Justin Germino Ramblings

Have had a stiff neck all weekend and am going to desperately try to get a Chiropractic appointment in today if I can.  Also ate some food which upset my stomach yesterday so had to sleep on floor last night and feeling generally miserable all around.

I am hoping to feel better to take the kids trick or treating this afternoon as I promised to hit as many houses as possible.  Not only do they want the treats (we don’t let them keep that many), but a local Dental office is giving $1 per pound of candy that is brought in from kids.  My kids are hoping to collect 5-10 pounds of candy each so they can get the $5 – $10 from the Dentist office.

They care more about trading the candy in for some cash than the candy itself which is kind of funny.  Meanwhile, I don’t eat too much candy myself though my weakness is Twizzlers and I tend to keep and consume every Twizzler that collects in any trick or treat bags.

Anyway, though the weekend in Encinitas was great (minus my stiff neck) came back already needing recovery.  Here’s to hoping the adjustment fixes my neck problems (which I think I hurt working out last week).

-Justin Germino

Another great article on BloggerJet last week when Tim compiled a list of the top 99 best blogs to guest post on, particularly if you are in the blogging / seo / social media categories.  The list included metrics including PageRank, Alexa rank, # of RSS Subscribers and sorted all blogs by lowest Alexa rank (most popular) to highest.

My technology and entertainment blog DragonBlogger.com made #54 in the top 100 blogs which included such giants as SEOMoz, Problogger and Social Media Examiner.

Not only are these excellent blogs to consider some of your best guest post article writing for, but because these are top blogs as far as traffic, readership and fans they are excellent blogs to regularly comment on.  As readers get familiar with your name and comments you may be able to establish yourself and even possibly bring a following back to your site.

I wound up getting several hundred referral visits back to my site from Problogger.net a few months ago from a single comment I made on one article.  Imagine multiplying this across four or five articles across 40+ sites, this could be thousands of referral visits just from commenting and engaging with others on blogs.

I highly recommend you get the list of Top 99 Blogs to Guest Post On from Tim Soulo and remember to Tweet it which gives you an excel spreadsheet you can download and instantly cut/paste the URL’s from or sort however you like.

BTW, though Tim Soulo has a relatively new blog with BloggerJet, I can honestly tell you I have seen some of the highest quality articles on his site that I have ever read.  Each article does a great job informing as well as entertaining it’s readers and even though some of the content may be already known by experienced bloggers the refreshing approach and depth of information Tim brings to his blog are top notch. 

-Justin Germino

I just couldn’t justify paying nearly $100 per month for satellite TV service to 3 TV’s in my house anymore so I was looking for a better and alternative way to still get to watch a ton of content (Movies and TV Shows) while reducing my overall monthly expenses.

I had already owned 2 Roku XDS boxes, and had the Netflix service but I found if I added Hulu+ as well then I had access to much more immediate TV Shows and Seasons than you could find on Netflix.  So here is how I worked my plan.

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I stripped out almost my entire TV package down to only my bare minimum channels, and removed service from 2 of the 3 TV’s in my house.  I now use Netflix / Hulu Plus only for the Kid’s television and they can get all the kid’s shows and movies they want and aren’t affected much.  With Hulu Plus channel coming to the Nintendo Wii soon they can even get easier access to the Hulu Plus TV shows as well.

So, with Netflix and Hulu Plus I am paying about $19 per month or so for those two services, but I also reduced my satellite bill by over $60 by reducing the number of streams and channel packages.  This gave me a net savings of about $40 every month just by making this arrangement.

I did find that I couldn’t replace satellite completely, the lack of LIVE TV on Roku makes it impossible for CNN junkies like my wife and I to watch real time news if I were to cut my satellite completely.  But I was able to save quite a bit and every little bit helps.

So live news and local channels (I can’t pick anything up with HD Antenna for some reason) are the only reason I really am keeping a Satellite TV subscription at this time.

-Justin Germino

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Was looking at my follow bloggers trying to leverage Twitter’s “Similar To” feature to find other bloggers of interest to follow and network with and found the feature to be less than helpful.

Was checking out @TycoonBlogger and found the following recommended because they were similar to @TycoonBlogger or at least Twitter thinks so:

Now I did more experimentation too see if such oddities would be suggested with @JohnAguiar @Kikolani @Ileane @Growmap or some of the other big bloggers and social media personalities that I follow.

I didn’t find any more humorous ones, but I did find that Similar To needs to have better filtering.  For one thing, locked accounts shouldn’t show up when they aren’t public.  For another they should check to see the follower status of an existing account and if < a certain amount then they shouldn’t recommend it as an account to follow.  Seriously it is pretty easy to find useless accounts, and the Klout Chrome plugin is really helpful as you pretty much know an account with a score of 5 or under will almost always be either a new account or 99% a bot or spam account.

