My birthplace is Iligan City. It is one of the highly urbanized cities in Northern Mindanao. But of course its fame is crippled by the current high crime rate and the more popular Cagayan de Oro beside it. My opinion, of course. But what I do know for a fact that Iligan is a haven for a tri-people culture where lumads, Christians and Muslims co-exist. And the sight of a restaurant or food marked with the word “Halal” is one quite common in our city.

I met Lareb over Facebook and he was a friend of a friend, you know how Facebook works. You see, he does not have a bit of a problem sorting and looking for Halal certified products because he lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Everything — everything there is Halal.

They do not sell anything that is not. If he goes to Indonesia or Bangkok, he would not have any problem looking for those products. But what if he takes a quick vacation here in the Philippines? Yes, he is going to have a problem filtering what he buys.

Would he Google about it? Most probably he would. He needs to know which food is seen as permissible according to Islamic law. The thing is, we do not have one until this site was put up of course:

Halal Certified Food

If you are looking for a resource site, you don’t need to look any further as this one continues to list the food we have here in the Philippines that are halal-certified. Check it out.

Oh and they do have a Facebook acount. Get updated on Halal certified food and products in Facebook.

I have recently written about the The Dreaded Black Screen of “No Approved Therapeutic Claims” and this one is related.

What happens when you whip out trusty Google, search up a medicine you want to purchase and find these out:

• no product website
• no local supplier’s site
• no official social media accounts
• bad reviews about the medicine

Simple — You move on.

This is a scenario of a total disconnect on the medicine’s lack of online marketing.

Good for you since you got the info you needed (medicine bad, find another).
Bad for the manufacturer since they didn’t get your business.

But hey, try to multiply this scenario with the many users primarily using the internet for SEARCH, the manufacturer is going to have a big headache.

A “Lack of Online Marketing” Example

Here’s a concrete example.

Medicine Name: SARIDON
Manufacturer: BAYER

Saridon, according to Wikipedia, is an analgesic that is widely marketed and available in the Visayas and Mindanao region here in the Philippines. Due to its cheap price, it has become widely popular.

Try to emulate our above scenario and do a search for “Saridon” and you will see a very disappointing array of results. Encouraging? Certainly not.

You will see this search result all of the following:

One Wikipedia article. Check. One Youtube vid. Check. One fan-made Facebook page. Check.

But where is the SARIDON information
that your customer is looking for?

Turn to page 2 of the results and you’ll start seeing a negative feedback (warnings) and write-ups about the product. Issues were being raised regarding Saridon.

One columnist raised the issue of the ingredients found in the product. It stated the previous usage of phenacetin in the formula which is a known carcinogen and used in cocaine production. The product was reformulated but this time used propyphenazone which is not quite as safe to use like the previous active ingredient.

Another attack on the product is the mention of using Visayas and Mindanao are mere test markets (Imagine that! We’re lab rats!) and further mentions of the same warnings as the above columnist.

I know some of the people from Visayas and Mindanao might say they have not even heard of the product. That is the point. What if this kind of news moved from just an online buzz and circulates to ears that hear offline.

Would that be good for the brand? The resounding answer is NO.

The Fix?

The good thing is that there is always a fix for this. Online problems have online and offline solutions. The question now is how quick the company, brand, or manufacturer will address these kinds of issues before it becomes too late.

Old blog. New domain. New tweaks. All thanks to www.yoast.com. But of course there’s more that yoast can offer. For example, do you want tips for blog optimization? Want it to be super fast? Want to know how to track your visitors? What about maintenance? All these are answered with the 40 tips offered. See slideshare below:

Mechanics

1. Register and wait for the email verification for your account. After clicking on

your email verification link you may then log-in at the loadmomma site.

2. The administrator will verify the validity of your address within 24 business

hours after registration.

3. If you requested to have a Red Mobile sim delivered, and you have entered a

complete and valid address, your Red Mobile sim will be scheduled for delivery

after administrator approval. Please allow up to 3 business days delivery time

within Metro Manila and 5 business days outside Metro Manila.

4. If you currently have a Red Mobile sim please indicate the number in the

“current moblie number“ field during registration.

5. Once you receive your sim, input your Red Mobile number at your profile details

page to be able to start earning points.

6. Invite friends to register by sending them an email by using the invite friends tab.

7. Earn talktime for each friend who registers in LoadMomma, activates their sim

and inputs their Red number at their profile page.

8. You’ll receive 20 minutes talktime for every valid referral you make which will be

sent after verification and processing.

9. Go to the Load Manager tab, to see an estimate of your free talktime.

10. Please allow up to 72 hours for processing of your free talktime after verification.

I am so not liking Magento right now. Yes, it’s supposed to be a “snazzy ecommerce platform” but I won’t blame this to learning curve. Nooooo. I have already installed WordPress and BANS for the FIRST TIME and didn’t encounter any problems whatsoever by just reading the freakin’ manual. Well, I know those are too easy to install. But then, this is a different case.

