Who doesn’t look at their phone bill every month and say, “Why is the bill higher this month, and I talked even less on the phone than last month!?!?!”

Well, I finally came up with a solution that cost a bit up front, but is saving me big bucks on my phone bill that seemed to double monthly. The ooma Core VoIP Phone System provides you with unlimited nationwide calls for FREE and international calls on a PAYGO (pay as you go) basis over your existing high speed internet connection. The ooma even comes with caller ID, call waiting, enhanced 911 and voice mail that can all be tweaked in the “ooma Lounge.”

Personalize your ooma Core VoIP Phone System by creating private voicemail, adding phone numbers for everyone in your home and even set personal ring patterns - all in the ooma Lounge - for an additional fee. But for the basic service, it is free! We like free, right?!?!?

The ooma Core VoIP Phone System is so easy to set up, even a 10 year old can do it! Plug your phone into the system, then plug the system into your modem or router. And that’s it! If you want phones in other rooms, you do have to buy the ooma Scout, which you can find for as low as $49.99.

When I got the ooma, I ported my phone number over for $39.99 (one time fee), but if you aren’t attached to your number like me, then just set your ooma up with a new number.

With the ability to use my existing internet connection and phones I already had, the ooma Core has won a special place in my heart!

I’m sure you’ve noticed already that I love Twitter and all things tweeted! When I saw this new Twitter app I thought it was pretty cool. I’m a forgetful being you see, and I do get and send quite a lot of packages. So, here goes nothing, going to give TrackThis a try.

Following the steps on their website:

1. Go to twitter.com/trackthis and click the Follow button
Since trackthis uses direct messages, you must follow it so it can send direct messages to you. trackthis will follow you back immediately so that you can send direct messages to it.

Done! And within less than a minute my Gmail popped that TrackThis was following me back Who knew auto following could me smile so easily -lol-

2. Send a Direct Message to trackthis like: 123456789123 New PC
Click here to send your message, with the FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL tracking code first, followed by a nickname for the package.
Example: 123456789123 Macbook Air

I have a package full of bath and body goodies headed my way from The Scented Tub, so I figured I’d pop that tracking code in there.

3. Sit Back and Wait!
We’ll send you a direct message each time your package changes location. You should receive the first message within twenty minutes.

Sitting back ….. done, waiting…. boring! But, I’m hopeful that when it updates I’ll catch the tweet going by. I just did a quick check at USPS.com to see where the package was and it currently says:

Status: Processed

Your item was processed and left our RENO, NV 89510 facility on December 2, 2008. Information, if available, is updated every evening. Please check again later.

It would be nice to see an automated confirmation message letting you know your tracking ID has been received sucessfully at this stage since you’re not going to get an update right away. The sitting and waiting without confirmation can make a person wonder if they did everything correctly or not. I’ll come back and edit this post when TrackThis tweets at me and let’s me know something new!

–
edit # 1 update received
About 10-15 minutes later I received two updates via direct message from TrackThis

The first message was a thank you message requesting donations to support the app. The second was the current status of my package that I entered the tracking number for.

You may have noticed we have some guest posters this month on Gadget Girl. I haven’t been able to really sit down and read about anything cool or gadget like recently. My husband has been in the hospital with an infection. He’s home now, but he’s got a couple more weeks of recovery to go still. So, I put out a call for guest posters to keep things moving along here.

I’ll be by once a week or so too, but I know our guests will do a great job. If you’d like to do a guest post here just leave me a comment and let me know, I’ll be in touch

If you play WoW (who doesn’t?) then you’ve probably seen websites with nifty mouse-over links to items, displaying all the stats without you having to click on anything.  If you are wondering how they do it so you can set it up on your website, then you are in luck, its a very simple process.

The first thing you have to know is how the items are identified.  First go and visit WowHead or Allakhazam.  Now search for an item… any item.  If you look at the URL in your browser you will see that it ends in a 5 digit number.  The number is the same for an item across any of these sites.  This is the item’s ID.

Now you need the mod.  The Itemstats mod can be found here, make sure you change the language to English on the right hand side!  First you download the mod itself, and then you download a file specific to what you are modding.  The mod works for Wordpress, phpBB, Joomla, Xoops, and quite a few more common website programs.  The installation instructions are included in the mod, or can be found on the website.

