This just inspired me to become a better blogger. Action coming soon.

I’m trying to blog a little more after a while. Much to my amazement, a person named Ehren Cheung made a mention of my blog.

I’ve always enjoyed aspects of writing but I know I don’t claim same level of penmanship like Shakespeare or Faulkner, more like Ernest Hemingway, so I guess it’s fortunate that we have blogs where simple, clear and concise writing is only needed.

I’ll end this post with a link to what makes for a good blog.

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?

Gives me something to think what I want to make of my blog.

This is cool, blogging with Textmate editor, using xmlrpc protocol.

A milestone happened today. I’ve hit six figures, 100,000 hits, on my website.

I remember when I first started this blog, the only statistics was coming from me. Two sure facts about blogging. People use the Internet to find information, so make it useful and easy to read. Then, keep it updated—just about anything and make it interesting and original—in other words, just be you.

Thank you all for stopping by!

http://www.tonypierce.com/blog/bloggy.htm

if theres one trend that i despise it’s the rise of the Make Money Blogging blogs.

im going to be headed to austin for sxsw in about 10 days and i know im gonna run into people who are either gonna ask me for tips on how to make money blogging or introduce me to some of these make money bloggers and im just gonna take another sip of beer and head back to the bbq. (lol)

theres a word for people who try to make real money blogging.

its the same word they have for people who try to make real money fucking. (haha!)

lost.

(more…)

By Valeria Maltoni

Good stuff!

Forget your “but’s”, “maybe’s”, and all the other defeatist thoughts — it doesn’t take extraordinary talent to be creative. It takes discipline. Set daily routines for yourself, and transform what you thought was just a stroke of genius, the spark of a rare moment into a habit — your creative habit.
It takes work, and it takes commitment. When you decide to blog for money it takes healthier doses of both — do a reality check with Darren Rowse and ProBlogger. The good news is that it is possible for you, too. If you are willing to loosen up a little.
To be creative, you need to know how to prepare to be creative. It’s about much more than quality of presentation, it’s about being able to bridge between what you see in your mind and what you present to the world — skill is how you build that bridge. And you build your skill with practice.

My own long-awaited website has finally come into existence. Today’s the first day I uploaded my website. Pretty soon, my website will be viewed to millions around the world (yeah right). I’ve been delaying and procrastinating to get this done and uploaded onto the Web. It’s not 100% completely finished and probably will never be. Rome wasn’t built in one day so it’ll take time to populate this website to make your visit more worthwhile.

Anyhow, one of my goals for this website is to experiment some ideas that I think will be proven useful and one day, thousands of people will be using my idea! (yeah, right too). Another reason is to use this to communicate with colleagues, friends and my family. So far, this has three pages—home, portfolio, and blog—and in the near future, I’ll add more pages like photo journal, weather, news, etc. I guess that’s all for now and I’ll post more in the future. Catch ya around.

All morning I’ve been working on php to retrieve the latest post from the blog.html to the front page since I don’t want to put all entries on my front page. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I mean, I have an idea of how to do it but wasn’t able to figure out the codes right till I found this page that was really helpful. I want to give credits to the man who shared the codes, http://www.fluidthoughts.com/howto/php/content_syndication/. I was about half way in the codes and this page basically answered my other half problem, which was to capture the line number and keep going till the last line number that you want to parse.

Now, it’s working beautifully but one more thing remains to be solved, which is to tell the cpu to select the latest post in the archives folder. Right now, the filename is hard-coded. Hope it wouldn’t take as long as this one.

As I push my website closer to a “final production” version (meaning ready for public viewing), I have an idea that I want to add weather information to my website. You may ask why do I even want to bother putting weather info if there’s tons of sites that have it, such as The Weather Channel, Accuweather or rather, find it out in the newspapers? You do have a point but do you really want to type zip code or city and state everyday in the input box to get the weather forecasts you want?

Now, you’re thinking “Well, I use cookies to remember my preferences.” Only if you don’t mind sharing your personal information to the websites and besides, do you really want to see those ridiculous ads that appear next to your weather news everyday? I don’t think so too. That’s why I want to put weather forecasts on my website without even bothering with flashing ads or typing the zipcode. The place to do that is to firstly download a file from this weather service website, www.xoapweather.com and then configure the code to get your weather info. I’m doing that now and I’ll post again once I get it working and explain how. :-)

This morning, I decided to add a calendar to the front page, and found a popular script made by Dale Ray of www.corantodemo.net. The script can be found there and download for free. Pretty easy to follow and very editable. Then I customized the size, look, and font of the calendar. It looks pretty nice and simple. Later, I’ll try to see if I could link the dates to archives. Now, I’m going to really have to complete my website and set up a photo journal, so I could make better use of my brand-new sony camera that I was lucky enough to exchange it for my old sony camera under warranty at Best Buy. Then I’ll probably fiddle with the overall look of my website till I am satisfied, which probably is never. From time to time, I’ll add some more features to make it a bit more advanced than just a simple blog setup.

I’m back at work after a pretty nice weekend. I can see why they call it Blue Monday because it sucks to be here! Few workers are here, due to AWS (Alternate Work Schedule) that allows them to take one extra day off if they work nine hours shift in the two weeks period. I’m supposed to be working on Excel VB project, adding more features to the programming. But I need to see how it works first, so I’ll ask a co-worker first. I guess I’ll prolong it till afternoon.

Remember when I said I decided to use Blogger instead of Movable? Well, I learned a few more things about Blogger. It’s like once you set it up and get it running, you’re on your own. If you want to have an add-on, you’ll have to find around in the Internet for a script. Blogger doesn’t provide one for you. Movable already has a nice calendar script that comes with the installation. Also, it gives you more control over your blog, like you can look at the database and you log in from your own server, instead of Blogger’s server. Now, I’m trying to find a calendar script for Blogger and configure it myself. I’ll still keep Movable as it is still a nice blog tool.

Now I realize Blogger doesn’t have Calendar module add-on, so I’m looking for the codes in the internet. MovableType already has one and I’m thinking about copying some codes from there to here since the entire blog is on the same server and I know Movable Type sends variables to the cgi-bin, then get echoed back in html format. Will that work? hmm…