Hey, It’s Free!

Sorry folks, we were down for about an hour or so this afternoon. Long story short, I broke things and didn’t know it until my sister called me.

Oops

Well holy moly, what do we have here? That’s right folks, I grew bored with that bland layout we had before (TOO MUCH GREY!) and decided to slap together something new that used more than two primary colors. Of course, I might have gone a little overboard with strong colors, but for now this is what we’re working with here on HIF

Of course, I guarantee you I’ve messed up the site somewhere. So if you see anything that looks weird or outright doesn’t work, please let me know in the comments and I’ll get on it! I’ve tested the layout in Firefox, IE 7, and Safari and I don’t see anything too goofy, but I very well could have missed something. Thanks everybody and I hope there are more people out there who like the new look than who hate it!

P.S. If you are having trouble reading the site, let me know. My mom mentioned it hurt her eyes before, so I tweaked it a little. But who knows, maybe I didn’t tweak it enough. Let me know, because if nobody says anything, I’ll assume it’s fine.

Here’s a link to the video above just in case it’s not working for you. Also, I know I said I’ll be taking a break from the Internet in the video, but come on, it’s me we’re talking about here. I’m sure I’ll find a cyber cafe or ninety while I’m there Don’t forget about the Kiva.org Charity Drive that we’re doing and if you have any questions about it, post them in the comments or on the forums!

Until next time!

There’s an old adage that when the boss is away, the workers will play. Or something of that sort. I like it the way I said it because it rhymes.

Needless to say, folks, Goob is going to be out of town for the next two weeks or so down in South America, meaning you’re stuck with me for these next 14 days. If I had known about these free Murad skin care samples a week or so back, I could have a spa day while the boss here is gone. No worries, just cucumbers and facial mud and a fuzzy white robe (Not actual contents of sample package, but I’m allowed to dream!)…

But, because it takes two to three weeks to get here? I guess I’ll get that day as soon as he gets back… And it means I get to be the person who plays here for your freebee loving goodness of doom.

So uh, if you find any freebees over the next few weeks? Feel free to send them to me on the forums or to my e-mail (Found on the forums, so why haven’t you joined yet?), and I’ll do my best to get them up here for you as soon as possible.

Unless I raid my wife’s skin care cabinet and have my own spa day first…

[via the forums]

Technorati Tags: free, skin care, murad, goob, spa day

EDIT: The button below should be working now.

So there’s been a section on the freebie forums called Hey, It’s Free…To Help People! for months now, which I have yet to do a darn thing with. But I decided to change that today.

A few days ago I heard about Kiva.org, which is a non-profit website that specializes in helping aspiring entrepreneurs in third world nations. Using microfinancing, they are given small loans to be used to improve their daily lives before they ultimately pay the loan back to us lenders. To idea is to enable people to help themselves individually instead of simply throwing billions of dollars in aide to a foreign government and hoping it trickles down to the people. In fact, Muhammad Yunus recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his research into microfinancing and wrote a book called Banker To The Poor, where he details how effective the method is.

Just to give you an example, José Medina lives in Paraguay and is trying to raise $600 to purchase supplies for his handcrafts business. In 12 months time, he would have made enough money to repay the loan in full . They have had 2171 loans paid back in full and only 7 which have defaulted! Those are some darn good odds if you ask me.

Now, Kiva lets anybody loan money, but the minimum amount is $25. But I thought if anybody out there wanted to simply donate $5 or $10, that we could put our money together in a HIF pool or something and then pick a person to “sponsor” and help! It’d be kinda cool to think that all of us here at HIF specifically helped one person out there in the third world better their life!

So the basic plan of action is this: Donations of any amount can be sent to me, where I add them all together. No matter how much or little money we actually raise here, come September 12th, I’ll post two or three different potential people that we can “invest” in to help them out. We’ll take a day to pick a person and then I’ll invest all the money I collected into their venture. We’ll all be able to follow their progress along via Kiva.org I’ll even post a progress bar here on HIF or something. Then when they ultimately (and hopefully!) succeed in their business, they’ll pay me back. At which point, I’ll announce that we need to pick a new person and start the process all over again!

