John Raul dot Com

Blow all your whistles and toot all your horns for BlogRush, but I beg to disagree that their web service is able to drive substantial traffic. The teaser on their homepage, which reads “the fastest and easiest way to instantly drive a flood of targeted readers,” is none other than just a highfalutin blurb. I’ve been using it for months and the highest traffic I got from a single post was one – quite a drought.

BlogRush is a cooperative syndication network launched by John Reese. Their web service binds the blogs of their members through their widget which displays five clickable blog post headlines. Each member earns one syndication credit every time the widget is loaded on their respective blogs. It also costs them same value to have their recent blog post title displayed on another member’s blog.

Basically, I signed up for BlogRush with good expectations that their web service would help drive traffic to my blog. Blogrush’s dashboard looks great for sure: the statistics and traffic charts look neat and attractive. Unfortunately I’m not charmed with the interface whatsoever, like other bloggers do, I want results for my efforts: quality traffic for my blog as promised.

In the first few months, I ignored that it didn’t bring traffic due to the fact that my blog was one-month old when I registered it to their service. In the following months, I read and followed lots of tips and articles from other bloggers who praised BlogRush – but none of them worked. Even though BlogRush’s idea of driving traffic from targeted audience is good, people seem not to care clicking their widget and prefer links and referrals written on the blog post itself.

My Personal Standpoint

No matter how much I think that my articles might not be “hot” in the eyes of BlogRush members, I personally proven that some of them were proven good – good enough to actuate a click. In fact, some of my articles got stumbled in StumbleUpon and that drove me enormous amount of traffic. I know that the BlogRush and StumbleUpon are two different web services that drive traffic. However, if the two web services are to compete each other in terms of traffic generation performance, no doubt I would abandon BlogRush quickly and hop right away to StumbleUpon (or any other social bookmarking or web service that would bring measurable benefits for me and my blog).

It’s good to note, however, that Blogrush is a free web service. I’ll leave them now my comments and hope they take all of them positively. The intent of their service is great, but it needs spark.

On May 6th, it will be my ninth month working as home-based web developer, web designer, technical support engineer, and system administrator for people from North America and Europe. I was surprised that I was able to last this long without losing much my enthusiasm on my field of work. Perhaps I already loved the people whom I interacted with everyday and they are now significant part of my life, despite the fact that I don’t see their faces often and we are divided by great distance. The Philippines is like 12 hours ahead from America’s Eastern Standard Time (EST) – meaning to say, I am nearly in the opposite side of the earth from the people I worked for.

Today, I reevaluated my workplace to see if things have changed in the course of nine months. I’ve been like a couch potato sitting in my chair all day long and working all the time – yet I was very productive – so no regrets at all. Work alone was not a problem at all since my skills tend to suffice the needs of my employer and I was quite fast adapting the business-work environment they embraced to me.

Last January, I showed my workplace in one of my blog posts. It was revealed there my real office situation at that time. Now, I want to show where I work now. There is not much difference but at least few things improved. I got a new chair, LCD monitor and new sound system – things that helped sustain my energy and zeal throughout the day of work.

To let you know, I have a daily work routine. I usually start my day by waking up around 9AM to 10AM. After taking a quick breakfast and doing my personal preparations, I immediately “assemble” my office in our veranda. My office table is there all the time so what I do is bring my laptop outside, my LCD monitor, audio-voltage regulator (AVR), my infamous electric fan, my sound system and my office chair. After they are all set, my day of work begins. The air temperature in my workplace during the day ranges from 28C to 34C.

My workplace is really unique for my Web-inclined profession. There are few things that are not common in a usual office scenario. While sitting in a corner during the day, several creatures catch my attention and give me little entertainment. One time, there was a stray kitten suddenly jumped on my lap while I was working and slept on it. Then I saw our neighbor’s dog chasing our ducks and chickens. Plus, I have an officemate in a soul of a black-capped lory.