Finally you need to link an item.  This is the easy part!  Go and find the item ID for the item you want and use the code [item]43990[/item] to include it on your website.  By default you will have to click the item one time before it is added to your database and the mouse over works for your viewers! [see it in action]

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Angela is the webmistress of WoW Raid Leader, a World of Warcraft podcast with information about raiding in WoW as well as general WoW commentary.

: world of warcraft, wow, wow mods

Magpie is a unique advertising for Twitter users. If you tweet frequently, it might be a monetization option that you’re interested in looking into. If you’re an advertiser looking to spread the word about your new website or service and build links at the same time, then it might be something to try out for you too.

I decided to sign up with a twitter account to give it a try. Here’s an example of a magpie tweet that came through on that account.

I think that they are monitoring the adverts as they go through, I haven’t seen anything gross, offensive, or otherwise a turn off going through #magpie yet. If you want to get a feel for the type of advertisers that are using the service so far you can go to http://search.twitter.com and search for the hashtag #magpie.

As a twitterer I like that you can set the frequency of #magpie tweets in your account. You can set it to be every other tweet, every 3rd tweet, every 5th tweet, etc… However, it is only setup to have one Twitter account per magpie account. Now, that is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good because people can’t take advantage and have 50 Twitter accounts hogging up all of the ad que.

However, if you’ve got multiple twitter accounts, then I suppose it’s bad for you too because you have to pick just one to use with Magpie. Although, I suppose you could open additional Magpie accounts to match your Twitter accounts, I don’t know if anyone has tried that yet. As long as they all had unique email addresses (Which they’d have to for Twitter anyhow,) then you should be okay.

So far I find the Magpie service interesting and unique. But, to use it I think it depends on how you are using Twitter. If you’re using Twitter to be social, hang out with your friends and chit chat throughout the day, then having ads go by in your Twitter stream is probably not for you. Take some time and think about your Twitter goals and expectations before you sign up as a user.

I haven’t tested out the system as an advertiser yet, but I’m looking forward to doing so. Almost forgot, you can take the money you earn as a Magpie and set up your own ads and pay for them that way. Using it that way makes it more like a tweet swap than an ad platform, but it’s not a bad idea if you’re just sticking your toe in the water.

: Twitter, Magpie

Have a safe and happy holiday. Don’t eat too much pie

Have you ever visited a site and thought you might like to come back to it, so in order to find it again, you saved it to your browser’s “favorites” or “bookmarks” category? “Social bookmarking” is a term that describes a method in which Internet users can store, classify and share their Internet bookmarks.

There are many sites that allow users to share the sites they feel are useful and want others to know about. Other users can view these sites by category, topic or randomly, if they choose.

While this concept actually began in 1996, it started to get very popular in 2005 and 2006 when sites such as http://del.icio.us, http://simpy.com and http://furl.net started to take off.

As more and more of these websites pop up, new features such as allowing users to rate and comment upon the bookmarks, add notes, receive RSS feeds and even create social networks have popped up. The RSS feeds in particular allow users to receive up to the minute information on certain tags that they “subscribe” to. They are able to receive up to the minute information and resources on any given topic.

Since the information is being ranked by humans who are reading the information, the web pages with the most helpful content are receiving higher rankings. This is in comparison to a search engine’s spider that crawls the Internet and has its own way of measuring what pops up in the search engine results.

If you were searching for information on planting soil in a social bookmarking site, you may have very different results than which would come up in a general search engine search.

What does all of this have to do with your business? Basically, social bookmarking is the new “word of mouth” advertising. The more people that bookmark content on your site increases the chance of new users finding your site as they search through various users’ bookmarks.

If a site provides quality content that users find helpful and a little time is spent networking within these social bookmarking sites’, a site could have a much higher ranking within the social bookmarking site than it does in general search engine traffic.

Social bookmarking is another avenue of receiving web traffic. With many people taking hits from the search engines, this is another way to receive traffic. This doesn’t mean to ignore search engines or discontinue any search engine optimization efforts. This is simply another method that can increase traffic flow.