I look in my shoutbox and I see a link to a site. Usually I have got this knee jerk reaction to delete it but in the few seconds it took me to navigate to the manage page I decided maybe it wasn’t spam.
A little clicking later I like what I see. A site that looks like a community driven site for Indian music. Nice idea! I wonder why I haven’t come across those types of sites before.
Anyway, here’s the site I’m talking about: Musicballroom. If you’re the weird type, you can ignore that link and click on the one that’s in the shoutbox. Check out the international section (their main site) too, it’s quite something. 
Comment if you know any other sites like this.
With music services increasingly turning to DRM infested music files to squeeze every buck out of the customer, it comes as sweet surprise that a few sites out there do actually provide DRM free music at affordable prices. One such find is MusicMP3.ru which sells songs from about 4 to 15 cents depending on the length of the track. That’s quite an affordable price considering I’ve seen some sites charging close to a dollar for each song. And no, it’s not illegal, their faq page clarifies that they do in fact pay the licensing fees.
The Album Reviews give you a lot of background info which you probably won’t need but try out their sampler which you can use to hear a song before you buy it. I’ve bought a song from them and I’ve just played it on my computer and on my Discman. No DRM at all. Nice.
In case you’re one of those heavy downloaders you can try out their affiliate program where they will pay you for linking to them. The extra dough can be used to buy more music. An incredibly simple interface adds to the ease of use of the whole site. Check out their Music News section for an idea of what I’m talking about. Ignore the occasional grammar mistake since it’s a Russian site.
I’ve been finding it difficult to fund my account though. Presently, they don’t accept credit cards or PayPal. That leaves me with E-Gold which I have just exhausted. I’ve got to see if I’ve can fund my account off their affiliate program.
Woah! I was looking through my PayPal account and I notice that over the past year I’ve spent $126 on stuff other than hosting. Now, hosting is a cost that I’m conscious of and willing to pay but 126 dollars on other stuff? Ridiculous. I don’t buy much online! Or so I thought.
The only big purchase was a gift I bought my brother for his birthday since I figured it was better to buy something online and have it shipped to him in the US rather than buy the same here and ship it myself. Another small portion was a few donations I gave out. Apart from those every other purchase was $10 or less.
Seeing that I don’t get much in the first place I’d better start managing what little I have better. I’ve never thought of myself a spendthrift. I’m way better handling physical cash and real bank accounts than online money. I think the problem lies with me subconsciously thinking of online cash as play money. (Reminds me, I used to be pretty good at Monopoly, Mayfair was always mine)
In other news, I’ve got a verified PayPal account. So now even the sending limits can’t stop me from spending.
Last Saturday, past midnight, I was doing the usual rounds of websites to check if anything interesting was going on when all the pages started to give me ‘page not found’ errors. Assuming it was my wireless router acting up again I disconnected that and connected it to my LAN card only to find no difference. I did the usual sequence of checks and found everything connected properly. Restart modem. No difference. I noticed that my PC/USB indicator was red when it was actually supposed to be green. Another restart attempt and the thing doesn’t turn on. I thought I’d call up the Airtel guys but it was about 2 in the morning and for some reason I didn’t feel like calling them then fully realising that if I did push it off for later it’d be Sunday afternoon by the time I wake up. As expected I got up the next day at 1 PM just in time for lunch. I call the Airtel guys after that, tell them my problem, give them my phone number and just when I put down the phone I get an sms saying that my complaint was registered with them and it would be fixed before this time the next day. I was like, damn! these guys are fast. As promised the service guy popped up the next day, fiddled around with my modem for a while, changed the adapter and told me everything was fine now. The service that these guys provide is a whole lot better than what Hathway could ever muster (the only other ISP I’ve used is BSNL and we all know about their inexistent customer service).
In other news, we’re going on a tour (educational, they say) to North India some time next month. We’re planning to visit Jaipur, Agra, Delhi and Manali. The trip will last 9 days or so. I’m sure it’ll be fun if it comes through. The whole thing gets cancelled if AU decides to start their state wide placement drive during those 9 days. Not to mention what effect the sem results might have on the tour. Damn AU, they make it a point to annoy those that don’t want to be.
This update should last me a month, no?
I’ve been through my fair share of hosts, free and otherwise. I’ve blogged about my previous paid hosting in this post. Surprisingly the paid hosts went down more than the free hosts. George attributes that to me buying paid hosting that he wouldn’t use even if it were free. Sound logic and unfortunately true. I’ve finally decided to buy decent paid hosting.
At first while searching around I couldn’t find any small packages, meaning, around 1 GB. I wanted a reseller and all those out there were either upwards of 5 GB or were atrociously costly for what little space they provided. I even created an excel spreadsheet (damn!) with all the details so I could look at the deals at one go.
I condensed that list to 6 hosts that I thought were worth buying from. Two hosts had awful reviews, another didn’t accept Paypal, one other had decent reviews but George didn’t like the domain name or the fact that they had spelling mistakes on their site. That left us with two more hosts that had few or no reviews of them. Luckily, I had tried them both out before. I had used one for about 7 days before I got pissed off with the support (I was on their free trial package, its possible they have different support for freeloaders) and the other host used to host the host where I bought my previous reseller from. A few emails later, I was all ready to buy hosting from the host that hosted my previous host (I like the sound of that). Come Sunday, I should officially be their customer.
