Mobile Daily Devotional

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Here are some interesting statistical information on “Google Trends on keyword search for mobile phone vs cell phone vs handphone”:http://www.google.com/trends?q=cell+phone%2C+mobile+phone%2C+handphone.

From the Google Trends statistics, people in US and Canada tend to use the term cell phone, while those in Australia and Europe uses mobile phone. Those of us in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia prefers handphone.

In the past, the term cell phone is rarely used in this site. Anyone searching for daily devotions for cell phone on Google will rarely find this site. I will start using the term cell phone in place of mobile phone in this site in order to make it easier for those looking for daily devotions on cell phone to reach here.

For those who are wondering about the January 2007 edition of Our Daily Bread for cell phone; it should be out within the next couple of days.

This site started providing Our Daily Bread, Global Prayer Digest and others for mobile phones in May 2006. The download stats so far:

*July 2006 stats is up to 27th July.

This is the stats from this site. I think a lot of people are downloading these same applications from GetJar.com. The applications have a few thousand downloads each according to their stats.

So, there you have it. The number of downloads for the past 3 months.

For the past week, this website has been having a yo-yo like experience. Dreamhost that hosts this site had a string of problems. Those problems caused this website to go offline for a few hours for a few days over the past week. For those of you who couldn’t get in this site during that period, now you know why.

The hosting has been very reliable for the past year until last week. They have been working very hard to resolve the problems and have been very open with the problems that they are facing. All this happened just as my hosting fees was due for renewal. I decided to give them another chance and renewed my hosting for another year.

Do you surf the web using your mobile phone?

I was going through the web server logs for the past week and noticed that there were visitors using mobilephone to access this website. For the past 7 days, we had visits from the following phone models.

Sony Ericsson K300i
Nokia 6061
Nokia 3120
MOT C650 (twice)
Samsung SGH T509
Samsung SPH A940

I tried browsing this website using the Nokia Series 40 emulator. It was a horrible experience having to scroll left, right, up and down to view the site. I shall add creating pages with a simpler layout for mobile phones into my todo list for this website.

While browsing around Mobile Ministry Magazine, I came across a review of eBible.com. Registration is by invitation only at the moment, and I promptly submitted my email for an invite. Much to my surprise, I received my invite within the day.

I was very pleased to find my favourite bible translation, the New American Standard Bible available there. There’s a bookshelf of 19 titles for me consisting of Bibles, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Commentaries. After trying out the various features in the site; my favourite is the popup window of bible verses when the mouse icon moves over a verse reference. The overall feel of the site is great.

I was using Firefox on my Dell laptop on my initial visit to the site without any problem. When I tried out the site on my Apple iBook G4 with Safari, the navigation using the mouse and keyboard seems to have a mind on its own. Navigating between chapters was problematic. Safari support still needs work. With Firefox on the iBook, navigation between chapters worked without any problem.

Overall, pretty impressive for a beta software. Kudos to the development team!

31-July-2006 Updates : I’ve invites available. Post a comment here to get an invite.

21-July-2006 Updates : I’m out of invites for now. You can still post a comment to get an invite and I’ll put you in the queue. I’ll post an update when I get more invites.

Last week, I submitted my registration for Google AdSense. After 3 days, the reply came saying that my application has been approved. The email said that delivering Google ads to my web site is a simple 3 step process.

1. Activate my AdSense account.
2. Paste AdSense ads code into my web pages.
3. See the results

So, over the weekend, my Textpattern pages and forms were cleaned up in preparation for AdSense. I generated the AdSense code for my Textpattern templates using the “AdSense for Content” wizard. So far, so good. Getting the AdSense on the web page was indeed very easy. Next, to view how the ads look in my site.

Horror of horrors, the ads that came up on my Daily Devotion on Mobile Phone page were about crystal gazing, new age and spirit guides. What I was expecting were Christianity related ads, instead what I got were ads that were totally against my beliefs.

(Momentary panic) – What should I do now? What can I do?

It’s a good thing that AdSense has a Competitive Ad Filter that allows for blocking of specific ads. There’s a very helpful how to tutorial on Competitive Ad Filter available in the AdSense Help Center. Following the steps from the AdSense Help Center, the “offensive” ads were blocked from appearing on my web site. Phew! If those ads couldn’t be removed, I would have to stop using Google AdSense. Now, please excuse me while I go and check the results of my ads.