Untwisted Vortexservices

Cheap Calls to and from the Philippines

RT Cunningham — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:16:38 +0000

There are a few ways to save money and make cheap calls to and from the Philippines. Using the long distance service provided by your regular residential telephone service may be convenient, but it isn't the cheapest route to take even if you manage to get a "preferred country" deal.

Residential Long Distance Service

The best deal I ever received using my residential long distance service in the US was 21 cents per minute for calls to the Philippines as part of their "preferred country" plan. Without that plan, multiply that amount by 10. Either way, they weren't exactly cheap calls.

For a long time, it was the only option I had. After I obtained phone service in the Philippines, I found the local long distance service charged 40 cents per minute for calls to the US. Sure it's an international call, but it's highway robbery for the people that live on local wages.

Phone Cards

Phone cards, some specifically designed for Asia, are a fairly cheap route to take. Cards can be purchased in amounts of $5.00 and $10.00 (and possibly more). The rate adds up to something between 10 and 12 cents per minute.

In my opinion, phone cards aren't reliable enough. If you get a bad connection, you lose money quickly when you hang up and dial again and no longer getting cheap calls.

Text Messaging

While text messaging isn't voice (duh), it's incredibly cheap if you get a monthly plan going along with your cell phone service plan. My wife was paying $7.50 per month for unlimited texting.

While a plan like that's cheap, using Skype (for voice) is even cheaper.

Skype and Skype Out

Skype has a few different options, but I only use "Skype Out" for calls to and from the US and the Philippines. I even have a local Phoenix (US) number so friends don't have to use long distance. In my opinion, this is the best way (right now) to keep an open line of communication going between the US and the Philippines.

Some people may call me crazy, but after an initial investment of around $500.00 (in US dollars) and a monthly cost of about $75, calls to and from the Philippines are virtually unlimited. That investment includes a cheap computer and the most expensive monthly Internet service. If a family member in the Philippines already has an Internet connection set up, the additional cost of the Skype Out service is less than $7.00 in US dollars.

The Absolute Cheapest Calls

Internet cafes are all over the place here in the Philippines and currently cost anywhere from 15 to 25 pesos per hour (or 33 to 55 cents in US dollars). Using a Skype Out account and a computer at an internet cafe is the cheapest route when only one end is using a computer (and the other end is using a residential or cell phone).

The cheapest call is made using an instant messenger with voice from computer to computer. The only charges are those of the Internet connection itself, or the hourly charges at the Internet cafes.

Changes in Technology

The cheapest and best way today may not be cheapest and best way tomorrow. It makes sense to pay attention to advertisements concerning telephone service and news items about telephone technology. Information about Majicjack, a VOIP service advertised at a price of $20.00 (US dollars) per year for example, sounds extremely interesting to those of us on a tight budget.

There will always be some direct or indirect costs associated with any kind of telephone service. Telephone service, as cheap as it is or may become, will never be completely free. You don't, however, need to pay more than is absolutely necessary.

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TextAdMarket Beta Update

RT Cunningham — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:49:56 +0000

A couple of days ago, amidst all of my other backend programming work, I provided a little assistance at TextAdMarket when things didn't work quite right. I did my initial review on May 31st ("TextAdMarket: A New Non-Contextual Advertising Service") and I've had plenty of time to evaluate the changes that have been put in place since then, as well as the overall service.

My Assistance

I was attempting to create two new ads, which are now up at the top of both sidebars, using the new color options. I sent an email message to Benjamin Schrum, the owner, when I found out that new colors wouldn't save from screen to screen.

Ben did some testing on his end, and I did some testing on my end, and we found out that the problem was limited to Firefox 3. The colors saved just fine with IE6, IE7 and Firefox 2. We didn't test on any of the other browsers, or at least I didn't.

The problem was traced to using relative versus absolute paths, a method that seems to prevent caching in Firefox 3. After a minor change in the code at the server, everything worked fine.

Out with the old. In with the new.

I replaced the stale banner at the top of the right sidebar and added one to the top of the left sidebar. The old banner made me more than $10 with only 2 advertisers, which isn't bad when you consider I wasn't really trying.

The 2 new banners have been colorized to blend in with the rest of the sidebar widgets. What do you think of my handywork? They're the same colors I use for the Google AdSense ads that regular visitors never see.

New CPC Ads

Ben worked his tail off to add CPC (cost per click) ads to the arsenal of publishing options. You have to leave the checkmark in place (which I did) while creating a banner to participate.