The beauty of this is that your one time donation doesn’t just help one person, but multiple people time and time again. If this is something nobody’s interested in, no worries, but I thought since we all get so many freebies all the time, maybe we could muster up a little support and pass the baton to those who could really use it.

So if you want to donate something to this cause, you can send it to my Paypal address, which is shyzer@shyzer.com or you can just click the donation button below. (Shyzer.com is my personal website that I owned years before HIF, hence when my Paypal account isn’t a HIF e-mail :)) You can donate money using a debit or credit card or if you already have a Paypal account, you can donate through that.

Thanks for taking part in this and here’s to actually making a difference in the world!

Well, I’ve been getting requests to sign up for the non-existent newsletter here on HIF for almost a year now, so I finally broke down and set up a little something for you folks that like to keep up with the site through e-mail! That’s right, you can now sign up for daily updates, which will be sent out every evening directly to your inbox thanks to the kind folks over at Feeburner, which I think was just bought by Google for 89 billion dollars or something.

Enjoy folks! And if you subscribe only to realize later on that you no longer want to get the e-mails, I’ve made sure it’s easy for people to unsubscribe. All you have to do is click an unsubscribe link in one of the daily e-mails and Feedburner will no longer e-mail you. Now is that not nice of me, or what?!

I’ll be working on fully configuring this new theme for the rest of the day, so please bear with me if the site looks a bit messed up for a little while!

It was about time, right? If you’re interested in reading more about the new digs, then by all means click below! If not, no hard feelings

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As you might be able to see from the grossly enlarged and out of place button of the sidebar, HIF is up for a Blogger’s Choice Award, whatever the heck that is. All I know is that we have three votes so far and we need more! You can either click the button or this link here to go vote.

We’ve got until June 2, I believe, to get as many votes as possible. 43 votes will get us on the first page of listings for the hobby blog’s category and I think the leader in the category has 128 at the moment. It’s a lofty goal to try and catch them, but what the heck, let’s see if we can’t do it! So go vote if you like HIF and thanks in advance everybody!

Kathleen Ramirez, from the Ka Leo O Hawai’i newspaper, (I hope you can figure out where their located) wrote an awesome article about HIF that I recently got a chance to read. Their main website is down right now, but you can find the article below the fold.

I also want to thank David Pham, one of the newspaper’s editors, for sending me copies of the newspaper and keeping me in the loop about the article’s status. And remember, if you have a local newspaper, please send them an e-mail with a short little blurb about HIF and see if they might not want to write about us. The more, the better!

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Earlier this month, I was interviewed by a few fantastic reporters who were interested in putting together a story on HIF and the freebie world in general for their respective newspapers!

The first article to come out was written for the FSView, the college newspaper for Florida State University. We conducted a phone interview for the story and I was pretty nervous. It was the first time I’d ever been in the interviewees shoes instead of the interviewer’s, but I think the article came out pretty darn well.

The next article was written for the Ka Leo O Hawai’i newspaper, which represents the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. Their website is down at the moment, but the reporter, Kathleen, was nice enough to promise to send me a few copies of the newspaper itself! So as soon as I get them, I’ll scan the article and upload it here to HIF!

The rest of the interviews I’ve given recently have yet to produce any articles, but I’m told that a few will be running in the near future. As soon as they do, I’ll post them here on HIF. But I wanted to add that if you’re a college student yourself, or have any friends that work for a newspaper or radio station and you want to help support HIF, then PLEASE e-mail them and let them know about HIF!

One of the best ways to get new readers here on HIF (and with that, new people who can find some freebies!) is to spread the word via any form of media whatsoever. Newspapers, radio, TV, even blogs! Each and every bit helps and with each new article comes new readers! Heck, even if you just e-mail your local newspaper and tell them about us, I’d be forever grateful, even if nothing ever comes of it. So thank you in advance for helping to spreading the word about HIF!

