Roku: A must for movie buffs

Have you heard of Roku yet? It's a digital video player sold by Netflix.

Roku instantly streams highly-quality movies from both Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand, pulling movies from the Internet and displaying them directly on your television. With Roku, you can choose from over 50,000 movies and TV episodes to watch instantly — and just like with DVDs, you can pause, rewind or play them anytime.

Twenty-four hour movie rentals from Amazon cost between 99 cents and $3.99 each, while movie rentals from Netflix are free and unlimited so long as you have a Netflix membership (even the cheapest option at $8.99 means free, unlimited, instant Netflix movies for your television).

Roku is small, delightfully easy to set up and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Learn more at www.roku.com.

Website Topic of the Week: ‘Under Construction' Pages

There are millions upon millions of web pages promising that content is “Coming Soon!” The sad fact is that most of these pages will not be live anytime in the near future. This is why people rarely believe you really mean it when one of your site's pages reads “Coming Soon” or “Under Construction.” They won't check back and your site looks incomplete and unprofessional.

If a “Coming Soon” page temporarily makes good sense for your site, it's imperative to provide credibility to the text on that page by telling people when they can expect to see the new content. This summer? Next month? This winter? Telling your site visitors that new content is coming “soon” just isn't good enough.

Grab Bag: Your Five Links of the Week

1. http://tinyurl.com/ntvze3 — Learn what the infamous “There is a problem with this website's security certificate” website warning means, as well as what you should do next time you run into it.

2. www.greendimes.com — I've mentioned this website in the past, but it's so great I think it deserves another recommendation. GreenDimes (now actually called Tonic Mailstopper) helps you stop junk mail in three simple steps. Fast, easy, and just $20 per year. Help the environment while getting rid of (most) junk mail once and for all.

3. http://tinyurl.com/69yh55 — Take a photo of any CD, DVD, book or video game with your iPhone. Then use this free iPhone application to automatically identify — then find rating and pricing information on — that product.

4. www.messageSling.com — A free service that replaces the standard voicemail system on your phone. Make sure you click “Take the Tour” after arriving on the homepage to quickly learn all that MessageSling can do for you.

5. www.cleepr.com — A simple, easy to use search engine for music videos.

eRin pheiL is the primary creative force of timeforcake (www.timeforcake.com), a web design and development studio in Frisco. She can be reached via email at info@timeforcake.com.