How many of you get those one-time Visas or Mastercards for birthday and Christmas presents? It’s not long before you find your wallet or desk drawer awash in those cards that have just small dribbles of cash left on the balance.

You know what I mean: Aunt Mildred gives you a $25 gift card and you spend $21.82 at the mall. What are you going to do with the remaining $3.18? That’ll get you laughed out of Starbucks. Hooted off of eBay. Waltzed out of Wal-Mart.

It finally dawned on me today that I don’t have to guiltily skulk by the “donate, please!” buttons on my favorite blogs and free software websites. When I’ve got a few bucks left on a gift card, I’m going to use these sad little dollar amounts to put a drop in the bucket. Now, some of my blog faves may be wondering why $6.55 and $3.18 are showing up as oddly precise miniature donations, but that’s okay. It feels great.

What are you doing with your too-little-to-use charge card balances?

Technorati Tags: How to donate to blogs, blog donations, software donations, using up charge cards

I’m calling an early end to the Entrecard experiment. All the glitches at Entrecard.com have soured me on the experience, at least as it applies to dropping the maximum of 300 cards per day. I’ll continue to use the system as a useful way to find interesting new blogs to read, but no more click-click-clicking solely to rack up the points and to raise my blog in the category ranking.

Why? It’s just too discouraging:

• to click and not get credits
• to try to click and only get “invalid” results
• to click through on blogs that are fast loading but which don’t have topics that match my interests

So from here on out, I’m ONLY going to click on Entrecard blogs that:

• look as if they might be interesting (that’s one click)
• maintain my interest (that’s many, many future clicks)

Sorry — I’m dropping out of the click race. It was an interesting experiment for me, and maybe it’ll be a good idea again someday when Entrecard is working without daily glitches.

The GOOD news is that my Entrecard prices will probably plummet, while my blog contents will return to their usual programming. :o)

Technorati Tags: Entrecard, powerdropping

Well, looks like there’s another glitch in the Entrecard system. For both of my blogs, I’m not getting credits today for any cards I dropped. It looks like it’s working when I’m clicking on the Entrecard ad on someone’s blog; I get the “Thanks!” button.

But my Entrecard credit balance? It stays at zero.

I’ve emailed the support team once again to ask what the heck is up. Is anyone else having this problem?

Update: I guess it was their system just glitching for everyone, based on comments I read in the forums. And it’s now working again. (I mainly put this post up here and on my other blog so that other card-droppers would know I wasn’t just being a slacker. Or, at least no more of a slacker than usual!)

Technorati Tags: entrecard glitch