I stay outside working until 6PM to 7PM (sometimes up to 9PM), then I start packing and disassembling my office and move things back inside the house. There, I assemble them again for my next phase of work that commences around 7PM and ends up to 3AM (sometimes up to 5AM).

As you can see, I’m pretty a hardworking person. I work nearly 18 hours a day (more than twice the number of hours of work in a real office environment). But see, I have no regrets whatsoever; bloggers and web developers like me do this for good. And we do it like this for now because we strongly believe that our hard work will lead us to somewhere else in the future.

And we do it like this for now because we strongly believe that our hard work will lead us to somewhere else in the future.

Working alone was the most challenging of all, but my love and zeal to change pushed me further and let me feel like not working at all.

It always feels good when hard work pays off. In my case, I’ve been running this blog for almost five months now and today for the first time, Google’s second quarter PageRank (PR) update for 2008 finally brought PR3 to this blog. PageRank is Google’s view of how important the pages of my blog are and they somehow influence advertisers with their own Web standards.The PageRank gauge can be seen when you install Google Toolbar on your web browser.

Wikipedia defines PageRank (PR) as:

…a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

Benefits of PageRank

The first benefit of having a good PR if you are a website or blog owner is that advertisers start to notice you. The higher your PR, the more attractive you are to advertisers — this is a thumb rule. Now that this blog acquires PR 3, it has greater chance to make some money for whatever purpose it may serve best. Well, hopefully. I still need to exert more efforts and be consistent in pleasing my audience with my blog articles.

Another benefit of Google PageRank is during appraisal. If I decide to sell this domain, for example, I can use Google PR to determine the selling price of my website, along with my Alexa Traffic ranking, among others.

How Did I Build My PageRank

What I did basically was to provide good content. I did quality reviews in my previous posts and other sites seem to like them and they linked to my pages. Whenever they link to this blog’s pages, it is like they cast a vote for this blog to build a PR. This is how Google sees things on the Web for their PR technology.

During my five months of blogging, I also met new friends from the blogosphere and we ended up having our links exchanged. They added my blog’s link in their blog rolls and mentioned me somewhere on their blogs. What they did contributed as well to my current Google PR, which is good.

My Personal Standpoint

While the scale of PageRank (PR) ranges from 0 to 10, having a PR of 3 is fair enough for a start. For sure, there is more work ahead to increase the PR on its next update sometime this year. But for now, I want to thank Google for my score!

Last March 11, I first tasted the Speedy hosting plan from Top Hosting Center. Now, after quite some time of thorough observation, I am ready to give you the verdict of their flagship hosting plan for this season. This post was made particularly for people who want to know the true value of Speedy. THC’s Speedy hosting plan replaced the infamous Rudolf in their web hosting spotlight. Does Speedy deserve the limelight? Let’s find out.

Speedy Versus Rudolf

The hosting features of Speedy plan can be emphasized by putting it side by side with the infamous Rudolf plan which I believed to be one of the greatest hosting plans the Web has ever seen during its time.

As you can see above, Speedy is distinguishable by its enormous disk space and monthly bandwidth. Plus it comes with free dedicated IP address and a domain name, along with other hosting features Rudolf has. Perhaps one of the things you would care is that Speedy is regular hosting plan priced at $6.75 per month for 24-month subscription, unlike Rudolf which was introduced as lifetime hosting plan for only $95.

Like what I expressed in the post when I first experienced Speedy, honestly I was very excited for its features. My previous Rudolf plan felt great as is, considering that I don’t have to pay for its monthly fees and enjoy hosting for life. However, I wanted to have the best for this blog. So, when THC unleashed its Speedy hosting plan, I was one of the early people who were able to taste its glory.

The Glory of Dedicated IP

Other than the great bump of its figures in terms of disk space and bandwidth, it is the dedicated IP address that makes Speedy hosting plan rather distinctive compared to its competitors. THC is proud that Speedy is the best hosting plan with its level as shown in their comparison page.