It's a brand new option which went into effect during the July 4th holiday weekend, so it's a little slow starting up. I'll have to watch and see if any CPC ads start appearing. The CPC ads are only supposed to appear when the CPD (cost per day) ads aren't filling up the empty spots.

Ad Serving

Ad serving is still a little slower than I'd like to see, but with the assistance of the WordPress IFrameWidgets plugin, they won't slow the rest of the page down.

I've seen a few minor instances where an error instead of the old banner ad appeared. I actually think I contributed to those errors while testing gzip options.

Evaluation

I plan to run the TextAdMarket ads for at least another month, just to see how well they do. I'll also be looking at the stats on their site to see how well they're performing. The worst that can happen is that they won't perform well on this blog. In that case, I'll just have to use them on some of my "niche" blogs instead.

Have you tested the service yet?

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Uncomfortable with OpenID

RT Cunningham — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:12:58 +0000

For the uninitiated, please read about OpenID at the source. For a quick and dirty lowdown, all you need to know is that OpenID is a centralized password system which is supposed to be secure.

I don't like OpenID.

I don't like it for the same reasons I don't like the idea of national ID card. All someone has to do is have access to your OpenID account and they have access to all of the accounts where you use OpenID. Whatever information is stored in your OpenID account is not secure, even if they say so and even though it sits on a secure server.

Nothing is secure when you add the human factor to the equation.

Security and the human factor.

All you have to do is read how US government computers and databases were compromised by government employees to understand how it works. All the secure systems in place mean nothing when the people using the systems do stupid things like taking laptops home with huge databases on them. It doesn't matter if they're allowed to do it or not, they still do it.

Putting your private data in the hands of any single entity is asking for trouble, in my opinion. It all comes down to a matter of trust. You're trusting that the people behind that entity won't use your information in nefarious ways.

The false sense of Security.

When people start trusting a single entity with their private data, something's wrong. I've been seeing OpenID used on more and more websites. It saves the new sites from having to put their own authentication system in place. Old sites are using it as an additional authentication option.

I would never use OpenID at a website where they have more than just my basic data stored. Banks and other intensely secure systems don't use it and you just have to think about it for moment to understand why they don't and won't use it. Ever.

OpenID has its place.

If you use OpenID as a master password for blogs, forums and other websites that just want your basic information (like name and email address), I don't see anything wrong with it. In fact, I would probably use it for those purposes.

When more information is required, such as addresses and phone numbers, that's when I start getting antsy. I would rather risk an independent system getting compromised than all the systems getting compromised due to centralization.

Maybe I'm just paranoid.

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I Will NOT Dumb Down This Blog

RT Cunningham — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 22:00:07 +0000

Unlike the mass media in the US, I will not participate in the deliberate dumbing down of America. I recently discovered, while checking this blog's results at the Website Grader and The Blog Readability Test, that the reading level needed to digest the contents of this blog is above the level most people in the US graduate from high school with.

The Results

According to the website grader, this blog has a readability level of college undergraduate. According to the blog readability test, this blog has a readability level of college post graduate. It's understandable. When I took my aptitude tests in high school and the military pre-entrance exams, I was scored with a reading comprehension of 13+, equivalent to a year of college.

I don't agree with the scores given by the web services. They scanned the blog too quickly to have made a determination, considering there are over 1300 posts on this blog. Nevertheless, I realize that most of the content is geared toward people who can read better than what elementary level education provides.

Elementary Level?

I graduated from high school in 1978. I had 2 semesters of language arts (and I don't remember the titles) during the high school years and neither one of them focused on reading. I didn't attend any classes which focused on reading after the 8th grade.

I don't know what the curriculum of American high schools contains these days. My younger son graduated from high school more than 4 years ago. I would estimate he has about a 9th grade reading level — he likes to read novels — despite the fact that he had to have special classes for his learning disabilities for the entire 12 years of school.

It's a very sad state of affairs when students are graduating from high school and can barely read or write. Why does the American education system allow it? It's an even sadder state of affairs when people who read and write English as a second language are more proficient in it than Americans, where the primary language is English. The dumbing down of America has been successful so far.

Conclusions

I often wondered why the number of subscribers to the feeds for this blog remained almost stagnant, increasing at a very slow rate. I no longer have to wonder. It's apparent that the articles aren't digestible by the majority of the people who visit the blog, 70+ percent of which are in the US.

