Softphone VoIP

Today I spent a great deal time trying to find a VoIP service that would allow me to have a second phone line without giving up my current Telus phone line.

Vonage
Apparently Vonage used to offer this service but not anymore, it seems they want more of the primary market and force you to move your main number to their service. Verdict - OUT

Ringcentral
The second option I found was ringcentral. The problem with them was they don't have a service for outbound calls in Canada, I don't really want to have to use my main phone to call out and hope they don't call me back on it. Verdict - OUT

Versature
Versature is a business solution. They offer up to 5 lines and lots of business features including the ability to select numbers or get toll free numbers. The package looked good but cost 35+ a month plus a setup fee. A little too rich for what I needed.

Primus
The solution I choose was a recommendation from a person who sets up PBX phone systems and that was Primus. First I ordered online and their system is poor to say the least. Basically the process ends and you don't know how much you are paying and have no account of the package ordered. It even has canned text that didn't apply to my order. So I tried going through the system again and found the service I really wanted (not the one I ordered) and set about making a number of calls to get the first order cancelled and the new "Talkbroadband softphone" service set up. They tell me I can have it in 24 hours which is significantly faster than anyone else and has the best pricing of $9.95/month unlimited local which I can upgrade to unlimited Canada/Usa for another $10.00.

I'll wait and see how the service turns out, but from my day of research, if you want a VoIP phone in Calgary, you want it cheap and fast with a seperate phone number. Go to Primus and order over the phone.

Social Networks in a Box

I've been playing with a few social networking solutions as I work on the REI gallery and a yet to be determined second social network site. So far I have used ellg which is the basis for REI Gallery and seems to be very full featured, but was a bit ugly when it came to making templates.

The other solutions I've tried are Buddypress and Pligg. I haven't really delved into the internals of these systems but I do like some of the implementations from the Buddypress gallery. I also like the concept of CSS based themes since I am very into content seperate from structure. Many were the days studying CSS Zen Garden.

There are of course numerous other open source social networks but I think taking on 3 at a time will be my limit. Until then I will hack away at these three.

Connecting Dots

I decided to update my company website and as part of the plan I wanted to link to major social networks... being facebook and twitter, plus add an rss feed which will be from this blog. The progression went like this.

1. Get a twitter account - this is fairly straight forward, I created an account a while ago and was able to change my username to match my company website. Getting followers will be next for twitter.
2. Setup the facebook page - it's not readily apparent how to do this, I used a sidebar link on the pages page which i got to from the control on the footer bar after login. Setup is pretty straight forward, though once it's up facebook is all about getting you to advertise your page in their network. Fair enough. I linked the facebook page to twitter using a built in tool so all my wall updates now post on my twitter (killing 2 birds with one stone as it were).
3. The blog - I looked at wordpress (free and self-hosted), typepad and blogger, of course as you can tell I chose blogger. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but I decided a free blog that didn't take server resources away from my other sites would be best. Free wordpress has limits on commercial content which finds me here on blogger.
4. The website - I built the website with concrete5 which is definately overkill for what the site will actually need. I used it to test bluehost as a service provider, formerly I had it hosted on dreamhost. Bluehost uses a simple scripts program which installs concrete5 for you, which I thought would save me lots of time as I create more and more concrete5 sites. The problem is the installer creates a bad install and I had to do it manually anyways. I'm sure sometime in the future it will be fixed but for now manual is the way to go.

The ideal solution will be to use one service (probably the blog) to produce content for the other two. I have the facebook -twitter link so now I seek a link to blogger. I'll let you know what I find.