250,000 visitors and counting for my Family Matters website; Thanks to everyone who have browsed this site

(Note as of February 20, 2014: I transferred my “Legal issues and family matters” website to Google Drive, a free file storage and web hosting service. You can also use the shortcut http://tinyurl.com/familymatters-ph to access the website.)

According to my Sitemeter.com tracker, my website “Legal issues and family matters” reached over 250,000 visitors more than a week ago. Soli Deo gloria!

The website became online December 17, 2005. It contains the complete text of the Family Code of the Philippines and numerous laws relevant to the Filipino family.

It has been averaging 240 plus visitors daily since last week (see the graphic below). Google Analytics, my other website tracker, reports that, for the past month, visitors have come from 84 countries. The top ten countries with the most number of visitors are the Philippines with 83%, and the remaining 17% divided among the US, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Kingdom, Qatar, India, and Japan.

“Legal issues and family matters” contains numerous Gospel links and my website trackers report that these have been clicked.

What bothers me, however, is that the 2nd most browsed page in this website is that on RA 9262, our country’s law on anti-violence against women and their children (see the Google Analytics report below).

How you can help “Legal issues and family matters”
[1] If your church or ministry would like to sponsor the web hosting fees for “Legal issues and family matters” and its co-hosted website “Better English for everyone”, please email me at gtgalacio@yahoo.com for more information. My current web hosting plan with dot.PH Domains is US $66 per quarter with a monthly bandwidth limit of 15 GB.

Because of the increasing number of visitors, I need to upgrade to the next higher plan of US $155.40 quarterly billing (US $41.80 monthly) with a bandwidth limit of 30 GB per month. With annual billing, the cost is lower at US $38 monthly or a total of US $458.00.

[2] More than 78% of visitors reached “Legal issues and family matters” through search engines like Google and Yahoo. You can help increase traffic to this website by posting links to it from your websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.



Internet ministries

My Internet ministries consist of two websites www.familymatters.org.ph and www.betterenglish.org.ph, and several blogs, namely, “Salt and Light” (articles on relationships, marriage, family), “Baptist Churches in the Philippines” (directory of churches); “Legal Updates”, “Campus Connection”(youth-oriented articles including photography), “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and “Baptist Distinctives, free online Bible Institute for Asia, Africa and Latin America”. I also have free PDF newsletters available for download on legal issues affecting the Filipino family.

How I became involved in Internet ministries

I have always been interested in reading and writing. During my grade school days in the 1960’s, I woke up early everyday to go to the guardhouse and read all the English newspapers delivered to a Chinese business tycoon who owned the compound I grew up in. Afternoons after my classes, I would again go to the guardhouse to read the Evening Post (if I remember the newspaper’s title correctly).

That Chinese business tycoon had in his garage a room filled, from floor to ceiling, with hundreds of Reader’s Digest, Life Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines. During school breaks, I would spend hours there reading. Whenever I missed lunch, my mother would begin looking for me and she would always find me in that room.

During my high school years (Rizal High School, 1969-1973), I continued my habit of reading newspapers; I spent part of my lunch breaks in the library. In my junior year, I became a sports reporter for our schoolpaper “The Rizalian”. The adviser, Miss Consolacion Constantino, patiently edited my articles, but none of my articles was ever published.

After I lost my NSDB mining engineering scholarship in UP Diliman, I followed the UP guidance counselor’s advice that I should go into writing as a college course and career. I graduated in 1979 with an AB English degree from Philippine Christian University.

I became an English grammar teacher (Dona Aurora High School in San Mateo, 1981-1983), and then a journalism teacher and schoolpaper adviser (Quezon City Science High School, 1983-84, and Rizal High School, 1984-1995). In 1985, I enrolled in a BASIC programming course in my alma mater PCU. In my work, I learned desktop publishing (Pagemaker 4), word processing (MS Word 2), and graphics (Coreldraw 3), using our school’s 486 computer, Brother laser printer, and flatbed scanner. (My first computers were a Texas Instrument 99/4A with 16k of memory and a Commodore 64, both gifts from my nephew Ken.)

I was admitted into the Philippine bar in 1995 and practiced law until 2005 when I stopped accepting cases.

In 2003, as I was surveying the ministries still open to me considering my age and circumstances, I learned that online writing was a viable ministry. I canvassed several schools and institutions where I could possibly learn website design. One company in Shaw Boulevard (opposite Jovan Condominium) charged Php 60,000 for its website design course. Too expensive. Genetics Computer Institute had a website design program costing Php 16,000 while Informatics offered its program at Php 20,000. Their curriculum was not what I really needed. Meralco Foundation offered an HTML course at only Php 4,000 but by that time, I had already learned how tedious and error-prone hand coding was.

I began buying books on website design; the books were very expensive, with prices ranging from Php 500 to Php 1,700 (Vincent Flanders’ Son of web pages that suck). I read through the books even though I could not really understand what I was reading. I then bought from a computer bookstore in SM Megamall and SM Centerpoint several tutorial CDs on Dreamweaver and Microsoft Frontpage.

In 2005, I designed and printed out using Pagemaker 5 a sample page of what I wanted my website to look like. To inspire and challenge myself, I brought the printout wherever I went and looked at it from time to time; I also showed it to friends, telling them that I was designing a website. Applying what I learned from designing yearbooks in my work as a schoolpaper adviser, I did a detailed storyboard for each page of my website. Starting that January, I spent my mornings reading my Dreamweaver book and studying the tutorial CD. I thought that I did not have to understand or learn everything about website design. I only had to learn whatever I needed for the website as I conceptualized it. All this time, I also began learning what blogs were.

By late October 2005, I already had created my first blog (“Legal Updates”). I finished designing my website www.familymatters.org.ph by late November. Although I had registered the domain name and paid the web hosting fees by early December, I did not know how to upload the files from my computer to the server. I did not know what FTP (file transfer protocol) was.