News and commentary from LookContests.com

I’ve added a new shortcut that you may find useful.  As you probably know, when you click the contest title, the browser loads the contest site in the top-right window so that you can enter the contest.  Sometime, however, it’s more convenient to have the contest site load in its own window.  Clicking on the new button pictured below will do this.

If you find that you always want the contest sites to load in their own window, go to your settings and check the box labelled “Open contests in new tab”.

Enjoy, and please feel free to comment if you have any suggestions.

Mike

LookContests.com does a lot of the work of organizing and presenting contests in a way that frees you from manually having to keep track of everything. However, you’ll still run across things that we can’t automatically handle. For example:

• A site may require that you return to a particular page on a particular date to see if you’ve won.
• Some contests require that you watch a TV show to acquire a key word or phrase.
• Some contests may not fall into the reguar ‘monthly’, ‘weekly’, ‘daily’ categories that we use.

LookContest.com’s Reminders function was created to deal with these situations. You can add a Reminder for a contest at any time by clicking on the “New Reminder” button in the contest details window. You then get to specify:

• the date that the reminder is due
• some text that will remind you of the meaning of the reminder (i.e. “Watch Global News at 6pm”)
• the URL, if applicable, to indicate a web page that you should visit
• whether or not you want an e-mail reminder

Any time you view that contest’s details from that point forward, you will be able to see that the reminder has been recorded. To see all of your active reminders, you can click the “Reminders” button in the main contest list window.

Every morning at 6am, LookContests.com goes through all the reminders and e-mails the ones that are due that day to you. This way you don’t have to do anything. Just add the reminder and then forget about it until you get the e-mail. Simple and effective!

The contest listings on the site pack a lot of information into a small area.  I created this image as a quick reference, which will hopefully make it easy to get up-and-running for new users.

I’ve updated the site this morning with the latest code that I’ve been working on over the past few days. Here’s a brief summary of the changes for your reference:

• New option to open contest windows in a new tab or window. Normally, the contest site is displayed in the top-right frame of the contest listing display, but now you have the option to have the contests load into a separate tab or window (depending on your browser settings.) Once you’ve changed this setting, you’ll need to refresh the contest listings in order to have the changes take effect.
• Search has been implemented. You can now search for contest listings by clicking on “Search” and entering the key words that you would like to find. If you enter more than one key word, only contests that contain all words will be displayed. Also, the results currently exclude expired contests.
• New option to see the original ContestCanada.net post. The contest details section now includes a button called “ContestCanada.net Post”, which when clicked will display the original contest posting on ContestCanada.net. This allows you to quickly browse the posting comments to see if anyone has added helpful information.
• Performance Enhancements. The site will now load a lot faster. There is still room for improvement here (loading almost 300 daily contests will still take a few seconds), but this is a big step forward.

Enjoy! And if you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to add comments below or e-mail me directly.

If you’re Canadian and love to enter contests, we’ve got an exciting new site for you! LookContests.com has been built from the ground up to be the single place you can go to find new contests, keep track of your entries, create notes and reminders, and hopefully win some great prizes.

We’ll have lots of new information in the weeks to come. In the meantime, please feel free to write to us at webmaster@lookcontests.com.