BlogMunch

Thank You, Philip!

This morning, I fired up my gmail to find a piece of excellent news. I am the monthly winner of the Contestblogger $100 Draw. Wow, that really make my day. Thanks, Philip.

For those who don’t know Contestblogger.com is the Big Daddy of the online contest scene. Its site is full of every kind of contests and sweepstakes you can find. You can practically stay all day at the forum joining any contest that caught your fancy. As they say, the more you play, the higher chance you win.

Philip is also very concerned about the (mis)conception of online contest in general. Whenever someone mention online contest or especially sweepstake, the first impression will be a scam. Philip try hard to filter out all the scam like the infamous Ashwin Khanna contest scam. Recently, he also wrote an well thought out article about avoiding contest scam.

I don’t know how he did it, but he has now expand a single Contestblogger site to a network of contest site, like my favorite Photo Contests site. As far as I know, he is doing this alone. I can’t even manage three of my (not so successful) site and he is doing this while being a Marine of the US Army. Very efficient.

So do you want a chance every month to win $100? Set a permanent linkback on your blog/site to any of Contestblogger’s network of sites and wait for your name to be call. It will come.

Separate ventures for the year…

(Credit: NDH) 

As I was saying last time about renewal of my old domains, I finally did renew the domain that I think worth keeping. In addition to that, I bought three new domain for three separate ventures for the year.

I got round to buying the domain (.com) for my actual name. Which if you do a bit of research, you should know the name of the domain. Since I am taking up digital photography as a hobby, I will be using that domain as my personal photoblog. Those one photo a day type.

I did some research for the right template for this photoblog. I find that Wordpress very few themes specially for photoblogs and to set it up properly requires various plugins and customizations. As per all Wordpress blogs. The research led me to Pixelpost. This is a blog software specifically for photoblog. Although like Wordpress, it has addons and templates to choose from, its vanilla install is fully capable to  display your photos as a professional photoblog. Highly recommended.

For my second and third domain, its much more simple. One of them I would like to make a Single Serving Site (SSS). Click on the link or google it to learn more about it. This type of site I first heard about in the podcast for stackoverflow.com. I am not even sure why I listen to that podcast as I know nada about programming. But the eleven episodes cover a lot of concepts and I really learn alot. Quite entertaining too. Anyway, I want to built a SSS as I want to try out web app development. I am always curious about programming and a basic SSS should be good practice for me. We’ll see. I will link it here if ever I finish it. Expectation alert: My SSS will not scored high on originality.

Last one will not be a surprise. It will be another BANS domain. This time, I will concentrate on this one site and develop it fully before I move on to make another BANS site. That’s what I found after one months of testing BANS. You NEED to promote your site properly to expect any traffic.

There, this will be another busy year before another round of domain renewal comes around.

For my vain heart…

For the record, Firefox 3 was downloaded more that 8 million times on Download Day. Awesome!

P.S. Will this certificate look good on my CV?

Holy Shit! Start your .info buying again!

Wow. I have not dabble with domain buying recently until I need to renew my domain yesterday.

Went to Godaddy and all the dot info (.info)domains is now $0.99. As cheap as a song on Itunes.

Well, I think I will let go of all the rubbish domains I have and buy a new batch of .info domain to play with again.

With almost one year of experience bumping around on the web, I think I can choose better names this time.

And hope to make better use of them.

Not sure when this deal is expiring, so if you have any interest at all to host your own domain, now is the time to own a www.yourname.com .

Be part of a World Record with Firefox 3.0

I have been using the Firefox 3 (FF) beta and RC (release candidate) for the past few months. It is really a great improvement over FF 2. The speed is faster and the interface is better.

Well, this should be old news now if you subscribe to tech news, but in case you didn’t know, FF is trying to break a world record for the number of downloads in one day. Officially, it is called Download Day. It is now know to be 17 June 2008. That’s next Tuesday.

The Download Day page is cool where you can pledge to click next Tuesday, then you then see all the different users that pledge around the world.

Setting Guinness world record is a fad nowadays. Singapore where I am at even have a game show for just for doing that. Quite a amusing show.

So support FireFox and be part of a World Record next week.