I've read a few articles which tell me I should always write at a reading level that the majority of Internet users can comprehend. I will not. I will NOT dumb down this blog! There will always be occasions where I write like a moron and there will always be occasions when I write like a genius. I've already made my opinions well known: Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation ARE Important When Writing a Blog Post and Words are Power!

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Odiogo is a Go!

RT Cunningham — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:09:23 +0000

Pronounced like "audio go", Odiogo is a service that converts RSS feeds into podcast-ready audio files, as mp3 files.

I first saw Odiogo being mentioned on another blog months ago. I'm sorry, but I don't remember which one. A few hours ago, I spotted the "listen" button on the blog owned by the Ultimate Geek Girl and clicked. After listening to a couple of articles, I was sold.

I signed up and added the Odiogo Listen Button to my posts via the WordPress plugin they had available. There are plugins available for most of the blogging software platforms. I had to remove it, temporarily, because another plugin, which inserts my URL at the beginning of every post, had to be disabled. I didn't think listeners would want to hear my URL spelled out each and every time. Oh yes, I tested it.

After I had FeedBurner synchronize my feeds again, and a few hours later, I turned the plugin back on and it's now available at the top left of recent posts. I don't know, however, if it'll remain on the blog. It all depends on the kind of feedback I get.

There is one thing that it does for me that I consider valuable. It makes me fix my mistakes. You can probably hear mistakes in previous posts. Heck, you may be able to hear some mistakes if you're listening to this right now.

Update: The "listen now" button has been removed. The audio files are available at the "Odiogo Audio Feed" link in the sidebar with the rest of the feeds.

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Do I Have 'Stupid' Stamped on My Forehead?

RT Cunningham — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:28:52 +0000

Even if "stupid" IS stamped on my forehead, can you see it?

Sponsored posts companies must think I'm stupid when they send me tasks that pay $6-$10 each. Wait a second; I don't do sponsored posts anymore, right? Check, right, affirmative. Then why do I still allow them to send me these things?

A Source of Inspiration

To tell the truth, I would never visit most of the websites that sponsored post services handle because they're about things I have absolutely no interest in. Every once in awhile, though, I'll see one that I want to write about. Heck, I'll even throw in the links they ask for when I write it. I'm not, however, going to go through the trouble to meet their formatting and length requirements; not for a piddly $6 or $10. I make more than that from AdSense in a day most of the time, on this blog. I probably wouldn't do it or $100. The Google slap isn't worth it.

Sometimes I'll visit the websites that are sponsored, just to see what they're all about. 99 times out of a hundred, it's a wasted trip. That one time when it isn't, well, I probably won't write about it anyway unless it's something I'm concerned about. Things like gas prices, environmental impact, new technology and obscure things are the things that rock my boat.

I'm Stupid, but I'm Not That Stupid

Back in October of 2007, my blog got slapped down to PageRank of 0. After fixing everything, and requesting reconsideration from the Google gods, I got it back up to 4. Later, something happened that wasn't something I did wrong and it got knocked back down to a 3. I sent another note to the powers that be and managed to get the 5 I have now.

There's no way in hell I'm going through that crap again.

I'm Not 100% Stupid

I'm stupid, but I can't be completely stupid because I have proof. If you have this video game, Hexxagon (yeah, it's old just like me), see if you're less stupid than I am. Check it out:

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Forced Downtime

RT Cunningham — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:26:50 +0000

Some of you may already be already aware of the situation that many hours ago. For those of you aren't, I'll fill you in. My web hosting company is HostNine in Jupiter, Florida and my blog physically resides on a server at the H1 datacenter for The Planet in Houston, Texas.

On Saturday evening (my Sunday morning), a transformer in the datacenter caught fire and the fire department ordered the entire facility shut down. After reading updates on community forums for both sites, I discovered there was no way to tell when the service would be restored. The total downtime ended up being somewhere between 35 and 36 hours.

A blessing in disguise?

The downtime gave me time to breathe and time to think. I had time to research several keywords for niche sites I'm contemplating in the near future. The first niche site is almost done, needing just one plugin installed and two posts added. At least, that's all I think it needs but now I'll have to double-check everything. It would have been done on Saturday if this incident hadn't happened. James at Men with Pens said it would give me more time to write, but he doesn't understand how little I've been writing these days.

I now have 4, 5 or 6 niche websites to complete and the last two depend on other factors besides my desire to do them. There has to be enough information available to work with.

Anyway, I'll be back in several hours with at least another blog review. I still have to check things because some plugins are behaving badly.