Sorry for the downtime there for the past 40 minutes, but I needed to upgrade Wordpress, the software I use to run this site. And I figured late at night on Easter Sunday would probably be the best time in the near future where there were as few people on the site as possible.

But it looks like I’ve got everything up and running now, which is surprising because I’m not even drunk yet! Happy Easter everybody!

On the forums, I’m known as the music guy for all of the samples of albums and mix tapes that I post. I’m always talking about some new band or some cool or crazy music video that I’ve found.

But all of my endless promotion and forum pimping aside, what people don’t know about me is that I love to watch movies. I may not talk much about the movies I watch, and I might be downloading a few too many to add along to my fiancée’s and my Total Access from Blockbuster and Digital On-Demand Cable (with 2 DVR boxes), but we watch probably a movie a night. Two on good nights, and more on good weekends when I don’t have to work. But seeing I’m the weekend closer, that’s sadly few and far between.

That’s why this little find of Red Box DVD Rental codes would be so totally awesome–if there was one by us to go to. Oh, and yes, I’m sending you to the forums on that one WITHOUT a “[via the forums]” link because of the fact that it’s two links to things for the effort of your one click here.

And seeing I’m talking so much about them, why not join us and say hi? Doesn’t hurt you, and I don’t bite… Well, only when I’ve had my caffeine…

and the objective of this post was to see how many irrelevant hot links I could fit into one HIF post… Goob, I think I might hold us a new record…

Technorati Tags: free, dvd, movies, music, red box, caffeine, shameless plug, forums, hot link heaven

I’ve tried a lot of food in my life, some good, some bad, some ugly. I’ve also tried A LOT of health food, mostly bad and ugly, but bee pollen is something I’ve never tried. What could it possibly taste like?! As a vegetarian should I even be ordering this? Honestly couldn’t be as bad as the elk antler velvet that I tried a couple years bad to ‘rejuvenate’ and ‘energize’. Before elk antler velvet, I didn’t have the ability to run and puke, so I can’t deny it gave me more energy. Back to the point, try a free sample of PollenPower! Bee Pollen and tell me what you think!

(whoah my first HIF post. how cool is this?)

Technorati Tags: Bee Pollen, Free, Sample, Gross, Health

People who’ve been reading HIF for a while now probably think I’m a broken record at this point, but it needs to be said again that you don’t leave your home/mailing address here in the comments. I don’t send out the freebies. I never have. I never will. Instead, you need to click the link provided in each post and then enter in all your info on the new website that loads.

Well, after an exhausting month long search and taking another few weeks to write up a a guide on how to work WordPress for them, I’m proud to announce the newest writers here on HIF! They’ll all start posting pretty soon here as we start the trial period, but for now, I’ll let them introduce themselves:

Amy’s having trouble with her home computer right now, so she hasn’t sent in an intro yet. I’m guessing her kids tried to flush her computer down the toilet. Well, at least that’s what I did to my mom’s jewelry box when I was a kid. But don’t worry, I sent my GI Joe’s in after it to “save the rings” as I later explained to her.

Hey, all you HIFFER’s!!!!!! My name is Amy and I was one of the people who answered Goob’s plea for help posting freebies on the main HIF site! Yayyyyy! I suppose you are all wondering about what kind of person would want to do something like that, so a little about myself:

I am a homemaker with a wonderful husband of nearly 15 years (I always refer to him as “hubby Chris”, so get used to it!) and I have two boys. Connor is 13 and Brendan is 12. I am one of the fortunate people who is financially secure enough that I now get to stay home and raise my boys while hubby Chris slaves away. I hail from the Pacific NW. I am originally from a little hill billy town about 35 miles SE of Portland, OR but left town the day after I graduated from high school. Hubby Chris and I kicked around a lot and have finally ended up settling in the Seattle area.

When I was growing up I wanted to be either a princess, a mortician (I kid you not) or a journalist. Now, although I make my children call me “Your Highness” I am hardly a princess and hubby Chris says he’ll never kiss someone who touches dead bodies for a living and I dropped out of college at age 20! (Sigh) So…….here I am, doing “journalism” for all you HIFFER’s! I am so excited to share freebies with all of you. Plus, reaching two out of three goals ain’t bad!

