Paypal. Instead of dozens of websites accumulating angry Paypal customers, let’s bring it all together in one place.

And while you’re at it, please consider signing this online petition.

 Well worth a try:

Recent posters report direct intervention by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to resolve their ‘frozen account’ problems.

And if all else fails:

Lastly, you can try CSSF, the body that regulates Paypal in Luxembourg.

Filed Under: how to Tagged With: , , , ,

Make your own record player

October 26, 2008 By 1 Comment

Scratching from the late 1950s

I found a 1958 Italian ‘animal alphabet’ book yesterday in the Market with a record in the back cover. I couldn’t resist, so £1 exchanged hands and I scurried home to get to work building a record player.

Making a record player is one of the more curious skill sets I acquired from a childhood without TV.

Here’s Elliot passing an enthralled two minutes, er… ‘scratching’ away with the device to create a few squawky little Italian phrases.

All you need is a pen top, a needle, some cardboard and a record. That’s a round thing with grooves in it that makes sounds, kids.

Quality sound reproduction .to0, don’t you think?

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How to podcast a conference: our simple setup

October 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Podcasting conferences made easy with our reliable, low-cost setup

Podcasting the speakers at a conference is a great way of capitalising their knowledge and experience and turning it into useful content. You might as well – after all, they’re doing the presentation anyway.

If you’re looking to audio podcast conference speakers, here’s our top ten tips.

1) Most voice, least background noise. That means putting a mic as close to the speaker’s mouth as possible. We always use a wireless ‘tie-pin’ (lavalier) mic to capture our speakers.

2) Buy Sennheiser Freeport wireless mics. The best wireless mics for the least money from the company that also makes the best wireless mics for the most money.

3) Capture the audience questions. Use a hand-held Sennheiser wireless Freeport mic (set to a different channel to the tie-pin mic). If the questions are planned, get the people to sit in the front row and wait for you to bring the mic to them. If not, be prepared to simply pass the mic along the line – whatever it takes to get the questions recorded.

4) Keep channels separate. Run your speaker mic into one channel on your recorder (we use the mAudio Microtrack) and the hand-held into the other. This means you can cut questions into the audio when you edit, omitting any extra mic noise when it’s not in use.

5) Do whatever you can to reduce background noise. Turn things off; move things, relocate if you can. Definitely turn your mobiles off – and ask your speaker to turn his/hers off too.

6) Monitor your levels visually. Set your levels visually first with the headphone volume off. Headphone gain can fool you into thinking you’re recording a strong signal when you aren’t. When you know you’ve got a strong signal, then bring up the headphones’ level.

7) Stop the recording after each talk is in the can and save. If your recorder’s going to crash, it’s better to lose one presentation rather than all of them.

8) Keep a spare set of batteries for everything charging. In our case, that’s 2 x 9V for the wireless mics and 4 x AA for a power-charger pack for the mAudio. Nothing is worse for your professional reputation than blowing a conference with dead batteries.

9) Carry your own extension reel and gaffer tape. Never assume there are enough sockets for what you need, where you need. The gaffer tape will make your snaking cable safe – and stop someone pulling your kit off the table.

10) Take your time mic-ing up your speaker. They’re nervous, you’re nervous (because you’re holding up the whole proceedings) – but just take your time and be calm and focused. Minimise loose wire and friction noise.

That’s it. It’s all about getting a strong, clean recording on the best equipment you can afford. The Sennheisers are about £115 each; the mAudio mp3 recorder about £200, batteries and cables etc about £50.

Go-anywhere professional quality podcasting for interviews, outside location, seminar presentations, conferences.. you name it – all under £500.

Filed Under: how to, podcasting technique Tagged With: , , , ,

Best audio player for blogs

September 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Yahoo player – possibly the simplest audio player for your blog so far

If you’re looking for a simple audio player for your blog, Yahoo seem to have come up with it. It’s simple to use and features a useful drop-down list that makes our samples page work far better.

