A week ago, I received an email from Steven Wong, a re known Malaysian Internet Marketer which run his own Wordpress Blogging Seminar in Kuala Lumpur. I was really surprised to receive an email from him. I was even more surprised when he told me that he uses this blog (Kinabalu Blog) as an example for his seminar for new aspiring Malaysian Bloggers.

After much discussion, he suggested that we made a podcast interview of my journey into website creation and blogging. He sent me a set of questions for me to answer during the interview, a day before the appointment. It is just a couple of very basic questions, whereby he aim to get the most information from me in an hour session, so that he could share it with his students.

I received my first check from Advertlets yesterday. Josh Lim called me personally last week to confirm the spelling of my name, before he printed it on the check. Since my first review of Advertlets 3 months ago, it seems that Josh has become one of my friend - yes, this sounds like a butt kissing - but sms-ing me at the middle of the night, searching for somebody to write a review for a Digi Fu-Yoh Street Blast concert here in Kota Kinabalu, has made the relationship really close.

RealTravel is a travel guide and trip planner for travelers, powered by advice from real travelers. Their tagline, “Real People. Real Advice. Real Experiences.” shows that you can use their website as a one stop center for all your traveling tools and tips for your next destination.

It is a website that gives travelers information on the places where you want to go, by learning from true experiences of the real travelers which has been to that place and you can even tell other travelers your side of the story after you have made the trip.

I got an opportunity from my good friend, Gaman to review his blog, Sabahan.com, when he runs a contest to review his blog almost a month ago. I was not interested at the beginning, but when I saw his latest post saying that he needed another 2 reviews to complete his Group 5 entries, I just decided to give it a shot.

This review of his website will based on my novice knowledge about webmastering and blogging which I learned from scratch for the last 2 years. Most of my reviews will bias towards the few professional bloggers in the blogosphere, as I am going to make them as the benchmark of my review.

Our blog have a lot of plugins (especially Wordpress), widgets, theme, graphics, bells, whistle, advertisement and javascript installed. Have we ever test how long does our blog to upload? If we follow the 8-second rule, (the old Web 1.0 webmaster rule), if our website fail to load on the visitors browser within 8 seconds, the visitors will almost always turns away. Some search engine will have time out in 30 seconds. Loading time over 24 seconds looses 40% of potential viewers due to impatience!. It will then of course reduce our availability of ‘monetizing’ our blog with them, especially if we highly depends on Adsense or affiliate products.

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

I’ve found a way to beautify our Wordpress URL from this:

http://www.mount-kinabalu-borneo.com/blog/2007/03/02/this-is-the-title/

or even this:

http://www.mount-kinabalu-borneo.com/blog/2007/03/02/?p=12345

to this:

http://www.mount-kinabalu-borneo.com/blog/this-is-the-title.html

Why?

1. Make your URL more visitor friendly and more ‘natural looking’.
2. Search engine optimized.

What do you need?

1. A Wordpress plugin, Permalink Redirect Wordpress Plugin by fucoder.com.
2. Make sure your .htaccess on your root directory is writable.

How?

1. Download the php or zip file from fucoder.com.

I received and email from ReviewMe yesterday, informing me about my rejected post. The reason: The advertiser canceled the campaign. Crap!!!

See it for yourself:

Okay, okay. It is not a secret anymore. You can earn money from blogging. There are a lot of ways to ‘monetize’ your blog, so that apart from your usual rants and ramblings, you will get paid for it. I just would like to share another way of expanding your options to make money from your blog - with a slight twist.

Because of the request from Josh Lim (Advertlets) for more YouTube clips from Digi Fu-Yoh! Street Blast at Padang Merdeka, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah on 2nd June 2007, I hereby present to you few more clips from the event.
I must tell you that the audio of the clip is not so good, because:

1. I record the event with my new Canon Powershot A460, an entry level digital camera which gives so-so quality of videos and audios.