I am very much looking forward to being here and helping all of you keep your mailboxes overflowing! Bye for now!

Hey folks, my name is Adam, and some of y’all might have met me on the forums. I’m 24 (Age of Aquarius on Jan 31st), and I’m getting married at the end of April. Mostly, I just like getting free stuff, and a ton of free music too. My wit is mostly funny to myself, but maybe some of you guys will appreciate it too. I got hooked on freebies because of Goob’s site, and I’m just glad I can help you guys get some of the fresh ones from the forums.

I’m 17, a freshman at Louisiana State University where I’m majoring in Chemistry and Psychology, and live at home with my mom, grandma, two cats and a dog. I play guitar and tennis and spend most of my time with my friends. I used to work at a bagel shop but it closed down and now I’m focusing on school. I love the internet and I love freebies! I’m a starving college student, how could I not love freebies?

Colt hails from Chicago, IL. By day he is consumed with his graduate studies at a Chicago university. By night he eagerly reads freebie and deal forums in search of the next best freebie to report to the fine readers of heyitsfree.net. With his trusty sidekick, Luke the Beagle, at his side, no freebie shall escape his sight (except during Thursday nights when The Office and 30 Rock are on, or during Tuesday nights when House is on).

Hi, I’m Maggie. I’m a sophomore in high school and obviously like to write, read, and talk more than I should. This is the first time I’ll be writing for the viewing pleasure(or maybe some other horrible emotion, depending on how my skills work out?), so I might seem a little… off, to put it best. I’m thought of to many as ‘that weird, short, lesbian chick’ at my school, though I’m only two of the four (short and a chick. Well, maybe a little weird to them?). I’m diabetic, musical, and love acting, and can talk on and on about anything for quite a while. I’ll spare you that lovely habit, and save all of my typing for some fun freebies, and… yeah. Whoo, and hello there.

So there you have it. Your new deliverers of freebies!

Attention all Hiffers: If you’d be willing to talk to a reporter for an upcoming article about HIF, please message me on the forums or contact me and let me know how long you’ve been visiting HIF, where ya live (just city and state, I don’t need your address :)) and a phone number that you can be reached at. (Noting a good time to call you would also be appreciated!) The reporter is super nice and I imagine this would only take a few minutes of your time.

Thanks guys, you rock.

The workload between trying to keep the site not only running, but fresh, as well as managing the forums, coming up with new contests, trying to find some cool sponsors, etc. has outgrown my free time! And that doesn’t even leave room for trying to develop all the cool ideas for the site that could set us apart from 99% of the other freebies sites out there, as well as all the other random projects I have going on at the moment.

So the time has come to bring on a few fellow writers here at HIF!. Please, you didn’t think I’d just give up and close shop, did you? I freaking love freebies! And I love all the readers, commenters, and contributers even more! So here’s the deal - if you love freebies as well and think you have what it takes (don’t worry, it’s not much. If I can do it, anybody can!) to post on here, then send me an e-mail.

The few basic requirements are:

• A love for all things free!
• Basic writing skills (that means, correct spelling, punctuation, grammar, the usual. Microsoft Word is a great friend when it comes to this area if you have trouble :))
• Be interesting! You don’t have to have the same dry wit as me, but you need to be able to take a freebie and write something funny/witty/humorous/whatever about it!

Ideally, the perfect candidate would have the above skills as well as the few mentioned below!

• Prior experience with Wordpress or something similar. This is optional, as WP is VERY easy to learn (it’s made for people who know little about computers) and I’m willing to teach/help. But it’d be really nice if you knew it ahead of time!
• Experience with finding freebies. I’ll be glad to share whatever resources I use to find the freebies if you don’t know of any already, but if somebody came to me with a resource I didn’t know about and had the above skills, chances are they’d be on the shortlist.
• The ability to filter out crappy freebies. Anybody can find links to free brochures for Montana tourism, but who actually wants one? You need to be able to weed out the scammy/crappy freebies, seeing as how 90% of the offers out there qualify as those. We only want the good stuff here on HIF!

