Daily Deal: The New Techdirt Deals Store

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Tue, Mar 24th 2015 12:25pm — Daily Deal

We're excited to announce the new Techdirt Deals store. We've partnered with StackCommerce to bring you some great deals on web services, gear and gadgets, freebies and more. Right now there's 70% off of a Lifetime Subscription from VPN Unlimited, 50% off a Lepow ADD Detachable Battery Pack for power on the go or pay what you want for a Back-End Developer Course Bundle with 95+ hours of lessons on Ruby, Python and PHP. The deals have limited lifetimes and there will be new ones announced daily.

To help kick things off, we're giving an additional 10% off on your first purchase with the code TECHDIRT10 now through April 7 at 11:59pm PDT. We hope you enjoy these offerings!

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: daily deal

18 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 12:44pm

Looks a lot like https://deals.slashdot.org/
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 12:55pm

Umlimited
What is VPN Umlimited, exactly? (Pretty sure it's just a typo.)
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 1:11pm

Who designed this crap?
Who thought it was a good idea to put a gray font on a gray background? Who thought it was good idea to require Javascript from half the Internet? Who thought it was a good idea to splash junk all over the home page instead of text that actually explains what the site is?

First impressions count for a lot, and this site screams "designed by an ignorant newbie who knows everything about trendy web design and NOTHING about making a site simple, easy, and functional". Maybe I'll check back in a year or two to see if this worthless luser who vomited up this atrocity has been replaced with someone competent.
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 1:25pm

Re:
yup, it's the same partnership with StackCommerce
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 1:25pm

Re: Umlimited
thanks, fixed
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 1:28pm

Re: Who designed this crap?
Site looks nice enough to me, and I don't see the grey on grey you are talking about. And between the brief introductory text and the big list of products with prices, I think it's fairly obvious that the page is a store -- what more explanation were you looking for?
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Gwiz (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 1:38pm

Maybe it's just me, but today seems to be full of angry comments.

Did everyone's collective cyber-Cheerios get pissed on this morning or something?
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 2:21pm

Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
This text (among others) renders as light gray on dark gray on Firefox (36.0.1) on Linux:

"Share your referral link with friends and earn $10 credit upon their first purchase."

Also all the links at the bottom are damn near invisible (gray on black), e.g., the stuff under "Support", "My Account", etc.

You know, there's a reason books are black on a white background and not green on gray or blue on yellow or some other combination. It's called "legibility".

Also: try installing NoScript and then look at all the sites that are trying to load javascript on that page. Ugh. Horrible. Not that Techdirt itself is any better, but at least it's usable with nearly everything turned off.

(And yes, to answer a comment further down, I am having a bad day. Just once I'd like to go to a new web site and find that it's been built to be compact, fast-loading, eminently readable, doesn't require Javascript, doesn't require Flash, isn't an indulgence of the designer's personal need to express him/herself, and doesn't make me want to reach through the screen and throttle them. Also my coffee went cold.)
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B's Opinion Only (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 2:21pm

Broken?
I was pleased to find some free software on the site, but the downloading seems to be broken. When you click the link, you see:

Complete the steps below:
Step 1 – Get Your Updates
or
or
Step 2 – Spread The Word
or
or

What does that mean? None of the words are clickable.

Also, the login process is unclear. It is a Techdirt site, so why can't I log in with my Techdirt account? This could be made more clear.
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 2:41pm

Re: Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
Honestly, while I understand some of your complaints, it does not seem as bad as all that, and seems pretty in-line with the standard for a huge majority of websites for several years now. I too have my issues with some of the trends in modern web design, but it must really suck to use the web if you experience this much rage over every site that doesn't adhere to your strict minimalist design principles, since that's pretty much all of them.
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 2:43pm

Re: Broken?
We'll look into it but the best thing I can recommend at the moment is trying the live support on the store itself (it's linked at the bottom)

As for the accounts, unfortunately since this is a partnership setup and the site is operated by StackCommerce, I don't think we'll be able to offer unified logins.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 5:33pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
It does in fact suck, like a Hoover vacuum powered by a collapsing star. Most web sites are worthless unusable garbage thrown together by cretins who spent far more time worrying about their useless, bloated graphics and insanely stupid color scheme than about actually communicating. (Anyone who does not grasp that the Internet is first, last, and always a text medium should be taken outside and shot through the lungs as a service to future generations of humanity.)

I'm not so much of a fan of minimalist design -- although I am -- as much as I am of function. If I cannot instantly read your web site and instantly use it then you have failed as a web designer. (Alright, not quite: if it's a speciality web site catering to a small population, and I'm not part of that population, fine. Know your audience and all that. But clearly a site selling general merchandise is NOT in that category.) I'm not going to waste my time trying to get through some web designer's idiosyncratic layout, navigation, etc. in order to buy a widget or read an article: I'll just go somewhere else.

(Case study: the Slashdot "beta" design, which is utterly worthless tripe and should result in the punishment of every person in the room with that decision, preferably by exposure to Justin Bieber at 140 dB.)

Every extra byte, every extra line of code, every every 1K of graphics is bloat, waste and garbage. Web designers should be FORCED to experience their own sites over a 56K modem in order to teach them how to code efficiently. (Those who resist? Outside, up against the wall, etc.) It's actually easier than ever to code highly-functional, immediately-usable, sleek, efficient web sites that also look great: yet web design, as a whole, is arguably worse than ever. (Example: how many sites have a home page that WILL NOT LOAD unless Javascript is enabled? Web designer: outside, wall, lungs, etc.)

So I suppose I shouldn't expect any different here, but I was hoping. Shame on me for being far too optimistic.
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Leigh Beadon (profile), 24 Mar 2015 @ 6:42pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
I think you need to recognize the fact that site operators have a wide variety of goals and needs, beyond just appealing to the small segment of the population with such incredibly strict design standards. I think several of your points are good ones, but I also think you are taking them to an absurdly absolutist level that you know perfectly well is unrealistic to expect on the modern internet.

And to clarify: we did not design and build the Techdirt Deals store. It's a partnership program with StackCommerce and the design comes from them. It also seems pretty clean and straightforward to me, hardly a mess of information that must be sifted through. I think you're being unreasonable.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2015 @ 11:08pm

Why is Techdirt promoting "lifetime subscription" scams?
It's very disappointing to see Techdirt promoting these "lifetime subscription" scams, which anyone gullible enough to ever fall for knows are never close to "lifetime" in duration.

Granted, $40 is not a lot of money (I've been scammed out of far more money buying a "lifetime" gym membership that only lasted several months) and might even be a fair price for a VPN *IF* the service lasts six months to a year.

But buying into any "lifetime" promise is pure gambling, and it's a sucker's bet at that. Even if the company is still around in a few years, they always seem to find a way to change the terms of the deal (whether openly or secretly) in ways that are most definitely not in the customer's benefit.

Having been hoodwinked more times than I care to admit, I now consider all of thise "lifetime" deals to be outright scams, and I think it's a disgrace that Techdirt is giving its seal of approval to this fraudulent practice.
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Andy (profile), 25 Mar 2015 @ 9:58am

Re: Broken?
This may have something to do with the browser/device you're using... can you try on a different browser/device to see if you're still having the issue?
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Mar 2015 @ 6:26pm

Re: Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
Is trolling ur full-time job? Must be paying big bucks. Where do I sign up?
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Mar 2015 @ 6:30pm

Re: Re: Re: Who designed this crap?
Maybe u should just shut up and drink ur coffee....
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Anonymous Coward, 27 Mar 2015 @ 11:50am

Get your Mike Sponsored VPN service! Download away, pirate friends!
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