Been tinkering with this for almost a week now and it is getting on my nerves. Got errors importing the SQL of their sample data in phpmyadmin. That is why I cannot use the Downloader to install Magento. I am doing the Default Install instead to run away from sample data.

Transferring the files via FTP would leave me nail-less on every finger if I spend my time watching it trickle file by file. No, I won’t do that. My time is too precious. I have to leave my PC running and uploading the dang files. And only to find out later that it’s still NOT working! The internal server error 500 is still there happily looking at me. I change the permissions several times already and still it didn’t work.

My desperation even reached Twitter but no Magento person contacted me. Yes, I was expecting it to be like GoDaddy where their customer service is 5-stars! More on that later.

I will now see where oh, where did I go wrong. Any Magento experts there who want to end my hatred?

I am so freaking stupid today. I purchased Skype credits and realized that Paypal deducted it from the WAMU bank account instead. I checked the WAMU account but realized it was not credited so I was aiming to check my Unionbank debit card. I accessed their site where “almost” everyday I use the same login information.

Blame it on later’s celebration or Dabby’s fussy sleeping that I brainlessly entered the WRONG PIN. It had warned me that it will be the last try but I insisted on the freaking wrong pin that my ATM became BLOCKED. Stupiiiid me!

So I was freaking out and immediately emailed their customer support (customer.service@unionbankph.com). Of course they only have automated responses and their email didn’t even help a bit.

We will reply to your query within 48 hours. Correspondences received after office hours, weekends, as well as Public Holidays will be responded to on the next banking day.

For urgent requests, you may also contact us through our customer service hotline (841-8600) or thru our domestic toll-free hotline 1-800-1888-2277.

The problems are:
Today is New Year’s Eve and the rest of the days will be HOLIDAYS.
We don’t have a landline.
We only have one cellphone that is not loaded in eons (lol).

So my only resort was to use Skype of which ironically I just bought credits for $10. The thing is there is not much information on how I should dial these numbers from Skype.

Skype has instructions for dialing TOLL FREE numbers but I don’t get it (or just too panicky). And Unionbank only posted the number (841-8600). Heck! I am in Cebu I don’t know how to dial that.

My resort was to look for help forums on about anything about Unionbank and was glad I made it across a comment on a blog. I will post it below for “future” reference.

After activating your EON Card you should enroll for a cyber account in Unionbank’s website. It will be activated in 48 hours and you should not login to it within 48 hours or else your account will be blocked and you will be needing to email or call(+632 84186) their customer service department. You should be patient and wait for the 48 hours activation period. regarding the EXPUSE number, after registering your eon card to paypal, you should email(customer.service@unionbankph.com) or call(+632 84186) Unionbank’s customer service department for your EXPUSE number, they will be asking you some security questions about your account.

Okay so that calmed me a bit. I dialled the number on Skype (+632 84186) and spent the next 1.5 minutes trying to figure our which number to press in the maze of instructions bombarded to me. The clue is to press “5″ which says “for credit card, eon card concerns”. Something like that.

Someone immediately picked up on the other end so I was VERY glad. She asked for some details that I prepared beforehand. She had me on hold for about two minutes (OMG my Skype!). Questions were asked for verification. She then told me that they will be sending in an email in two days. I asked her when the two banking days would be since it’s the Holidays. She said it would be on January 5. OMG! But then she assured me that if I can recall my PIN, I can withdraw in the local ATM machines. That was enough.

So I spent exactly 6 min 34 sec on the phone with her. My credits are so eaten up. Well, I will be looking forward to their email days from now. And if all fares well then I won’t be ranting here again. Customer service didn’t suck after all even if it’s New Year’s Eve.

www.lijit.com

“Uh, I had an adrenaline rush. It’s very common. You can Google it.”- Edward Cullen, Twilight

Google has become a household (or office) term for “search”. Even conversations in the big screen can be quoted using such a term. Meeting someone who doesn’t know Google would be a once in a blue moon event. Think of “search” and without a glance I’m sure you would think of that six-letter word on white background with a textfield and two buttons below it.

But, as some bloggers may have noticed, Google is quite flawed. When doing a search, the tool would pick up all related links to sites related to those keywords entered. This is not what you want so you set it up to search only your site’s content and some other site that you entered away on the configuration. Still this is not enough.

This is where Lijit fills in the gap. This innovative search engine gives publishers the Lijit Wijit, a FREE plug-in component, to put on your site and give your readers a way to not only search your blog and your other sites but also search your photos in Flickr, your videos on YouTube, your bookmarks in StumbleUpon, or your content on Facebook.