So now you know what I’m looking for, but you’re wondering what’s in it for you! Well, that’s pretty easy!

• This will be a paid position. I’ll be paying each writer per post they make up to a certain amount every month, so that everybody is paid equally. But let me stress one thing - if you’re in this for the money, don’t waste your time. We don’t make much money here at HIF! Industries and thus, I have very little to pay people with. As the site grows and (hopefully) makes more money, I would be able to pay you more. But as of now, I can only modestly reward you for your work - but hey, most sites don’t even pay their writers!
• Your own HIF! e-mail address if you want one. (ex, joe@heyitsfree.net or sally@heyitsfree.net)
• You can write as little or as much as you want each month. If you only have time for a few posts a week, that’s fine. If you have a bunch of time the next week and want to go all out, then more power to you!
• Once we get some sponsored freebies around here (I’m still pestering companies about that!), you’ll be first in line to get the samples and enjoy them.
• Firsthand knowledge and experience of how running a freebie site works!
• A custom user tag over on the Forums. You’ll be the envy of everybody here. Hahaha.
• The ability to tell your friends and family that you work (hey, you’re actually getting paid!) for a one of the coolest freebie websites on the net! Wait, not just freebie sites, but one of the coolest sites on the net, period!

This would be the perfect job for college students, retirees, stay-at-home moms, people who goof off on the computer at work - in essence, anybody who has a little free time every day! I haven’t decided how many people I’ll be hiring now since it’ll depend on how many applicants I get, how much people think they can write, etc. But every application will be looked over and responded to by me personally.

So e-mail me your application and let me know you’re interested. In addition, include any samples of your writing (it doesn’t matter what the topic is) that you might have, how many posts a day/week/month you think you might be able to do, and why I should pick you! Here’s to keeping HIF open, free, and awesome!

This is just a reminder folks about the super cool Scavenger Hunt over on the forums that is opening right about now! The first person to complete it will win a free DVD of their choice and everybody else that completes it will be in a drawing for yet another free DVD. More info can be found in the link provided or in a post I made a few posts down from this one.

I hope everybody has fun!

Man, I love it when drunk drivers slam into power poles and knock out my power for the day, don’t you?! I didn’t know what to do with myself as I couldn’t search for freebies all day. So instead I opened something called a “book” and “read.” It was weird. I don’t ever want to have to do that again!

To make matters worse, now my home internet connection won’t connect to any of my websites. Not a single one! So until I get that resolved, the only way I can update this and my other sites is through my neighbor’s open (and painfully slow) wifi connection and while I’m at work. This has got me thinking that maybe I should look into getting a few extra hands to help me out around here and on the forums…But more on that later!

Since this internet connection is moving about as fast as I can sprint (which is slooooooow), go check out the forums for your freebie fix. I’ll try and update tomorrow at work.

I’d be thrilled if I could get a new design for Hey, It’s Free! sometime soon. Ideally, I’d like to have a fluid 3 column layout. Only having this one sidebar on the right severely limits the number of link trades I can set up, which in turn limits the traffic we can get from that method. Plus everything feels way too cluttered over there, I’d like to have a whole new sidebar to help spread things out. The fluid aspect is a must, as I can’t stand seeing all this blank space on the sides with my large screen resolution. I’m looking into taking a free theme out there and modifying it like I did with the current theme, but it sure would be nice if I could simply find what I wanted to start with right off the bat

So if anybody out there designs Wordpress themes, knows of somebody who’d be willing to help me out, or knows of a layout already created that I might be able to use, please let me know!!!

And while we’re on the topic of hopeful changes, is there anything you’d change about HIF? Any features you’d like see installed/created/morphed out of small woodland creatures? Then be sure to let me know about it in the comments! I’m looking to take HIF “to the next level” per say and increase the traffic around here!