Tag: money

P-card from Hellenic bank and Flickr Pro

Vladimir told me about this new cool offering from Hellenic Bank – P-card, so I went to the bank today to see if I can get it.

Basically, P-card is a regular debit card. It is not connected to any of your accounts though, which is a nice thing if you want to use it on the web. The amount debited can be anywhere from 15 CYP and 500 CYP. If you run out of money, you can debit more. The P-card is for electronic use only, which is good enough if you ask me – web, ATMs both local and abroad, and shopping point of sale systems – are all good.

Applying for the card is extremely easy. Any clerk of any branch can issue the card in about 10 minutes. All you have to do is present and ID card or passport and debit either cash or from your account. The good thing is that you can even use P-card to give someone else money, like a gift for example.

I decided to start with a 50 CYP card, debitted from my account. I have received a package that contained the card itself, PIN, the copy of terms and conditions, and a bonus CYTA So-Easy 5 CYP card. Not bad.

I have also tried if the card worked on the web and didn’t have any problems. I have purchased myself a two year Flickr Pro account. By the way, I have a couple of ideas on how I am going to use it extensively in a very near future.

Resume: if you need a quick, simple, and secure way to buy stuff on the web or via other electronic means, get yourself a P-card from Hellenic bank. That’s a really good option.

Updated Google Ads

I have done a few minor changes about the Google Ads that I run on this site.

Firstly, I have added another vertical ad on all pages. It appears below the search field and makes the sidebar look not as lonely as it used to when scrolled further down.

Secondly, I have changed the color scheme of all ads to match the new colors of the site. Luckily, I didn’t have to mess around with CSS and hexadecimal numbers myself. Google Adsense has a theme that closely matches the colors that I wanted – Steely Gaze.

Thirdly, I have separated all ads into three channels – sidebar, comments-above, and comments-below. This will allow me to get better reports from Google. From now on I will see which ads are more effective and also will be able to play around with different color schemes and ad formats.

I hope that all these ads are not too annoying and that you’ll be clicking on those that really match the content of posts. I am less than $10 USD short for my second paycheck from Google and I hope to get it before Christmas.

On spending money

My Linux Weekly News expires in a couple of days. I’ve been supporting the publication for the last two or three years and I still find it to be a great source of good journalism. But I realized that I haven’t been using it that much in a last year. Sometimes it were weeks between my visits to LWN. It just doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. And I think this is a good reason to stop renewing my account.

With all those extra money I feel like I have to find a new place to spend them. The problem is that I don’t use that many web services anymore.

Most of the stuff I do on the web is connected to my site in this or that way. So I was considering donating to WordPress at first. But they say that time is the best thing I can give to them, not money. And I do promote WordPress as much as I can both on this website and when I talk to people.

Than I thought about Gallery. But I figured that I am not that happy with it yet and I’ve only just started using it. I am not sure yet that I will stay with it for a long time.

By this time, I was practically out of alternatives. And than it hit me – Flickr. I don’t use it much yet, but it bugs me all the time. Flickr is an excellent service and I want to find the way to use it. And maybe I will. Currently, I am just backing up some of the most important images there, but I think it’s that monthly bandwidth limitation that stops me from working with it seriously.

Another point that made me consider Flickr more than anything else is that by paying them money, I won’t be just donating. I will get a FlickrPro account that will increase the monthly bandwidth limit from 20 MBytes to 2 GBytes and provide me with a bunch of other useful functionality.

I haven’t yet made my mind though. I am still thinking about it. If you have any suggestions on which other services or product I might be interested in, let me know.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-08-27

Adsense Logger plugin for WordPress

Adsense Logger is an open source PHP script that helps website owners to optimize Google Adsense for their sites. I just found out about it today and realized that I wanted something like this for a long time, but never took the time to find it.

Apparently, there is an excellent plugin for WordPress that automatically installs and configures Adsense Logger to work with WordPress. Simply copy the files from the ZIP archive and assign correct permissions. TADA! You’re done. If you wish to see your Google reports within your WordPress administration area, enter your username and password in the plugin configuration page.

I’ve just installed and tried it and looks really good. Now all I am missing are those ad clicks (hint, hint, hint).

Found via this Bloggin Pro entry.