My Higher Secondary School Reunion

A few days back (on 19th June), I attended our school reunion. I completed my Higher secondary school at John The Baptist Higher Secondary School (JBHSS), Puthiamputhur, Tuticorin District Tamilnadu.

I felt happy to see our Teachers and Friends. I could remember the sincerity and dedication of the teachers there. Though our school is located in a village, most of our teachers were very skilled. I am thankful to all our Teachers, especially our Physics Teacher whose dedication is extraordinary. I still remember her teachings on Nuclear fusion, Black Holes, and Superconductors which were considered less significant at that time (around 28 years back) but getting more importance these days. Apart from that, she used to tell about the importance of education aggressively. Now I could understand it by going through the history of various countries and people. Nelson Mandela rightly said, “Education is the most powerful weapon in the fight against poverty". I mean real education, not the one selling on commercialized schools/colleges.

I studied engineering degree and then worked in many software companies, and then run a software company for many years. But currently, I am publishing Science and Technology news on my YouTube channel. I would like to thank my school for this also. Because my school gave me the opportunity to read news on assembly/prayer for many months while studying there. It was a good experience.

Apart from studies, this school strongly cultivated good spirituality and good habits. I believe it helped me to choose simple and peaceful life over stressful/luxury/corporate life though I got opportunities for both kinds of life.

This photo was taken in 1992 (Around 30 years back while studying 10th standard)

I am thankful for the people who started this school and the people who put their efforts to develop this school. And thanks to my friends who arranged this Reunion.

Though this Reunion made me feel happy overall, I felt some kind of sadness as some teachers who showed a lot of kindness to me were no more.

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WhatsApp Group for watching latest Science & Technology News

For many years I am uploading science and technology news videos on my YouTube channel. If you want to watch those videos, you can join this WhatsApp Group.

Let me know if you find any issue in joining this Whatsapp Group.

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Released new version (4.2) of our PHP Timesheet Script to make it work on mobile devices

We have developed a php timesheet script in the year 2010 and updated it many times to include many features, and sometimes to remove unwanted things to keep it a simple script so that usage and maintenance will be easy. As it was developed many years back, I hesitated to develop it further. Instead I thought of developing a new script from scratch. But that will take a lot of efforts, especially it will require a lot of testing.   So, I postponed that plan.  And therefore, I stopped selling it last year and I switched my focus to run my Science and Technology News YouTube channel. 

But many people approached me to get the timesheet script even when I removed the "Buy now" button from the site. I explained them that it might have outdated. But still some people bought it. It made me to realize the demand for our timesheet script. I did some detailed study to understand the timesheet market. Based on my analysis, a lot of people are selling cloud based timesheet membership. But the price is high though it looked very cheap initially. Some people are selling timesheet script, but they are not providing source code. Some open source scripts are available, but they are not fully developed. I had written similar thing when we started selling our timesheet script a decade back. It seems the situation is not yet changed. 

In brief, there is a good demand for good and affordable timesheet script even if it appears that the market is flooded with timesheet products. So, I thought of developing our timesheet product further. But at the start of this year I decided to put my 100% efforts for running my YouTube channel. So, initially I hesitated to spend time for timesheet development. Recently I heard about some events that made me to realize the risks of depending on YouTube fully.  So, I was looking for some YouTube alternative as I explained in my post about Odysee. After putting some efforts to find YouTube alternatives, I found that there is no alternative for YouTube as of now. Finally I decided to put efforts to start selling our Timesheet script again.

I have updated the timesheet script to make many pages mobile friendly. And, I replaced the popup calendar with jquery datepicker. After doing some testing, I released this updated script as version 4.2. 

Previously I was selling this script for $80 and sometimes I sold it with Discount offer. Now I am again selling it with Discount offer. If you buy it now, you can get it for just $40.

You may watch this video, to know more about our Timesheet Script.

We have done a lot of custom changes for many of our timesheet customers based on their own requirements. We have done date format changes, language changes, look and feel changes, work flow changes, changed the hierarchy (e.g added task), included various reports,  added new features like payroll, expenses, etc. 

Apart from that, we have developed separate timesheet applications from scratch for some customers.

So, we can do any kind of custom changes easily.

And, as our timesheet script comes with source code, our timesheet customers themselves can do any custom changes.

You can see  the live demo here. Let me (rajamanickam.a@gmail.com) know if you find any issue when seeing the demo. And, I welcome any suggestions for improving it further in the coming days. 

