After three months of part-time development of functionalities and inclusion of new providers the The VoipRateTracker is project completed all its major objectives. The last milestone, the alert of changes via mail functionality has become recently available for all registered users. This functionality will be further developed to also alert on the event of provider addition for instance.
The project will now focus on finalizing details in functionalities and the inclusion of more providers. Also from the technology of the data extracters will be covered as i expect to make the shift from PHP to Phyton as development language. This should solve some issues i had when trying to include some providers that due to the amount of data were causing memory and server load problems.
The traffic of the site has been growing steadly and to my very good surprise the users tend to return to the site very often. The search engine traffic is also increasing steadily week after week. Recently we have entered the Facebook and Hi5.
In the last couple of months i had to change some parts of my life in order to reduce expenses. One of the critical points was that contact with the family back home using Skype (sometimes SkypeOut) was still a bit expensive , specially calling mobiles.
Some months ago a friend pointed some other VOIP providers, in special VoipBuster. The problem was that when i decided to look on the internet for the best provider for my needs it was a bit complicated. The providers have very different rates , for instance some offer the landlines calls but have more expensive mobiles calls. This process of choosing the best provider was very time consuming. Furthermore it came to my attention that this providers write in very tiny letters that they may and probably will change their rates without previous notice to its customers.
An idea for a project was then born. To create a site where the user could easily find the best provider for his needs and be informed of the rate changes. The VoipRateTracker was born.
Currently in Beta stage the functionalities are being added on daily bases. Currently most of the providers listed are from the group Betamax that controls about 30 different providers. Also the current focus is providers with pre-paid service and not contract services. With time new providers will be added as well as the alert functionality. So now you know, save on your national and international calls, visit VoipRateTracker.com.
February 28th, 2009
admin
As of April 2009 and after analysing the current market situation i decided that was time to embrace a new, but at the same time old, challenge which is to finally learn the German language.
My basic understanding of German were during this seven years already in Germany enough since i hardly ever needed it for working as most of my friends either were foreigners or spoke English.
However , in todays market situation basic german was no longer enough as therefore i decided to go back , do intensive german classes and finally learn the language.
After some time spent looking for the right place i have found a quite good school that offer a very good service for the money spent and are extremely frendly. Situated in the Schwabing area the Tandem school besides extremly competent teachers also offers extra curricular activities specialy interesting for those who are new to the city or country.
I have picked up at the final of the level A2 and decided to do both B1 and B2. This represents over 4 months of daily 9:30 to 13h classes. I honestly think that i did not had so many classes since the highschool.
I expect with this to be able to work and communicate in german because then i will be able to improve on my own.
February 28th, 2009
admin
Workfow tools are essential to easily model any business process. Workflow tools avoid document templates and endless email exchanges between the parties of a process.
After several days of browsing over different tools available on the market i came across the ProcessMaker application.
Besides being OpenSource which is a big plus it also offer lots of functionalities, a user interface that is quite friendly and additionally quite complete documentation.
From the installation to the configuration and creation of a first test workflow it takes about one hour. The installer creates its own application stack including Apache server and MySql Database server. The configuration is also extremly simple , having the administrator just to create some users and usergroups.
The User interface is very powerful and quite simple to use. However it may not work very well with all browsers. Following the tutorials that come with the product and going through the examples that can be installed very easly we can quickly have a overview of the potential of the application.
For the Business model that i was trying to implement there was just one minor problem. In a work flow a task could only be assigned to a single user instead to a group where all member could eventually take action. This can be worked arround by creating distribution list emails corresponding to the groups but it is not very clean and may be very complicated when several BP run on the tool with different user groups and roles that are overlapping or not.
The design team of the project seemed very active and continually improve their product. For instance a solution for the problem i described above was planned for a next release)
Overall this is a platform to keep in mind.