The other thing is just hitting page refresh re-orders the list each time and takes off the accounts you are already following or chose to follow, so you can find some good matches but you have to be thorough enough to read their bio’s and look at the user’s tweet history if you want to find/follow people based on the default Twitter Similar To feature.

-Justin Germino

So the other day a CenturyLink guy comes to my door saying that they finally upgraded the lines in the neighborhood and now are offering the CenturyLink 40M+ broadband package.  This is 40Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream and had a fantastic introductory rate for 1 year.  I was very excited even though it meant I would have to buy a DSL router and disconnect my cable modem service but the price and speed were both better than what I was currently getting with Cox Communications at the time.

I have a lot of internet heavy devices in my household, including:

• 3 laptops
• 1 Desktop PC
• 2 iPad’s
• 2 Roku XDS boxes (streaming Netflix, Hulu+ or Amazon Prime Video)
• 1 Wii
• 1 Xbox360

The computers are always on and connected to the internet and my kids are usually streaming a movie on the Nintendo or Roku when they are home (we don’t have cable TV or satellite in their rooms anymore so they exist only on internet TV content for the kids rooms).

So, needless to say I hog bandwidth and the 40mpbs was nearly double my bandwidth plan currently with Cox.

I was all set to sign up and the CenturyLink technician called his center only to find out that the 40M+ cut off about 4 houses down on my street, and that my house was only able to get the 20M with 896kbps upstream which was much lower than my current plan (upstream).  It is lame that they can have the better plan for only 1/2 of a street in the first place, but even worse is that their door to door guy didn’t know and was so excited to sell a plan only to find out it wasn’t available and lose the order.  The guy’s time wasn’t wasted, I was educated about it coming to the area but he didn’t make a sale.

Meanwhile, I am hoping the lines get upgraded and the 40M+ does become available at my house in the near future (I was told to check back monthly).  Until then I just got a tease about the CenturyLink 40M+ and was told I could have it, but alas it isn’t available at my house.  The guy even told me “The house 5 doors down is for sale, just buy that one and move in there”.  Which I didn’t think was overly funny.

-Justin Germino

One of the benefits of being a tech blogger is when I partner with companies and get tech devices to review and/or giveaway to readers in contests.  It is a great value as I get to actually test and try new products hands on without having to invest my own money to test it and the company gets a free review and publicity from the review and contest.

I wouldn’t do this for a product I didn’t stand behind, but fortunately this New Trent IMP38B Wireless keyboard was a great product to giveaway.

If you have an iPad and want a bluetooth keyboard that doubles as a durable hard cover case then this product will work very well.

Enter to win a iPad Wireless Keyboard Case now and all you have to do is share the article to get a few entries.

This is the one I am giving away in the contest!

Who has an iPad and wants a chance to win a free Bluetooth keyboard case?

-Justin Germino

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I was wondering why Amazon didn’t have a Kindle book rental service where you can simply pay a per month fee and rent/read up to X books at a time instead of having to pay for each book individually in the same way Spotify offers music for a monthly fee.

It was then that I found out Amazon.com has a textbook rental service which is geared to greatly help college students.  You basically rent a single textbook for a specified period of days for up to 80% off the price of actually buying the book.  You can access the book on any device (Kindle PC app, Tablet…etc) so you can read it anywhere and even after the book expires all your notes are saved and still accessible.

For those who don’t know about the service this could be a big time way to save money on super expensive textbooks that you would just buy only to have sit and collect dust on shelves a year later after your classes have ended.

You can also easily extend or rental or re-rent if you need to reference again.

Seriously, this could be a big way to save money.

However, let’s say you still want to buy and have a textbook.  Amazon textbooks still gives you used Textbooks at up to 90% off and 30% off new textbooks.  Amazon will even pay you 70% back when you sell the textbook you purchased back to Amazon after you are done using it.

It is sort of like a rental, you buy the physical textbook and use it as long as you need.  As long as it is in same condition you bought it, you can sell it back to Amazon for up to 70% of the price you paid for it.  Naturally there is variation here  but it is a good way to get money back to be used for the next semester of books.

If you haven’t looked at Amazon yet for ways to save on textbooks you should, and I would lean toward the Kindle eBook rental myself since it makes the device everywhere at once and you can have multiple books all fit neatly on 1 portable tablet like say the Kindle Fire or Kindle Lite!