Refer this timesheet script to your friends who are interested to have their own copy of timesheet script instead of paying monthly for every user. I hope even people without technical background can also easily manage to setup and run this timesheet script, as it is very simple. Almost all the hosting services are providing php and mysql. You need to just create one database and mention it in while installing the timesheet.  By owning your own timesheet, you can easily make any changes based on your own requirements and your data will be safe with you. Ultimately you need not pay more than once, and you can create any number of users.

I am planning to start selling this timesheet script by running Google Ads. I will be doing ROI analysis in few days. I may cancel the discount or increase the price to have Positive ROI. So, if you want to use the discount offer, buy it now.

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Odysee Review - My experiences of using Odysee Video Platform. Will Odysee become YouTube alternative or just Backup for YouTube Videos?

In this post, I would like to share my experiences of using the Blockchain-based Video platform "Odysee" for the past one month.

I have a YouTube channel running from 2009, and I have uploaded more than 3500 videos, most of them are Science and Technology News videos. Though I started my YouTube channel as Hobby initially, currently I am doing it full-time.

A few years back, YouTube had disabled monetization for my YouTube channel two times.  As I am doing YouTube video creation full-time, I was exploring some YouTube alternatives to manage the risk of any further YouTube demonetization.

After doing a lot of research, I finally decided to use Odysee as YouTube alternative. One month back, I created my Odysee channel and synced with my YouTube channel.

Overall I have a mixed feeling about Odysee. All the basic things are working good and we can consider it as YouTube Backup. But, as of now, we can not consider it as our primary video platform.

I was able to create Odysee channel easily, and I could sync my YouTube channel easily with simple process. 1000 recent videos from my YouTube channel were copied to my Odysee channel automatically. In the description, Odysee is giving the link to the original YouTube video also.  Only 1000 videos out of more 3500 videos were copied. Personally it is acceptable to me, as my old videos are not much relevant now. If I want, I can download the video from YouTube and manually upload to Odysee.

Syncing will be done for videos only. It won't import playlists, comments and subscribers from YouTube channel. I manually created some playlists and added videos to the new playlists. It took significant time. 

Experience of watching Odysee videos on Web is good. But on their android app, video watching experience is not good, as of now. I hope they will be fixing the issues soon. Actually they are working well to fix the issues. A few days back, I reported a small bug related to video embedding on reddit, they fixed it soon.

Apart from uploading Videos, we can use Odysee to post text content also. And, we can earn money in crypto currency named LBRY Credits (LBC).  As the payment is in Crypto, I initially hesitated to focus on my Odysee channel. After doing more analysis I realized that withdrawing LBC to my bank account is NOT difficult.

LBC is not accepted by many Crypto exchanges. It is available only in a few exchanges like Bittrex. But those exchanges are not supporting withdrawal to my local currency. So, I had to use two crypto exchanges for withdrawing money from Odysee.

Currently we can earn from Odysee in different ways. Even for watching videos, Odysee is giving LBCs. And, as a creator, we can earn money based on "per view". 

Odysee is providing Live feature also. I tried it once, and it is working smoothly.

And, I have noticed that my Odysee videos are getting good number of views comparing to my YouTube channel.  Currently I have only 20 followers on Odysee while I have 64K subscribers on YouTube. New videos on Odysee are getting around 10 views while YouTube videos are getting around 100 views.  So, obviously Odysee is having good potential to get more views if I promote it instead of promoting my YouTube channel on my social media accounts.

And, I was very much impressed with the Odysee's decision for not blocking RT channel while many media included YouTube blocked it.

All these things made me to think about considering Odysee as my primary video platform instead of YouTube. So, I did more analysis. Then I realized that Odysee is not yet ready to be the primary video platform. Currently it is having many shortcomings. Though it is good for creators, it is not good for viewers. It is not supporting transcoding. So, the viewers are forced to watch the video at fixed resolution. It will either consume more bandwidth or limit the user to watch in low resolution. The user is not having option to choose the option of saving bandwidth and watching at high quality.

And, it is not having ClosedCaption(CC)/transcript feature. So, people can not read the speech as text. It will be difficult to watch video if the accent is not familiar.

The important things like Search and Recommendation are not working well. It is almost not useful now. It will completely push the viewers away from the platform.