These are some the benefits of Lijit as quoted from their site:
• Increase searches by 2.5 – 5x
• Engage readers and raise pageviews 5% or more
• Grab the 30% of your audience that you’re missing
• Use search stats to improve content targeting and uncover reader intent

FOR YOUR READERS
Lijit allows your readers to use your customized search engine that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll, and more giving you the control over your readers and the opportunity to know the “how, who and what” of your site readers.

FOR PUBLISHERS
Lijit made sure that they are providing value back to their blog publishers. This is visible through the form of statistics that you can view on your Lijit account. You can see how many times you’ve been searched, about what, which of your results have been clicked, and much more.

As of December 10, 2008, they have released the latest version of their ad network. The theme of this release is to offer greater value and control for their publishers by offering transparent, flexible, and manageable search ad offering. This is by letting the publishers set their own prices and sell their own search ads.

FOR ADVERTISERS
Lijit gives you the ability to target the right people at the right time. You can build text ads using Lijit’s easy-to-use interface. Choose as many keywords as you want to target your ads and have your ads appear next to search results next to a site or set of sites that you have picked.

For an interview from Lijit’s CEO and co-founder Todd Vernon, you can watch this YouTube video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekxt5gnrwTA&hl=en&fs=1]

www.ideamason.com

IdeaMason is a knowledge management software. From its definition alone, you can derive that is a storage application for your ideas, sources, cited materials and research materials.

For an online article writer like me, my portfolio of work is organized as directories or folder on my local PC. This makes it hard to sift from one folder to another to look for an article that I wrote. It is also very difficult to manage status and progress of these articles since there is other option by to probably place it in a “Completed” or “Needs Research” folder.

IdeaMason offers to change this setup by managing all your portfolio items. Folders or categories are already placed and ready for you for the purpose of organization of your created documents. You can create new materials like either a new idea, quotation, thesis/abstract, summary or figure.

The work area that is presented to the user is a more familiar application like Word for easy text editing and formatting – a feature that is very useful for Windows platform users.

The one thing I found good was that you can create a composition. IdeaMason helps you do this by providing organization of though using the outline view. This is done by inserting an organizational element, either a part or chapter or topic or any other subtopic and them immediately adding an item under each outline.

Aside from that, documents created can be exported in formats that are commonly used like Word, HTML, RTF or XML. This makes it very convenient for writers or to blog article writers to easily use formats outside the application.

There are lots of additional features that a serious writer (or a student or someone from the academe) can use the application for and they are documented on their site for easier reference but the point being that you can organize your thoughts in this manner is already a big thumbs up from a not-so-advanced user like me.

Lots of reviews show user satisfaction for the product since it has been released for use. Reviews on the internet are from way back to 2006 and some items mentioned by those reviews have long been implemented on this application.

The important thing is to start using the application and get familiar with all the wonderful features that it has to offer.

http://www.fileride.com/

November 30, 2008 will be the last day for downloading the application. Then it will be in closed beta.

The FileRide application looks very good and sleek. For only 11MB of installer, it didn’t take much of my time to download the file and to finally install it on my PC.

After setting up my profile (actually I just setup my picture) I navigated my way through the fancy buttons that were presented to me. I was actually looking for the settings menu which probably let me customize the look and feel of the app but was dismayed to find none except the setting to play sounds and alerts.

The upper right corner had a blank box intuitively should be a search box and upon entering text, it matches up some items that were tagged as such. I was expecting much that it be the same as Google’s search – too many expectations though. I was given some Google results though that was of a different language.

On copying an image or a link or a file, it’s smart enough to detect that you have copied such and suggests you add it on FileRide.

As with most applications, I think it will take more navigation and more than a day to familiarize the app and the possibilities that it can offer.

Ever wondered why whenever you view someone’s profile on Friendster that person would view your profile in return? And for any Friendster user / fan there, the more profile views the better! Correct? Presenting the Friendster profile viewer.

This idea came from Rhendy the genius. I’ll write here the roots first and yes, I’m planning to bore you with the details on why I created my own script. The conversation looked like this:

bji: oh hmm.. sorry but you are probably too junior for this stuff
f: oh okay
f: is my info on your database even updated?
bji: hmm.. no in fact its about 8 months old
f: heh
f: im still junior then?
bji: I am only judging by the data there..
-end-

It stopped there. That was it. I setup my own XAMPP, configured cURL and.. as I’m sure Rhendy doesn’t have a copy of the Friendster profile viewer script (because I lost it too) so I decided to create my own.

(For my own use)

Steps to setup:

1. Setup the script. Send me an email if you want the script.

2. Run the script on the command prompt

C:\xampp\php\php.exe -f C:\xampp\htdocs\phptest\ftest.php

3. See the running script

4. Watch your profile views increase. /gg