NB: ‘mu:kaumedia work-around tip: This (and some other players) work by presenting a play button plus linked text. The play button plays your sound on-page in the player, but the link button (if clicked) opens the audio in a new browser window (Mac) or a Windows Media Player (PC).

If you just want the cute ‘play arrow’ you can replace the linked text with a full stop ‘.’ – and using the html editor, colour it white. Give the audio a title in plain text before the ‘.’ and it will appear as on our samples page.

Filed Under: blogging technique, how to Tagged With: , , ,

How do I hide my WordPress blog until it’s ready to go live?

September 4, 2008 By 12 Comments

Maintenance Mode graphicMaintenance Mode plugin is how you hide your blog until it’s finished

Now we’re getting busy with site designs, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to be able to build a site ‘offline’ as it were.

So I went looking for how to do that and found… (yes, you’ve guessed it) – yet another ‘how to’ shaped hole in the Googlesphere.

I was about to give up when a Canadian schoolteacher blogger caught my eye, and led me to ‘Maintenance Mode‘ from German developers Software Guide.

I laughed, I cried, I danced around the room with joy. This is exactly what I need; so simple and yet so bloody invisible. Here’s how it works – and you can have fun and make it look anyway you want!

Thanks, guys, or should I say vielen danke, Ich totally like liebe dich. Go there, don’t mind if you don’t speak German as good me, just press the buttons until the plugin downloads :-)

(BTW, don’t mind that it messes up the Flash image uploader in WP 2.6 – you can just use the Browser uploader instead)

Filed Under: how to, WOW!

Mandigo WP theme problem with Viddler video embed code

August 25, 2008 By 4 Comments

Are your Viddler videos cropped when viewed in Internet Explorer but OK in Firefox?

I chose the fantastically flexible and good-looking Mandigo WP theme to build a site and tested a Viddler video on a post and a page. In a page, the Viddler video displayed at the right size on Mac & PC and in I.E. and Firefox.

However, in I.E on the PC the video in a post was shrunk to 200 wide and 450 high. (It displayed correctly in Firefox on both PC and Mac).

I did a quick test: dropped a YouTube video into both post and page. This displayed correctly in I.E. and Firefox…. so….

I then used the YouTube script and changed out the Viddler source file!

Presto! The viddler video playing correctly on Mandigo theme in Internet Explorer.

I’m not a programmer, and I can’t tell you what it is in Viddler’s embed code that caused that problem, but YouTube’s embed code looks slimmer, for starters. Anyone out there come across the same problem and can shed any light on it?

Filed Under: blogging technique, how to

Using an image map in a WordPress page or post

August 3, 2008 By 57 Comments

How do I put an image map in a WordPress.org page, post or widget?

Being able to define bits of an image as ‘buttons’ for links is handy – it gives you greater graphic control over your pages, for a start.

For a blogging newcomer it’s not easy or obvious though and a Google search reveals the usual lack of simple ‘how to’ information.  Forget the WP Codex (unless you’re a complete geek or you enjoy being made to feel stupid because you don’t eat, breathe and sleep Php).

For regular, non-technical folks like you and me, here’s how you do it:

1) Make sure the image you want to use as your ‘image map’ is already hosted somewhere online (i.e. your blog uploads folder or some kind of free image hosting service like PhotoBucket)

2) Go to Chris Seidel’s handy little image-mapping tool and, using the URL of your image, follow the instructions to generate lists of the co-ordinates for the areas in your image that you want to make into ‘buttons’.

For square / rectangular areas (these will be referred to as “rect” in your HTML code) you’ll need 4 co-ordinates (each corner). For complex shapes (these will be referred to as “polygon” in HTML) you’ll need as many co-ordinates as it takes to define the shape.

When you’ve defined the shape, copy and paste the list of co-ordinates for the area into a text file, label them so you know which area they define and save for use in step 4) below.

