HomeBlend Administration

What a month June has been. We’ve seen our user base mushroom! We’ve also began crediting every game with a physical link back to the creators website - due to be complete by September!

Loads of stuff has been going on. Firstly on the topic of advertising! I am SO glad that we dropped Valuclick media - the old adverts. They slowed the site down SO much!!!! We have also discovered a new form of  advertising that threatens the privacy of the internet! Phorm uses your surfing history (sold to them by your ISP) to give you relevant ads! We’ve decided not only to reject phorm as a suitable advertiser for HomeBlend but also to warn users that their ISP may be selling their data! There’s lots of stuff about phorm out there so if you’re with Virgin Media (UK) BT (UK) or TalkTalk (UK) check it out! (I know phorm operate in the US but I don’t think they have the same relationships with ISPs - though still check it out!).

We have this month just launched HomeBlend Media Services (unfortunately with the exception of Web Design only available in the Bristol UK area). We hope to eventually expand the services to the entirety of the UK and maybe even in the US as well! HomeBlend Media Services offers affordable web design - IT support and IT consultancy. I’m told that a price list is coming in the next few days but if you can’t wait drop us an email for a quote! Visit www.bristol.homeblend.co.uk for details!

We’ve decided to cut the number of toons from 14 a week to 7 to help improve the overall running of the site! This way we have more time for maintenance issues etc. It is also means we can focus on getting the best quality over quantity. The number of games will remain quite happily at 14 per week! For information on updates during  the summer holidays please read July’s at a glance!

Lastly, we’ve really screwed up on this! The new account system we emailed all our members about! Basically it was really insecure - and we got horribly hacked!!! You may remember HomeBlend.net was down for about four hours a few weeks ago. Therefore we’ve had to pull the plug on it and move back to the old accounts! Definitely did not go to plan, and I apologies for any confusion it may have caused!

Well lets see what July chucks at us! Have an absolutely fantastic month and I hope you continue to enjoy using HomeBlend as much as we do running it!

Luke Appleton. C.E.O

p.s Been some updates to the Terms of Agreement and Privacy Policy - check it out!

We believe its every persons right to use and access homeblend! Therefore if for whatever reason you can’t access homeblend using one domain please use another.

You can access homeblend.net at the following offical addresses:

• http://www.homeblend.net
• http://www.homeblend.co.uk
• http://www.thestudentsite.co.uk
• http://www.freedomtoplay.net
• http://www.homeblendmedia.com
• http://www.homeblendmedia.net

There are a few more unreleased domains you can find via google.

To visit our testing server goto:

• http://www.theambm.com

Many Thanks

HomeBlend

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR LUKE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!

HomeBlend Peeps.

We’ve just launched the HomeBlend.net store. You can buy HomeBlend.net Merchandise, from official t-shirts to HomeBlend Hot pants. We’ve outsourced the shop to the good people at spreadshirt, so remember to read their TOS before purchasing. Visit the Store

We start off May finally as a Limited Company. No longer just a website, but a full fetched entity in the eyes of the law.

We pulled our old ads because of the affect they were having on HomeBlend’s performance and have instead placed much less demanding google ads on our pages. Feedback would be great!

We’ve reached 28,000 downloads since we opened the download service at the end of march! What a record. All media is free to be downloaded and redistributed. I feel like a re-write of our terms of agreement is in order, so stay tuned. Hopefully the re-write will act to benefit and protect HomeBlend’s Population (i.e you the user).

All toons now have credits, in the form of a link back to the creators website, where available, and this seems to have been successful. We have no plans to do the same for games, as they have substantial crediting within the content its self.

Stay Tuned,

Luke Appleton CEO

On the Request of our users we’ve changed where you find some of our games… the following games have changed…

Onslaught 2 - Action ==> Strategy
Storm Winds - Action ==> Strategy
Storm - Action ==> Strategy
Storm Astrum Defence - Action ==> Strategy
Storm Winds 1.5 - Action ==> Strategy
Strategy Defence - Action ==> Strategy
Toy Town Tower Defence - Action ==> Strategy
Undefined Protector - Action ==> Strategy

Please Note: this will not affect searches

Here’s a rough Guide to the games category system on HomeBlend.net

Action - Direct Combat - Weapon /fighting /combat related

Arcade - High Score Driven

Adventure - Exploration, platformers, RPGs etc.

Driving - Games based around vehicles - Racing, Parking, Motor Cross etc.

Strategy - Indirect planned combat and game play

Sport - sport related games

Puzzle - brain puzzling games

Being only human sometimes we get it wrong… if there’s a game in the wrong place… let us know… click contact at the bottom of every one of our pages

No Current Bugs Being Worked on…

1) Game de-selection in Internet Explorer - FIXED

2) Content Glitches (mainly in firefox) - FIXED

3) Bloated Rotating Ads - FIXED

Some of our regular users may have noticed degraded performance and downtime over the past few weeks! This is because, like many of our competitors we don’t use in house hosting - far to expensive - so we outsource it to a dedicated hosting company. Our previous hosting company have caused me nothing but trouble this year so far, and last weekend’s downtime has pushed me over the edge! After over a year and a quarter we’ve decided to move to a different host! In fact that’s where we are now! So hopefully there will be no more downtime - no more degraded service and no more CPU errors that have plagued us since the autumn!

Moving to a new host is a difficult process, especially with a beast the size of HomeBlend.net. Switching over the domains has been the biggest problem! The domains may point to the new server in the UK but the old one in the USA! By Wednesday it will be all sorted though! However if you still get a little downtime, try a different domain… one of these three homeblend.net, gamesfridge.com and thestudentsite.co.uk they all point to the same server!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have as much fun using HomeBlend as we do running it! Any hints, tips, queries or questions please click ‘contact’ at the bottom of our homepage, and we’ll be happy to answer them for you!

Ta for now,

Luke C.E.O

Some news about the GAMESfridge re-brand! The decision was made by us to re-brand everything on HomeBlend Media, under the HomeBlend.net brand, thus replacing the year old GAMESfridge! This was to stop the building confusion! Gamesfridge.com can still be used to access the site, and we still have all the same great content (and more)! Feedback on this would be great!