Archive for Technology

VoIP Options. What Should I Do?

October 13, 2006 at 4:55 pm · Filed under Family, Technology

I’ve been using Skype for the past couple years. Earlier, this year, they started offering free calls to everybody. At the end of the year, Skype will no longer offer totally free calls throughout the US and Canada. Rather than sticking with them, and paying a “per-minute” fee, I’ve been thinking about signing up for a VoIP service like Vonage. I really have no idea about how reliable the service is, or what to look out for, though.

I found a Vonage forum that has over 34,000 users, though, so I’ll be subscribing to a lot of thier feeds to get an idea of how it all works. There’s also a bunch of news and reviews on thier site, so hopefully I can get a good idea of what others think of the service.

Since Skype has been free, I’m usually on “the phone” for an average of 6 hours a day, or so. If I had to pay for Skype-out, I’d end up paying over $200 a month. With Vonage, it looks like I’d get unlimited calls for about $25 a month. Definetly worth keeping an eye on, before Skype’s current deal ends!

Have any of you had experience with other VoIP technology? What do I need to look out for?

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Mail Delivery Problems

September 6, 2006 at 3:58 pm · Filed under Personal, Technology

I woke up about an hour ago to find that I had “no” email, whatsoever! This NEVER happens, so I knew, right away that something was wrong.

I had recently moved two of the domains that I receive the most email at, to Google Apps. At first, I thought it was Google’s fault, but after a little bit of investigating, I realized that the hosting company I’m with (where I had to change the MX pointers) had “deleted” the custom MX settings, so none of the mail was even making it to Google.

I changed everything back, so things should start working, pretty soon. I also sent my hosting company a request (just a question, really) about why this happened, in the first place. I’m hoping this was just a one-time thing that will never happen again, but I’ll have to wait and see what their reason for the unexpected change were.

When this happened, any email that was sent to addresses at the two domains bounced right back to the sender. There’s one address that is semi-critical. The rest aren’t quite as important, but when you’re using email for business purposes, it’s nice to have things running, all the time. I thought that moving things over to Google would be more reliable (due to the redundant servers), but it seems that if my domains server develops problems, it still affects delivery. Grrrr…

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Selling On Craigslist

September 4, 2006 at 2:19 pm · Filed under Local, Technology

I’ve never actually used Craigslist to sell anything until now, although I have used the site to search for writing jobs, with pretty good results.

Anyway, we have an electric scooter / wheelchair that was bought about 5 years ago, and only used about six times. The chair has been just “sitting” there, for about a year, now, and is no longer needed, so I decided to throw it up on Craigslist to see what happens. It looks like the ad will run for 45 days, and I didn’t have to pay “anything” to post it.

Here’s the listing for the electric scooter.

I know that there are some cities that have to pay a certain amount for posting things in certain categories, there, but luckily, I’m not in one of those larger cities. I also don’t live in a place where everybody has two computers and visits Craigslist, daily, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of results I get.

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I’d Like To Know

July 14, 2006 at 2:50 am · Filed under Technology

What I really wonder about the whole “series of tubes” thing and Senator Ted Stevens is that “somebody” had to explain it, using that analogy, to him. Who explained how the internet works to Ted Stevens? That’s what I’d like to know.

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Web Site Statistics

June 16, 2006 at 1:19 am · Filed under Personal, Technology

I’ve never really been one for posting statistics on my web sites. Like Aaron says, it’s not really something that a lot of people that are reading my blogs care about.

That being said, though, last Monday I started using ClustrMaps on Webfeed Central, which can be seen in the left column of the site. It just gives a nice visual idea of where visitors to the site are located.

As far as stats packages, since I moved the site over to the new host, I’d been using Analog to see what happening. I had used it before, but I’ve never really been impressed with it. Last night, I decided to install AWStats, and on July 19th, I removed it, since things were not updating correctly. AWStats has always been my preferred stats package. My old host had it, but the new one didn’t.

ADDED: Since I removed AWStats on July 19th, I also signed up to have Webfeed Central tracked by SiteMeter.

The stats that are recorded in it only go back a couple days, to June 13th. I have all of the old log files from the previous server, but I still haven’t found a way to “inject” them into the new AWStats that I’m running. It would be nice to have the complete two years worth of stats in there (with a small gap). If you happen to know how to get them in there, please let me know.

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Advertising Firefox to Firefox Users

June 12, 2006 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Technology

Over on the main site, I had been advertising Firefox with Google Toolbar on every post’s “single” page. Up until today, anybody that visited the site would see the advertisement.

I’ve added some PHP that will show the ads only to users of Internet Explorer. There’s no use in showing them to people who already use Firefox.

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Changing Servers Soon

February 24, 2006 at 9:48 pm · Filed under Personal, Technology

I thought that I’d be able to wait a couple months to move Webfeed Central, but it looks like I’m not going to be able to wait that long. The problems that I’ve been having with FTP, mail, and the stylesheet not loading doesn’t seem to be getting any better. In fact, the problem seems to be getting worse.

I had “slowed down” posting over there, just to try to “not” create any more traffic at the site. Even by doing that, the problem persists. Within the next week or so, I plan on moving the whole site to a different server. I’m going to “try” to do this, without any help, but I’ve never had to move a complete site of this size, before, so I’m sure it’ll be an experience.

The strange part of this whole problem is that the Webfeed Central domain is the only site on the current server that’s having any problems. All of the other web sites, FTP, and mail seem to be working just as good as ever. It’s almost as if the hosting company that I’m using is “throttling” the domain, since mail and FTP seem to stop working during “peak” hours. I have no proof, of course, and even if they are, I don’t think I really want to know.

I’ve temporarily disabled some of the higher bandwidth files, in an effort to make things work a little better, overall. Right now, I can’t even get in to make or edit any posts, over there.

EDITED: I’ve re-enabled the higher bandwidth files, since disabling them seemed to have no effect on whether the site worked right, or not.

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