-Justin Germino

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Over 15,000 blogs use the Livefyre commenting system now including WPBeginner.com which I think is the lowest Alexa rated site using the Livefyre system to date (somebody correct me if I am wrong).

Meanwhile, it was a slow start for commenting on DragonBlogger.com with the Livefyre system but overall comments are increasing a little as my readers become more comfortable with the system.  Only a few readers have reported problems but I do still have quite a bit of fallout from other WordPress bloggers who used to comment regularly but abandoned commenting when I switched from CommentLuv to Livefyre.

Probably what aggravated my readers the most was that my CommentLuv links for all the older 19,000+ comments were just simply lost, vanished.  Even the former comments which had their usernames lost the backlink to their pages. All that time commenting to get a link back via CommentLuv was lost.  I can understand their frustration and I do apologize for the inconvenience

The truth is I love CommentLuv and still use it on 2 of my blogs out of the 4 I administrate (I actively own and run 3, but I also do all the admin stuff for my wife’s cooking blog The Chefs Cookbook).

CommentLuv is great for building backlinks and knowing what a latest bloggers posts were all about.  The thing is, my readership wasn’t all bloggers nor should it have been.

I was hammered with SPAM and even CommentLuv, GASP, Akismet…etc couldn’t stop me from moderating SPAM.  Livefyre is vastly superior at blocking SPAM than any WordPress commenting system I have tried in the last 5 years.  The impermium either catches the spam before it posts or cleans it up after it gets through the first pass.  I only have about 2-3 hours per day that I do blogging activities and I was spending about 10% of my time just dealing with SPAM comments, not counting on the time spent engaging and replying to real readers comments.

Secondly, as I learned with the recent Pottermore articles I was getting lots of comments where no reader left a URL, just name and email.  The vast majority of readers are not bloggers and have no backlink to leave.  I also wanted a system that encouraged readers to not only share the article (I have buttons for that) but share that they commented in the article so they could bring people into their conversation.  This is what Livefyre is also good at, and I found I have enjoyed joining and being apart of other Livefyre conversations on other sites.

The conversations within comments is something I have seen with Livefyre that is better than the default WordPress commenting system, it is also something you can’t get with CommentLuv.  You can instantly pull someone into a conversation just by typing @username in the comment and you will hit up that person on Twitter or Facebook where they will be invited to directly join in your conversation.  Yes, this can be abused but this can also be a great way to get feedback or attention for something important too.

Also, you still get a DoFollow backlink to your website/blog with Livefyre, so not all is lost.  You also get a link back to your latest conversation if you comment on other Livefyre blogs which often is your own blog if you are also using Livefyre.

So after my initial 30 day review of Livefyre on DragonBlogger.com and JustinGermino.com I have decided to stick with it.  I think it will improve even more when the guest commenting feature appears which should be soon and is the only feature Disqus has currently that Livefyre does not.

-Justin Germino

Decided to churn out this poem as a dedication to parents everywhere, figured just about everyone can relate to this poem.

Your Parents

Picking you up

when you are down

instilling smiles

when stuck in frown

A comforting shoulder

when carrying a boulder

keeping you colder

when emotions smolder

When things are unfair

we will still be there

and a glaring stare

mirrors only care

Lending an ear

while you shed a tear

always holding you dear

Your parents are here

-Poem by Justin Germino

I was given yet another reason to love the New Trent IMP1000 external USB backup battery the other day when I realized I had left my Blackberry Phone Charger in California and wasn’t going to be back up there for two weeks.  I had no ability to charge my Blackberry phone and still use it until I just simply plugged the Blackberry USB cable into the IMP1000 and used it to charge my Blackberry overnight.

Seriously, this device can charge a mobile phone without breaking a sweat and stores 11,000mAh.

While on the way back from California which is a 5.5 hour drive, my kids were on my iPad 2 constantly playing games.  They actually drained the iPad to about 27% battery and I just whipped out the IMP 1000 in the car and plugged the iPad 2 into the New Trent backup battery.  While they were actively using it by the time we arrived home the iPad was up to 97% battery and the New Trent device still showed it had 2 bars of power charge left.  This is while they were actively using it non-stop to play games for 4.5 hours it still not only kept the iPad 2 alive but actually charged it from 27% to 97% all from an external USB backup battery.

Power draining on one of your portable devices like a tablet, mobile phone…etc are no longer a concern if you have one of the New Trent IMP 1000 devices with you.  You just charge it via A/C at home and bring it with you whenever you are going on a trip.  It can hold enough charge to fully recharge most mobile phones 6 times, and it seems to be able to fully charge an iPad 2 and then a phone left over on a single charge.

This would be one of my top 5 products of 2011 for sure!

-Justin Germino

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