3) Now copy and paste the following HTML code from this page:

<map id=”counties” name=”counties”>

<area title=”London” shape=”polygon” coords=”357, 523, 361, 534, 369, 530, 382, 528, 388, 524, 386, 517, 398, 517, 398, 510, 386, 501, 382, 494, 372, 499, 357, 503, 356, 522″ href=”http://www.Google.com” alt=”London”></area>

</map>

<p><img usemap=”#counties” src=”http://i768.photobucket.com/albums/xx325/Reviewmylocation/region-map.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Reviewmylocationmap” width=”550″ height=”651″/></p>

…and paste it into a document so you can edit it.

The above code is what makes the image map at the bottom of this page work.  You can see that I’ve defined a single area – London – to act as a button (in this case, linking to www.google.com).  This button is defined by the red block of code.

To turn it into your image with your selected area, you’re going to need to replace the image URL with your image’s URL, the co-ordinates with your co-ordinates (refer to your lists), the names you want to give your button and the link URL you want the user to go to when the button’s clicked.

When you’ve done that, save it and test it by pasting it into a post on your blog – making sure that you paste it into the HTML window of the post editor, NOT the Visual editor window (as it won’t work).

4) To make more areas of your image into buttons, go back to your HTML and copy/paste that red block as many times as you need buttons between the green tags.

5) Then go through each area of red code and replace the existing co-ords with new ones from your saved area lists.  Then do the same for the area names and the target URLs.

Hope that was useful – leave a comment to let me know how you got on.

London nextcounty

(and so on.....)

Reviewmylocationmap

Filed Under: blogging technique, how to

3 simple rules for web design

August 1, 2008 By 1 Comment

PIGHere are 3 basic rules of web design that should save you a great deal of heartache and stress

A website needs to be:

1) Well designed. Even if it’s one page, a site needs to look professional and graphically attractive. If not, it doesn’t matter how effectively it works, people will still judge it to be atiquated or naff.

2) Easily found by Google for your business’s keywords. If each of your page titles is just your name and your company name, then your designer doesn’t understand how Google works. It’s not hard to write page titles with Google in mind.

3) Easy to update. Fresh content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive in Google’s eyes. If you have to run back to your web designer every time you want / need to add something, one of two things is going to happen: you’re either going to get fleeced or you’ll end up in a bitter relationship because everything will have to depend on the designer’s ‘goodwill’.

If you ONLY check out these three things before going ahead with your web project, you’ll save yourself a lot of money and a considerable amount of stress.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: business insight, how to, PIGs

WordPress Newsletter Plugin: design underway, sending on hold

July 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Selecting an ‘option’ blew up the send part of the newsletter plugin. Meanwhile…

…I’ve been working on creating the ¡mu! newsletter itself. I’ve used the basic template supplied with the plugin and modified it a little (replacing the header graphic, resizing the text and removing the title from the header).

How did I do that? I copied the ‘Kubrick’ template folder that came with the plugin and picked around in the php files with a text editor, replacing existing image URLs with my own (made to the right size). I took out the code that placed the newsletter title on the header. I added some HTML somewhere to reduce the default font size.

And then I just went about adding text, links and images in sections. It’s just a basic, 2 column newsletter but it’s more than enough to be getting started with.

What would be great would be some way of creating a newsletter design simply and easily from your site’s active theme, without having to hand-alter it the way I have. For all I know it might already be possible to do that but easy or obvious it ain’t.

With a bit of luck, by next week I might have some idea how to fix whatever broke when I clicked the ‘delete unsubscribers from database’ button in the plugin’s ‘Option’s page. ShiftThis.net if there’s anything you can do to help (in plain, non-developer English) I’d appreciate it :-)

[Update: Newsletter working, ShiftThis support improving - see this post]

Filed Under: how to, news

Idiot Guides: How to start blogging

July 8, 2008 By Leave a Comment

‘mu:kaumedia presents an idiot’s guide how to start blogging

Start Blogging: Step 1

Decide why you want to do it.

Here are some good reasons (make sure you know which applies to you before you start)

• Raise your business profile in Google • Have a website that you’re in control of • Save money • Make money • Communicate with your employees and customers • Create a niche site for your Fawlty Towers obsession • Sell things • Share your memoirs • Create a site for your group or club • Promote a time-limited product or event

[Read more...]

Filed Under: blogging technique, how to
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