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TextAdMarket: A New Non-Contextual Advertising Service

RT Cunningham — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:35:03 +0000

I was asked to beta test a new advertising service called TextAdMarket. This advertising service is very, very new. As with any new service in the beta-testing stage, this one isn't without its share of problems. There are very few members using it right now and fewer is better until the bugs are eliminated from their system. It has only been live for a little over a week.

Signing Up

In order to do a fair evaluation of the service, I had to go through the process of signing up for the service and put ads on my blog. If you see ads in the upper right sidebar, that's the result.

You can sign up too, without a beta invitation, by clicking:

One of the first things I noticed was an authentication requirement on every page. Luckily, I was in continuous communication with Benjamin Schrum, the owner. He fixed the problem while I was moving from page to page on the site.

The Interface

The interface is easy enough to get around on. The only thing I really found annoying is that you can't edit an existing banner. You have to delete and start over if you want it to be different.

Not every banner size that you see with services such as Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network are available. I'm hoping to see more size options as well as being able to control the individual attributes of the banners, such as the border and link colors.

The Selling Points

With this advertising service, you have the option of selling your ad links for a fixed price or letting the market decide. If you use the market-driven option, your ad prices will change automatically every 24 hours depending on your supply and their demand.

Here's the rundown for publishers:

Payment At $25
Ads Sell Themselves
Easy To Manage Listings
Free Listings In Marketplace
Payments By PayPal or Check
Low Commission, Highest Payouts
Indepth Site Performance Statistics
Set Your Own Price or Let Market Decide

I purposely set my ads high, starting at $5.00, so I could see how far they'll drop before they start selling. After one day, they dropped to $4.85 each.

The Buying Points

If you want to buy ads on other sites publishing the ads, the cost is relatively cheap. There isn't much competition yet and with the exception of my ads currently in the sidebar, the cost is less than 65 cents per link per day right now. Some are as low as 10 cents per day.

Here's the rundown for advertisers:

Targeted Advertising
Variable Time Length
Supply & Demand Prices
Low $20 Minimum Purchase
Stats, Graphs, Charts, & More
Open Marketplace Style Listings
Customizable Ad Campaigns & Alerts
Choose Exactly Which Sites To Advertise On

If you're looking to drive targeted traffic to your site or to an individual page, this is a cost-effective way to do it.

Contextual Versus Non-Contextual

It's perfectly alright to run these ads on the same pages as contextual advertising services like Google AdSense since they're not competing with each other. Since these are JavaScript-driven ads and "nofollow", you won't get penalized by the search engines either.

If your articles are written correctly, contextual ads are going to fare better. If not, then non-contextual ads are going to fair better. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages depending on what kind of website you put them on.

Evaluation

It's too early to tell how well the service will perform. The ad serving is a little slow, so I stuck my ads in an iframe widget to prevent them from slowing down the rest of the blog. I'm sure they'll work on the server problems as the beta testing takes place.

If you have wasted space on your site, you may wish to consider putting up a banner or two. As long as you don't stick them obtrusively in the face of your visitors, your visitors probably won't mind.

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When Google AdSense Just Doesn't Pay Enough

RT Cunningham — Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:14 +0000

I'm always testing different advertising methods. I move ads around, I change the sizes and I even change the sources. I'm glad I don't have to rely on advertising revenue to live, or I'd be screwed by all the experimenting I do.

Anyone who's been using advertising services for any length of time should already know about the alternate URLs that can be used for contextual ad services when ads for a specific context aren't available. There are other ways, ways that I use, to choose which ad service to display ads for.

Google AdSense Problems

Google AdSense is extremely easy to sign up for and also extremely easy to get banned from. It's one of the reasons that people who know how to use it are targeting search engine visitors only. Even when properly targeted, it isn't effective when the searchers end up being bloggers, webmasters and other people who never click ads.

If you have a really low CTR rate for AdSense and your clicks are adding up to pennies at a time, the explanation is simple. You're getting too many impressions and not enough clicks. That happened on this blog more than once.

