Skype, the most popular VoIP service provider, is offering a month of free calls from Skype to any number around the world, to celebrate 2010 Fifa World Cup. This offer is valid for 30 countries which are qualified for the World Cup 2010. You can check the announcement here. Out of these 30 countries, Skype offers unlimited calls to landline numbers in some of the countries (including the US, Australia, France, Germany among many other countries). But Skype charges a nominal fee of 1 Euro for all this plans. Payment can be made through any of the three options Skype offers.

Ever since I wrote the tutorial on Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL and jQuery, I get around 300 visitors everyday with keywords like "php voting", "jquery votes", "jquery vote up down", "php vote tutorial", "votes php mysql" and many other keywords. So I thought about writing a round-up of voting scripts and tutorials using PHP as the server-side language. Here are the tutorials and scripts that might be of your use. If you think I missed anything, do let me know in the comment section. You can also have a look at the round-up section for more such round-ups. :-)

Scripts

1. ColorRating: A well-documented, easy to use voting script. Higly configurable and easy to integrate with your database. It uses jQuery for a nice animated effect.

2. PHP Voting by Richard Silvers: A "fairly" simple PHP voting script. It allows users to vote and view the total results of the vote.

3.Star Rating Widget: The Star Rating widget is a plugin for the jQuery javascript library that creates a non-obstrusive star rating control based on a set of radio buttons or select option.

Commercial Solutions

1. Ajax Feature Request and Voting ($14): It's simple and a lot like Dropbox's votebox page.

2. ThumbsUp ($17): This is probably the best commercial script that is available. It comes with a slew of options — in various shapes and sizes. AJAXed!

Tutorials

1. Voting system with jQuery, Ajax and PHP: A very detailed tutorial on Dzone like voting system with jQuery, Ajax and PHP. This script helps you to display user votes on blog post.

2. A Simple PHP Polling/Voting System: This article will illustrate how to create a very simple, clean polling or voting system using PHP 5.0 and the DOMDocument object model. This allows the polling system to read and write polling results to XML, instead of say, a MySQL database like many conventional polling systems.

3. Creating a simple file based polling script: This tutorial will show you how to create a simple, file based polling system where you can easily setup new polls. No database is required for this script and you only have to maintain one config file.
4. Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP: This tutorial shows how to create a simple polling system that doesn't need a page-refresh to show the results.

5. How to Build a Poll System with PHP and MySQL [Demo]: This is pretty simple tutorial that explains how to polling with PHP and MySQL works. It offers the source-code, too.

6. Sort & Vote – A jQuery Poll: This is a very detailed tutorial on an innovative concept of polling with jQuery. The end result lets users drag items in order of preference and then submit it for polling!

Bonus

Very Simple Rating System - AJAX via jQuery, JSON: I guess, it's in Russian. Digg-like voting using jQuery, JSON.

Skype is an award-winning IM platform that is hugely popular for making calls to other Skype users and phones across the world. A lot of the companies regularly buy Skype Credits to make calls to their clients. And it's much cheaper to make calls from Skype than from usual phones since it uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). If you use it for the purpose of making calls, you may want to record calls that you made just to keep track them. iFreeRecorder is an application that does the job and that, too, with many options to choose from. iFreeRecorder uses Skype API to record calls.
Once you intall iFreeRecorder (Skype must be installed first, of course), you'd have to give access to use Skype's API.

Once you allow access to Skype's API, you're ready to go.

iFreeRecorder comes with a bunch of options — from MP3 quality selection to auto-record calls.

It also offers a history option that keeps track of all your recorded calls. You can also record conference calls!
iFreeRecorder is an innovative and very useful tool. It comes as a freeware but if you find it useful, do consider donating.