Once you buy a Speedy plan and you gain access to THC’s H-Sphere control panel, you will get one dedicated IP address that you can use to any of your domains. Unfortunately, a dedicated IP address can only be used by one domain, so if you need more, you have to pay add-on for $24 per static IP address per year. Once again, THC offers the cheapest rate with this optional upgrade for your domains. If you don’t have any idea about the importance of a dedicated IP address, this post is a good reference for you.

Now, knowing that this blog run with Speedy’s dedicated IP address for over a month now – was it able to make any difference at all? My answer is a resounding yes. Other than extended FTP functionality, one thing I noticed is that this blog got better traffic from search engines. It was scarce before when I was still under Rudolf’s shared IP. Another thing I noticed is that my domain’s emails received less spams. As you know, having a dedicated IP address protects you from being affected by other abusing users on a shared hosting environment. Chances of getting unsolicited emails and damaging your growing business reputation resulting from shared IP being blacklisted are greatly avoided.

The Speedy Hosting Experience

At first, I was greatly thrilled of the abundance brought about by Speedy. With four times disk space capacity (1,000 GB) and ten times monthly bandwidth (33,000 GB) allocation than that of Speedy hosting plan, dreams and daydreams of having dozens of sites having large contents are definitely possible. More sites, more money – that is what I thought.

Later on, I realized that it is quite hard to take advantage the enormous disk space and bandwidth (well, for my case). Adding quality contents to each of your sites and managing them are more challenging than merely getting large margins of hosting resources. However for web entrepreneurs and webmasters who have multiple existing domains and rapidly-growing websites, Speedy’s resources are sure-fire advantage.

Adding quality contents to each of your sites and managing them are more challenging than merely getting large margins of hosting resources

The hosting experience in general is rather identical to that of Rudolf hosting plan except worries of having deficient disk space and limited bandwidth are eliminated – which is good, less stress.

Speedy is only available on Linux platform. THC found out in their previous hosting plan experience that customers favor Linux platform than Windows. This is seconded by them because Linux is more stable, faster, and secure. If you need a Windows plan, however, ask THC’s live chat representatives for a Rudolf Windows plan (I heard Rudolf is still available on demand despite being out of the spotlight).

As usual, Top Hosting Center still excels in the area of customer support – which plays a vital role of having a pleasant hosting experience with them. Their chat support representatives are responsive and well-informed. They immediately act when they get aware that a problem has struck to any of their customer’s websites. Same goes with their trouble ticket system – responses and solutions arrive in timely fashion.

Little Shortcomings

Shortly after Speedy hosting plan was introduced, THC announced the change of H-Sphere’s EasyApp collection. EasyApp is a set of one-click-install PHP applications similar to CPanel’s Fantastico. EasyApp applications include CMS, blog platforms, e-mail and chat applications, among others.

THC is not anymore relying on default EasyApp package from PSoft, the provider of their H-Sphere control panel and EasyApp. According to THC, PSoft failed to deliver updates on time when customers need them. So, they outsourced custom EasyApp packages from HSpherePlugins.com, a third-party developer for H-Sphere. Now, despite applications being up-to-date, the number of EasyApp applications kind of reduced. You don’t have to worry though; WordPress and other important applications are still there and would possibly expand in the future.

Another thing worth mentioning during my observation is that Speedy is not slowdown-free. My blog experienced several slowdowns sporadically within the month. It is good to know, however, that despite Speedy being so generous, it is still running on a shared hosting environment – a kind of hosting that is not totally free from hosting problems such as slowdowns and downtimes which is normal.

Related Articles From THC Speedy Customers

If you have tried THC’s Speedy hosting plan and you write a review, please inform me and I will add your review hereunder. So far, these are the customers who expressed their opinions regarding THC’s Speedy hosting plan.

• New Hosting For GrandmasterB.com

Conclusion: Is Speedy The Next Big Thing?

I remember THC calling Speedy “the biggest standard hosting plan” they’ve done to date when they unleashed it. By reviewing the page they made comparing Speedy versus the hosting plans from other big hosting companies, I would say Speedy is superb. It deserves the throne of Rudolf hosting plan, which however is still very good for thrifty and frugal online entrepreneurs.

