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Toolbar woes for all… Conduit.com Sucks!

admin    T-Shirt News     T-Shirts, conduit.com, errors, t-shirt community, t-shirt toolbar, t-shirt tools, toolbar

Ah well I think I have to admit when an experiment goes fatally wrong, and this seems to be one of the greatest flops for quite a while. I’ve had all sorts of complaints regarding technical issues, and however grand the idea I have to admit defeat when it’s staring me in the face.

The main problem is that the service is provided by Conduit.com, their site is filled with assurances and promises regarding the customisation and security of their software but perhaps I let my guard drop too soon, there’s just no such thing as a free lunch. If anyone with a love of t-shirts and a bit of technical savvy wants to take control of the project, feel free to contact me and I’ll pass on the administration login details.

The truth is the toolbar needs to be built from scratch. Apart from the criticisms at MilitantGeek.com, which there are many, I received this today from Kamil at Cameesa, and to be honest this must be the final nail in the coffin for a short lived experiment gone awry.

Ouch! That sure looks painful, ad Firefox is usually so reliable. I’d recommend we all call it a day on the T-Shirt Toolbar for now, if I didn’t use a Macbook and had a fortune stashed away I’d buy the toolbar studio software from BestToolbars.net and give it a crack, from scratch, but it’s not going to happen, well not unless someone else takes up the gauntlet.

Ah well it was fun whilst it lasted, I want to thank everyone who tried out the toolbar, contributed links, offered advice, and wrote about the venture. Perhaps the experience has brought a few of us closer together, even if not exactly in the way I had intended. Let’s all take a minute’s silence for the short and uneventful life of The T-Shirt Toolbar…

My apologies to all for the time and effort wasted, there are some very patient and co-operative people out there in the t-shirt world, and I know, I owe you. If you are a tee mad toolbar wizard with an urge to take this further, expect a heap of promotion from Buy Tees in the future!

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13 Comments to “Toolbar woes for all… Conduit.com Sucks!”

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  profits October 1, 2008 at 8:29 am

  Paul, the only issue I experienced was the login for feedburner poping up but I don’t have the feedback that you do. I believe it is a solid idea that could be developed into something that most could find useful. You have great vision of a better community which may not be possible for obvious reasons. Militant Geek has some good suggestions in their review. I don’t think the whole idea should be scrapped but if you are done with it and don’t mind, I’d like to look into taking the idea further.

  profits
• Tee Toolbar Toast? | Militant Geek Custom Shirts October 1, 2008 at 8:07 pm

  [...] Updating a post from Monday Paul has now blogged that Conduit.com, the technology provider behind the toolbar, resembles a large vacuum cleaner of outrageous ability (ie. sucks). You can read the full account at Buy-Tees.net. [...]
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  Shirts on Sale October 1, 2008 at 10:38 pm

  Sorry to hear about the woes with t-shirt toolbar. Perhaps one of the problems, with the RSS feed, doesn’t have to do with the toolbar and instead has to do with your Feedburner account. Did you recently password protect the feed? If I try to subscribe from your website, I am asked for a password. Oddly, I didn’t notice this issue yesterday.
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  admin October 1, 2008 at 10:48 pm

  Thanks but that wasn’t the main problem, essentially there were complaints ranging from homepage hijacking to installation problems – I removed my feed yesterday but the problems kept coming and so I’ve passed the baton to Profits of TeeFeeds.com – I’m planning on building my own from scratch if I get the chance – cheers ;)
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  swanee June 11, 2010 at 5:16 pm

  That weird you experienced so many problems I currently run 3 conduit tool bars on my pc and have never had anything go wrong *shrugs*
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  admin June 11, 2010 at 6:19 pm

  Thanks for the comment Swanee. The post is 2 years old and so perhaps changes have been made to the system. I cite other posts with the same problems however as I say, this is an old post. Good to hear it’s good enough for your needs. although these days I’d say toolbars are just about redundant anyway.
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  Chookchooks September 12, 2010 at 12:58 pm

  I have been using Conduit for the last two years and now out of nowhere I have to remove so called Icons that infringe 3rd party agreements. My Toolbar had a Packman icon to indicate games link. I’ll change it to a space invader and see what happens.

  Found this by Googling Conduit toolbar Suck
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  admin September 12, 2010 at 1:27 pm

  Thanks for the comment Chook – I kinda think toolbars are over really, well as far as the browser market goes. With RSS and a host of popular social networks it doesn’t seem necessary. Sure there are some lovely Firefox addons/apps but it can get unwieldy once you’ve bolted on a few clunky toolbars. If you do have a market for a custom toolbar the best thing to do is get hold of the Google toolbar and create your own buttons using their API http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/apis/ – seeing as a lot of people still use this one a custom job could be attractive.
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  Karim November 16, 2010 at 10:36 am

  Hello,
  I stumbled upon Conduit.com while browsing the top 100 Alexa.com’s most visited websites, because I am looking for an intelligent way (and original) to get tardeted traffic to my French blog about writing tips for amateur and professional authors.
  Conduit.com seems to be ranked #31 today (November 16) and have a Google PR of 8.
  I was really impressed by seing the numbers that increase each secound, over 2 millions and growing up, and I said to myself: wow, this is the HUGE opportunity! But well, I didn’t understand much about how I could use their service.

  My main question is, why do they have so much traffic to their website? I am exploring Alexa to discover more
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  admin November 16, 2010 at 11:12 am

  If the toolbar includes an Alexa script that would explain it, every single page visited would count towards Conduit, much like a header frame.
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  David Arthur December 18, 2010 at 6:37 pm

  Home page hijacked by conduit! And now I can’t completely remove it from my computer.
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  admin December 18, 2010 at 6:59 pm

  Sorry to hear that David. I’d contact them for advice. I hate it myself, no need for toolbars like this any more. Thx for the comment, hope they get back to you b4 Xmas!!
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  David Arthur January 6, 2011 at 10:27 pm

  Have not heard a word from conduit about completely removing from my computer. Contacted 3 times. Perhaps you meant Christmas 2011.