Webmaster

I received an email from one of our readers. A.M. from India emailed me on how to proceed on creating a website like mount-kinabalu-borneo.com. I felt very honored to answer his questions, as I think there are numerous people around the net that could answer him better than I am…

Dear Dr Ruhaizad Daud

I happened to bump into your site after one of my friends trekked to Mt Kinabalu and I looked it up on Google.

Advertlets

I came across those two websites while trying to expand my capabilities of my blog to generate some side income. I found Adverlets first – while surfing Redesign Malaysia website. The deal from Advertlets sounds very appealing – with “RM15k for the first 300 blogger”, it will definitely opens some Malaysian bloggers eye. I did register myself as one of the bloggers, although I don’t do it whole heartedly. Just trying to dip my toes in the water.

Blog, also known as personal 21st century diary by some, is a personal website that you can write almost anything on it, without having the headache of being a webmaster thinking about a ‘website’. I hereby list 10 reasons why you should blog (although you can list more on why you should NOT blog):

1. It is free. You can choose among hundreds of free blog provider – from Blogger to Wordpress – or even this NEW blog services from my webhosting provider – iloveblog from Exabytes.

I have a HTML website about climbing Mount Kinabalu. I also have a Wordpress blog, (I use it as an update and news pages) which I blog almost every other day to update the reader on Kinabalu.

For the past few days, I was working really hard to make sure that the “new face lift” of our newsletter is running fine. I dumped my Drupal CMS through the Fantastico package on my webhost and install a new Wordpress engine to take responsibility on running the newsletter. Now, I have 2 Wordpress running in the same server (this blog and the newsletter). Fantastico package can only help you on installing one Wordpress copy (by default) but you can install another copy – by getting your hand a bit dirty on the installation.

It’s just my regular update of my website. I have been seeing Fantastico update service offering me to update my Drupal from version 4.7 to 5.1. I am not that keen initially to update it, as I have a very bad experience with similar update with Drupal before. The last time I update my Drupal, I need to reconfigure almost all my templates and themes and my Adsense module is not working. It took me another 2 days to figure it out.

I have tested 3 prominent free/open source PHP form generator for the past few months, trying to figure out which one is the best form generator for my website. I was looking for a form generator that is easy to install, very minimal script editing, can run in my local computer through XAMPP, customizable, able to send an automatic email with the form, fairly good support and updated. It took me few weeks to try all 3 and find the best solution for my Mount Kinabalu Borneo.com reservation form.

I am going to write this post based on my experience on creating website using static html page compared to few open source cms software that are available from my webhosting provider, Exabytes. So, we might have a different opinion, but I appreciate any feedback.

I am not a Linux geek. I am not a programmer. I am not even a person who have a background in computer. When I got my laptop 3 years ago, I could not help but learning a lot of new things from the internet. It was not until 6 months back when I decided to go online. And, to go online, you have to have your own website.