Then again, I would like to emphasize the nature of shared hosting. Despite Speedy being so big and great, figures will not guarantee a problem-free and dedicated-hosting-like web hosting. However, its free dedicated IP is a consolation, and with THC’s quick-responding support department, you will get a pleasant hosting experience for you and your business.

Despite Speedy being so big and great, figures will not guarantee a problem-free and dedicated-hosting-like web hosting.

Now if you don’t bother paying monthly fees for your web hosting, and for the sake of abundance, better SEO and quality of hosting, Top Hosting Center successfully wipes off their hosting contenders with the striking features of their Speedy hosting plan – and that is a big thing.

When I first saw Altec Lansing VS3251 powered audio system in a computer shop few months ago, I couldn’t resist drooling. I’ve been considering getting a new audio system for my computer because my four-year old second-hand stereo speakers start to manifest signs of death. What else could you expect from a second-hand – longevity?

Early this month I went again to the computer shop and took some glimpse on their sound solutions. I had several choices such as Edifier, Logitech, Creative, among others – but Altec Lansing stood above all of them. When I asked the sales representative to do a sound test for each of my desired speakers, Altec’s VS3251 immediately took my heart out. So, without second thought, I took my little savings and bought it. Now, this is my review.

What I Got

Aside from the pompous Altec box that I could brag to my friends, I also got five shiny surround speakers with removable stands, a wireless remote control, three audio input cords, and a subwoofer housed in a wooden cabinet.

Each of the five speakers is powered by one full-range 2.5” driver. The subwoofer, on the other hand, runs with one 5.25” long-throw woofer.

The VS3251 Experience

Setting up the speakers was quite easy and smooth. The 5.1 input audio ports (front, rear and center) are found at the back of the subwoofer box. Only the green (center) port is required for you to hear a sound from the speakers. Hooking all the audio inputs gives awesome 5.1 surround sound especially when the source audio comes from a six-channel sound card.

Altec made VS3251 a versatile sound system. Other than PC input, it also accepts music from MP3 players (iPod), TVs, DVD players, and even game consoles. The wooden subwoofer cabinet also features auxiliary input and headphone for private listening.

First, I started playing music from Winamp media player. I chose Bob Sinclar Feat. Fireball’s What I Want to immediately feel the speakers’ bass and power. I was surprised with the clarity of sound. The bass is powerful – the long-throw subwoofer lets me feel all the shakes and quakes. In fact, I ended up dancing with the music like a freaking idiot.

When I raised the volume to the highest level, I was really astounded with the consistency of great sound. The bass never failed and the highs were still clear – it felt like I was listening from large speakers.

The remote control allows easy toggle between surround and stereo modes – both provide outstanding performance. Surround mode is very ideal for watching movies and playing games, while stereo is perfect for listening music.

I watched Harry Potter movies to see how Altec VS3251 performs with movies – and to feel the difference of surround technology. It felt like I brought the movie theater at home. So much similar that one of our neighbors came to our house and joined me watching the movies. We were all incredulous and amazed how the five small speakers produce a very large and clear sound. Oh well, it’s Altec.

Conclusion

Altec Lansing VS3251 powered audio system exceeded my expectations. I did not regret buying it. I found the best replacement for my dying stereo speakers.

Price

Currently, Altec Lansing sells VS3251 audio system for $79.95. It has a big brother in same category, Altec Lansing FX5051 which unfortunately, is not available in our area and is quite expensive for me at $249.95.

About Altec Lansing

Altec Lansing is known manufacturer of high quality speaker systems. They have led the sound industry in audio innovation for 70 years. To give you idea how great their products are, their speaker systems have formed the backbone of world renowned places such as The United Nations Building, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Disneyland and Disneyworld, New York’s Lincoln Philharmonic Center and the Schubert Theatre, MGM’s Grand Hotel, The Singapore National Stadium, and The Sydney Opera House, to name a few.