Manipulating the Theme

Since I'm using the "Who Sees Ads?" WordPress plugin to control how and where I display the AdSense ads, I'm using code to tell it not to display AdSense for selective categories and posts, just like I did when I wrote "Bypass WordPress Content Plugins with a Simple Hack" back in March:

$category = get_the_category(); $cat = $category[0]->cat_name;
$cats = array('Advertising', 'Article Reviews', 'Awards', 'Blogging', 'Blog Changes', 'Blog Reviews', 'Blog Tips and Tricks', 'Bragging Rights', 'Contests', 'Marketing', ' Reviews Received', 'Visited Links', 'Website Design', 'Website Reviews', 'WordPress');
if (in_array($cat,$cats)) wp_ozh_wsa("Chitika-UV-Top-Blog");
else if (!stristr($post->post_content, '')) wp_ozh_wsa("post-top");
} ?>

You'll notice that I'm displaying Chitika Ads for the categories that I know will suck to no end for AdSense. Besides, it beats the heck out of their public service ads. The code can be tweaked and I can further diversify if I so desire. The fall-through is AdSense only because it's my primary source of ad revenue on this blog right now.

Chitika Display Problem

Yes, I'm using Chitika. I've been signed up for it what seems like forever, but I never got around to using it. The problem was that I couldn't see the display. It only displays in specific countries and the Philippines isn't one of those countries. What it does, until they fix the issue, is display a big blank box where the ad should be displayed. Since that's an awful waste of space, I plugged BidVertiser into the alternate URL for Chitika. That's another service I've been testing, but not really using much.

I don't expect to earn as much from Chitika or BidVertiser as I do with Google AdSense, but stranger things have happened. Not only that, but I plan to remove all the ads eventually, so I'm not too concerned about it.

The AdSense Basket

If you read enough blog you'll see the phrase "don't put all your eggs in the Google basket" many, many times. It's good advice to follow and I'm following it, at least for this blog. If you look at the top of the page, you won't see anything if you didn't reach it by using a search engine. If you reached it by using a search engine, you won't see Google AdSense ads up there. This article is in the "advertising" category and no one interested in this article will ever click an AdSense ad.

I'm currently in the process of doing this to all of the posts on this blog that are geared toward bloggers, marketers, advertisers, webmasters and other people I know don't normally click on ads. I believe my CTR for AdSense will go up instead of hovering at the 3 percent mark.

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Why aren't you offering RSS feeds by email?

RT Cunningham — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:00:20 +0000

If you're the least little bit concerned about your RSS feed subscriber count, then why aren't you offering RSS feeds by email? Unlike feedreaders, RSS email subscriptions count toward your total feed count every day until the subscribers go through the act of unsubscribing, whether the email is read or not. With feedreaders, your subscribers actually have to open their feedreaders every day and let them pull in the feeds. Now, I could end this as a soliloquy right here, but I don't think I'll get my point across. Instead, I'll give you a brief history of my problems and what I'm doing about them.

Feedreader Problems

As many of you know, I gave up on maintaining my RSS feedreader. I announced it with "I'm Spider-Man No More", a really lousy post in my own opinion. Oh well, we can't all be brilliant all the time.

Most of the problems could be attributed to poor connectivity somewhere between my local ISP here in the Philippines and the sources of the feedreader services in the US. The feeds were never up-to-date. Of course, some of them turned out to be dead blogs.

I wasn't commenting on blogs because I wasn't visiting blogs. I was relying on a poor feedreader connection to keep me up-to-date. In essence, using a feedreader was bad juju for me. I stopped using my feedreader and started visiting blogs in person, so to speak. It worked for a while, until I stopped having the time to do it.

The Email Alternative

Over the course of past couple of months, I've been slowly subscribing to feeds by email. Since I have my email client and my browser open at all times when I'm online, I can respond to a feed received this way almost instantly. Of course, it's only once per day, but it's still better than never.

The problem I'm having now is that many, and I mean many, of the blogs I'm trying to subscribe to by email don't offer email as a subscription option. Perhaps the authors don't feel that RSS feeds in general are important or perhaps they don't feel email options in particular are important. Whatever the case may be, they're completely wrong about it. I can look at my analytics statistics for any given day and see that quite a few of my returning visitors are RSS subscribers. Isn't that compelling enough to pay attention to your RSS feeds?

In some cases, it's a genuine error. The theme can have an error in it. A simple typographical error can render the feed address unreachable. Sometimes, the option is available on the page, but the author failed to turn the option on with the feed service. If I spot an error, I'll notify the blog author immediately, as I did with Todd of "Success with Todd". Sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't. Todd did and I appreciate that.

Blogs Without Email Options

I'm going to list some of the blogs or websites in which I can't subscribe to email feeds. Since I'm not using a feedreader anymore, they're stuck as bookmarks until they see the error of their ways.

That was only a fraction of them. Perhaps I'll list more in a day or so. For anyone I've listed: If you don't know how to add an email feed as an option, I'll be happy to give you a hand.

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