Currently, Odysee is boosting the content based on Money deposited by the creators. It is like, showing "ads" to viewers without marking them as "Ads". It will bury the good content, and I believe it is insult to the viewers. I think it is a major issue. So, I mentioned it to Odysee CEO through twitter. But he didn't send any reply to me. Instead, he is very busy with mocking YouTube and others. He won't be mocking YouTube, if he knows how hard YouTube was working hard to encourage the creators initially. As I created my YouTube channel in 2009 itself, I know these things personally. I used to get emails from YouTube frequently with some offers. As I was very busy with my software development startup at that time, I missed to use that opportunity.

All these things along with the key thing of not having videos of favorite creators will force the viewers away from Odysee. It will in turn, discourage the creators also as they won't get views. Odysee's efforts to bring viewers using invite/referral program will be wasted.

And, I have noticed an another important thing. Actually Odysee is saying that they are paying most part of the revenue to the creators. But reality is different. They announced Odysee Premium for charging the viewers. But they are not sharing this revenue with the creators. I understand that they have many valid expenses. But the point here is, on the one hard they are heavily, publicly  criticizing YouTube for not sharing most part of the revenue with creators, on the other hand they are doing the same thing. I have noticed few other odd things also. For example, "per view" rate is getting changed dynamically.  And, on one hand they are saying that no one can remove the content from LBRY network, on on the other hand they are saying that their paywall will work on LBRY network level also.

So, I would say that Odysee is a good platform for using as a backup system for our YouTube channel. But, currently we can not consider it as YouTube alternative. Let us see how things are going. You can join Odysee using my Invite link. 

Share your thoughts and experiences related to Odysee through the comments.

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Are you looking to earn money online or doing a small online business?

I am planning to start working as a freelancer to guide anyone who is planning to start a small online business.

As specified in my previous post, my highest priority for this year is, promoting my YouTube channel. So, I will be able to spend only a few hours per day on this freelance thing, and therefore I will be accepting a few clients only.

If you haven't read my online money earning experience post yet, read it first before continue reading this post, to have a better understanding of what I am talking about here.

Previously I worked as a freelancer doing web development and software testing for many projects many years back.

But this freelance initiative will be bit different from my previous thing. 

Previously I used to do whatever task given by my clients based on their requirement details and instructions. I stopped doing this kind of work, as I had to spend more time on my YouTube channel. I found it difficult to manage time to do both things as I had to make myself available according to my clients' schedules.

But now I plan to spend my time based on my free time. i-e Instead of completely stopping doing freelance work, I plan to do it for the people who are ready to be flexible with my available time.

I plan to set the per hour rate based on my workload and availability of free time. 

Instead of just doing software/web development work, I plan to do complete guidance for doing online business, as I had gained a very rich experience in doing small online businesses by trying various things. Though I am not much successful in many attempts, I learned a lot of lessons from them. So, I can guide others so that they do better from the beginning by avoiding the mistakes that I made.

So, if you have a product or service idea, I can guide you starting from choosing target audience, domain, website development, landing page optimization, lead capture, SEO, Testing, Social media promotion strategy, running Google Ad campaigns effectively, etc.

Even if you don't have any product/service idea, I can suggest simple online earning approaches (e.g blog, YouTube channel, eBook, freelance work, etc) based on your skillset and passion.

As I am exploring various emerging technologies daily to upload videos on my Channel, I got good exposure to business opportunities related to emerging technologies also. I can suggest a suitable idea based on your skillset and interest.

But earning from online business is not easy. We have to do a lot of hard work and we need to have a single-minded approach and have clear communication. And, it is having a lot of risks also. I can NOT give any guarantee for the success for your business initiatives. 

If you are interested, contact me at rajamanickam.a@gmail.com

And, if you have already running any business and looking for a paid promotion, you can place sponsored ads on my YouTube Channel videos.

For many years I was selling timsheet script. Recently I stopped selling it as I don't have enough time to do custom changes, and the script is a bit outdated. I have plans to update the script and start selling it again. I am exploring options to develop it further or make use of this experience in developing a similar product. Anyone interested in this business can work with me on win-win basis. (e.g developers can earn by doing custom changes, marketers can earn commission by selling it). The primary reason behind thinking about this project is, that we had done a lot of hard work for optimizing (link building) the landing page. I would like to make use of that landing page in some way. For Example, if you have any good timesheet product, I can sell it there on a revenue-sharing basis.

A few years back I created a few simple android apps and promoted some of them using various campaigns (including Google ads) for many months. Some of them got good ratings and reviews and gave some earnings. Later on I stopped promoting them, as I switched my focus to promoting my YouTube channel. Because of lack promotion the growth is declining now. So, I plan to sell it or get investment for sharing revenue. Contact me if you are interested.

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