Want to know which host it is? Well, y’all are smart enough. I left in enough clues for you to figure it out.
Marc’s blog seems to be sporting a few sponsored posts. While he’s cornered sponsoredreviews.com for himself, I thought I’d join in on the fun and went about searching for similar services. After a little searching around I found Smorty, a bright coloured, crisp looking site that has a very simplistic feel to it. All you need to know is right there on the homepage. Its a service connecting advertisers with bloggers and making sure everything goes smooth between them.
For the bloggers, what might seem interesting is the fact that they expect you to express your opinion and not push an advertisers product. They repeatedly emphasise on posting your opinion about any service or product. Their sign up is a single page and the whole process was a breeze. They took less than a day to verify my blog. My account already had 6 new offers under New Oppurtunities. The process here is that advertisers mention their offer and you select one that you’d like to write about. Once you submit your post it’ll be reviewed by both the advertiser and Smorty. Once its confirmed you’ll get paid within a week by Paypal. One thing to remember though is that there is a 400 word limit for each blog post. I’m not sure why they limit the amount of content. Also I was a tad disappointed with the offers. Almost all offered $6 for a blog post but since I’ve just started with them I’m guessing it’ll go up once I’m done with a few posts.
If you’re looking to be an advertiser then I guess you’re getting a pretty good deal. The testimonial page seems to rate them very highly. It seems like a great way to get high quality inbound links. Check them out if you’re interested:
Link: Get paid to blog
I wonder how long it’ll take for my post to get reviewed (Edit: It takes around 2 days). I’ll post what happens after I submit this blog post.
Edit: Haha… The post was declined because I linked to Marc’s blog. A rule I seem to have missed - “Post can only contain sponsors links”. Resubmitting post.
I’ve blogged about Radioverve before (here), while their site was not much to talk about before they’ve gone ahead and revamped the thing into a total kickass wordpress based website. Their integration of flash and AJAX with the wordpress theme is mind blowing. I really like their flash player and its intuitive interface. It all fits in quite well with their site. They’ve got loads of new content and they’ve split it up into different channels - Rock, Metal, Gospel, Jazz, Classical, Konkani, folk (yet to come) and their usual mishmash of everything. I find that especially convenient when I’m not quite into a song on one channel I just switch channels to something more interesting.
They’ve still got a few rough edges but none serious enough to spoil the experience. They’ve got a program schedule but in its present form I can’t see how its of any use. I’m not even sure if the program schedule is correct. Their rock channel schedule states that the LBG show should be playing at 10:30 pm but its 10:48 PM now and ‘Medicis - My World’ is playing (awesome song that. Gotta buy their album.) Also, it sounds like their promos have gone from bad to worse. It sounds like bloopers that they’ve taped and stuck in between songs, maybe its supposed to be funny but the humour completely escapes me. It gets pretty annoying after a while. I actually liked the Demon stealer records advertisement (a metal compilation of hardcore, metalcore and nu-metal - That guy had an awesome voice) better than the radioverve promos. Talking about promos, radioverve now has a badge that you can use.
And finally the one I think I’ll use - 
That large badge looks like its been badly cropped. Anyone willing to do the honours?
All in all its a good step forward and I’m sure everyone will appreciate the new content on radioverve. A few creative promos and a little tweaking with the site and they’re made.
RadioVeRVe is this really great online radio for Indian Independent Rock music. I’ve been listening to them for a few days now. They’ve got a decent collection of songs and though their programs keep repeating I really don’t mind.
One of the RJ’s is pretty good and has something useful to say. I think the guy is from Phenom which is another great band. They’ve also got LBG on high rotation. Listen to them now. Here are the links to their streams:
Low quality - 32 kbps : http://play-lo.radioverve.com/
High quality - 64 kbps : http://play-hi.radioverve.com/
Ultra quality - 128 kbps : http://play-ultra.radioverve.com/
I can’t wait until they come out with their program schedule. I’d also appreciate a little less promos but I can learn to ignore them.
I was randomly searching for wordpress themes and this was the first one I found. I didn’t like it when I saw the preview picture but I thought I’d check out the demo anyway. Was I blown away or what?! This thing looked awesome, it supports loads of plugins and its a snap to use. I got it up working in a few minutes unlike other plugin ready themes. I don’t think I’ll change anything except the header.
There were a few themes that Marc showed me, that were on xendx.com, that were pretty nice looking. I’ve shelved those for now. Maybe I’ll use them when I get bored enough or break this theme.
Only thing I noticed it takes forever to load but that could be because of my host. I’ve also got lots of plugins to install. Got any plugins to recommend? Comment…
So after a few years of using free hosts I decided I’d give paid hosting a shot. One of the reasons was that I know a couple of fellows that, while using free hosting, have created blogs with decent content thats worth more than a free host. There are some pretty good free hosts out there like IGB but since this was the first time I had the means and inclination to do so I thought why not, lets get us some paid hosting. I went ahead and bought the cheapest hosting plan I could find. Its been rather bothersome to setup all the stuff and submit support tickets but now thats done I hope there’s some smooth sailing ahead.
The funny thing is at one point of time I was emailing more than 8 people about their packages and if they’re willing to give out a low bandwidth package for cheaper and I got a negative answer on almost all of them. For some reason within the last month I’ve managed to buy two hosting packages that seem like killer deals. Now to verify if they’re killer deals.
