I finally have my new site about online shopping in Australia ready. It’s called MyOnlineShops.

It’s a replacement for the shopping site that I lost last year, when the domain renewal email went to an old address I wasn’t using any more. Someone quickly grabbed it, as it had a great ranking at Yahoo, and solid PR, and then offered to sell it back to me for $800. No thanks. I did the work for that once, so he won’t get any profit from me. And it no longer ranks anywhere useful.

MyOnlineShops was completely created with Drupal, an open source Content Management System. I didn’t have to do any code at all - it is pure core Drupal, a large number of contributor modules, and CSS. OK, maybe 10 minutes of html for the page layout, moving a few things around from the default layout.

I obviously have a thing about My…. websites. This is my third, after MyDogSpace and MyDogSite.

The reason for calling it MyOnlineShops, is that it lets me (and free members), create my own list of favourites, have my own shopping blog, my own profile, and make my own reviews and comments on shops I’ve used.

I’m still busily adding more online Australian shops, but feel welcome to suggest any missing ones through the contact form on the site.

I seem to have lost my two most profitable domains this week.

I logged in this week to check that links were working, and found someone else’s strange site there! My sites were christmas.best-australian.com and best-australian.com - and as you can imagine, there starts to be a lot of Christmas and online shopping traffic at this time of year.

I had put a lot of effort into getting my Christmas site ranking well - it was position three at Google for “Christmas Australia” all year, and had even been position 1 for a long time last year.

So I looked at the registration details - and it no longer had me as the owner. However it was unusual looking - my original registration date of 2003 was still there, but it had been updated in November, which is obviously when the new person’s site was loaded.

I had registered the domain through my host, so i contacted them. But they were just a reseller for Godaddy, and suggested that I contact them. So I lodged a support claim to both Godaddy, and WildWestDomains, the new registrar, who is actually a kind of sister site to Godaddy. No news yet.

I did a bit more research, and yes the expiry date on my credit card was out of date - even though funds were available, and the card number hadn’t changed.

But I did not receive any warnings that my domain was about to be transferred to someone else.

The (wry) twist is that I had just rebuilt a new more improved Christmas site at a new domain - Christmas Australia. But I had been planning to use this as a case study on transferring sites - using 301 redirects etc. Well I can’t do that now. But I do have all the details on my old incoming links, and you can bet I will be contacting them and asking them to link to my new site.

It may be too late to rank well this Christmas.

But it has taught me a few lessons. Centralise domain registrations, so you don’t have lots of email addresses to check. Hide your domain registration, so you don’t get spammed to death. Lock all your domains. And use captcha’s to stop automated robots from spamming your addresses.

I was in the process of doing all this anyway. But I wasn’t quite fast enough. Wish me luck in my new domains.

I’ve been working on a new online shopping cart selling fancy dressup costumes and halloween costumes, called Costumebox.com.au.

I had the pleasure of being the first official customer, too, buying a Cool Ghoul costume for one of my boys for halloween. We take our halloween seriously at home - lots and lots of decorations - spiders and spiderwebs, and our favourite - a foot-sensitive doormat that shrieks when you tread on it.

Thank goodness for designers - they’ve come up with a lovely layout for the costumebox.com.au site. i had the easy bit, just coding the layout.

And the people behind the site are the most impressive, hard-working, entrepreneurial, professional women I’ve ever seen. Working around the clock to customise things exactly the way they wanted them.

Costumebox - where Australia buys costumes.

Luckily I can now leave the bank (available across the nation) I’ve used for the last four years, as they finally got off their butt and let me transfer my mortgage to another bank. It dragged on for months, from the start of the process, and in the last week I was getting phone calls from the mortgage broker complaining that the old bank wouldn’t talk to the mortgage broker or my new bank, and the old bank wouldn’t release the title deeds despite having the signed transfer document in their hot little hands.

Absolutely pathetic.

The first bad mark against them was when I asked for a joint account to require two signatures. First they said no. Then they said yes. They sent me a confirmation letter. Then they ignored it and let money go out with only one signature. It even went to their legal department, and they admitted they were in the wrong.

Then their ATM in the city malfunctioned and ate my card, for no reason. (Then I saw the piece of paper from a good samaritan fluttering nearby, warning people about the ATM). So, according to the instructions written on the ATM, I went to the local branch.

First they didn’t know they had an ATM there. Then they said I shouldn’t have come to the branch, as they outsourced ATM support. And then they said they couldn’t do anything about the ATM, or my card. They had to issue a new card and ATM.

When I worked at Westpac (the good guys) many years ago, that would have been crap. You had until the next day to retrieve the card and help the customer.

Of course, when the new card came, the new PIN didn’t work.

Then when my house insurance (with the same bank) was due, I didn’t receive a renewal. So they let it lapse. I was uncovered, until I rang and checked, knowing that my insurance was due at that time of year.

And almost every time I tried to use internet banking to transfer my money from the old bank to the new bank, their online access or transfers were always down.

Good riddance to bad banking, fellas.

My other nasty shopping experience was with IKEA this week.

I had a catalogue in the mail, and saw a cheap lamp, bookshelf and desk. Drove halfway across Sydney to get there. Eventually found the desk on display, and was underimpressed with the quality. Was casually informed by a wandering assistant how to record details of the item location. He verified that there were lots of the bookshelf in stock. But no desks. We also looked at some glassware, but found it too ugly to consider seriously.

Made it to the IKEA storeroom. Spent around half an hour, trying to find the bookshelf. It looked like there was one, but someone had scrawled all over the box, saying it was red. Somehow, multiple bookshelves had sold out in the last 10 minutes.

Giving it, I got the kids some ice cream. One lick and it fell to the ground. Kind of summed up the whole IKEA experience for us.

Got home, and mulled over it. Found out you could check the availability of items online. Rang up to see if it was possible to hold an item, or order online, or get it delivered. No. No. and No. And there were no desks, despite the guy saying they were getting more the next day.

I’m now cured of ever wanting to shop at IKEA again.

I was updating my online shopping site, to get rid of dead links and add new shops, and I ended up peeking at all the shops.

I have to say this page of cool gadgets tickled my fancy - a dot matrix watch, flashing t-shirt and LED belt buckle were sadly tempting. For the kids, of course.

And the margarita kit at Fun Gifts looked so easy I could be tempted away from my home-grown frozen strawberry margaritas. Almost.

Latest Buy was making me waver between the desktop clock/digitalphoto/thermometer/calendar, and the USB missile launcher and Equaliser T-shirt again. Guess I’m doomed to an electronic Tshirt at this rate.