We’re coming up on two years since I started (October 10,  2007) this blog on Blogspot and I thought I’d make a post about the past and future directions.

I’ve met a lot of great people, both users and vendors, both experts and novices, and learned a lot over the past two years. Let me just say that there are a lot of helpful people out there, the problem is connecting with them in such a way that everyone benefits. With the sale of Nortel this blog might take on some added value going forward as folks try to support their aging, possibly End-of-Life, Nortel equipment. I’ve already started to archive a number of Nortel documents just in case they disappear from the Nortel website as Avaya closes the deal and moves forward with the integration of the product and business units. With that said though I’m also going to start branching out adding some content around Cisco, VMware, Asterisk, etc. It will still be technical I just might hop around a bit depending on which topics interest me. I’m also going to start adding some video… more to come on that.

With respect to the physical appearance of the blog, I’ve was concerned that the previous theme was just a little too busy (although this new theme is starting to look busy again… I wonder who’s fault that is!). I wanted to focus on the content and not just load up every possible WordPress widget under the sun so I decided to make a change to the Fusion Theme by Milenko Popovici. Thanks for your hard work Milenko! I’ve already started to play with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) trying to tweak a few things – I’ve got to learn somewhere!

On the financial side I thought I would be 100% open with everyone here. While I’m not looking to make money from this blog I am looking to try and break even. To date I’ve shelled out around $263.05 for hosting, while I’ve received around $212.27 in ad revenue leaving me short $50.78 which isn’t all that bad and very acceptable from my viewpoint although you wouldn’t believe the additional tax forms I had to fill out to satisfy the IRS in case they ever audited me. I wouldn’t dare add up the amount of personal time I’ve put into this blog or responding to personal email messages or the wife would probably beat me silly.

While I’m happy to report that visits are up 2,000% this year over last year I’m sad to report that I still don’t rank with respect to Google’s Page Rank (no back links for me). You can see the statistics from Statcounter below for the past 30 days where I’m averaging about 311 visitors daily and over 522 page loads daily.

So I would ask that if you find this blog interesting or helpful please link to it, or Digg it, or share it to whatever social network you might enjoy. Please don’t SPAM or SPIM (I just heard this one last month… SPamming Instant Messaging). If you like the site and content why not just drop a reply saying Hi! When you’ve done that head over to the forums and help spread the knowledge.

You’ll find me on LinkedIn, Delicous, Digg, Blogged, Disquis, and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten about.

Thanks for the support!

Cheers!

I don’t think this blog is that popular by any stretch of the imagination…

Well the final notice arrived last week sometime. AT&T is pulling the plug on CallVantage come October 20, 2009. I’ve been a CallVantage customer for more than 3 years now and I’ve never (yes never) had an issue with the service.  And it’s saved me a ton of $$$$ with the wife making all those long distance calls that can go on for hours and hours. The voice quality was awesome and the feature set was superb. I’m very sad to see this service go, it was truly a winner if you ask me.

So now the search begins in earnest for a replacement (AT&T is advising all CV customers that wish to port their numbers to issue the request/order by September 29, 2009). There are quite a few other VoIP providers out there these days but where’s the gem in the rough? I haven’t decided myself but I’m curious if anyone out there has any opinions they’d like to share.

http://www.vonage.com/
http://www.voicepulse.com/
http://www.phonepower.com/services/voip/voiphome.aspx
http://www.itp4you.com/
http://www.voipo.com/
http://www.intalk.com/

The obvious option might be Vonage although I read a lot of bad stuff about their customer support, although is that just because of their sheer size?

I’ve got a lot of homework to do over the next week or so.

Cheers!

Update: August 11, 2008

After doing quite a bit of reading I went ahead and ordered service from VoicePulse. It’s amazing how many dreadful reviews of all the different VoIP service providers are out there. Then there are the supposedly independent review sites that are really just looking for a commission on the referral. It was very time consuming sifting through all the garbage in search of some honest non-biased reviews. In the end I decided to just try VoicePulse given it’s location, New Jersey, and  the age of the company itself – it’s been around for sometime now. I guess there’s quite a rush on since the Linksys ATA was on backorder at the time I placed my order. I just got an email from UPS that the adapter is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I’ll be sure to post a full (honest) review when I have everything up and running.

Cheers!

There are obviously a lot of very knowledgeable people posting to this blog. While I think the material I’ve already posted is helpful I think there are a lot of other folks out there that could help. I’m currently contemplating starting a discussion forum (probably using phpBB) to help get these folks connected. While I recognize that there are quite a few existing discussion forums (Tek-Tips is one such forum) that provide a great environment I think a better job could be done to help nurture the participants and help keep the discussions on topic. I know that Nortel has some discussion forums of their own which are relatively new.

I get a LOT of personal email messages asking for help on various topics. While I try to respond to the vast majority of them I don’t always have the time (or energy). I’m thinking about the following forums;

• Nortel BayRS Routing
• Nortel Ethernet Switching
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switching
• Nortel VPN Routing
• Nortel Succession 1000 Call Server
• Motorola Wireless LAN Switches
• Network Management

While it will probably mean some additional workload to get it up and running it could really help connect a lot of folks and could. I could also solicit a few experts to help moderate the different discussion forums and provide some high quality content.

Let me take a poll and see what you folks think. Please feel free to be brutally honest!

[poll id=”6″]

Cheers!