A.P.P.L.E

Most of us that own a personal blog will add a chatbox widget to communicate with readers. Yesterday, 2 of my new visitors asked me the same question on how to add custom emoticons to the chatbox. So, this post is specially dedicated to them for answering the question.

First of all, you have to identify which chatbox widget service are you using. Two of the most popular chatbox widgets are Cbox and Shoutmix. Each chatbox service has different setting. So here, I’m going to post a short tutorial on how to add custom emotions, also known as smileys, in both Cbox and Shoutmix.

[Special notes to Teddy and Winter: Yours is a Cbox widget, so just follow the Cbox guide]

Before acutally going into details on how to add custom emoticons, you have to understand that you have to host (upload) your own emoticons. Meaning, you will have to grab your own collection of emoticons (click here for full set Onionhead emoticons), and upload to any free image hosting services like Photobucket, Imageshack or TinyPic.

After you have get ready the emoticons that you wish to use, you will have to login to your chatbox widget account to edit the settings.

Read more…

After managing this blog for 1 year and 5 months, I am quite satisfied with the rewards (socializing, knowledge, money, etc..) it brought to me. I’d love to thank all my readers for continuously supporthing this blog.

A.P.P.L.E, my main personal blog. This blog share almost everything which much related to my life and experience.

At the same time, I have runned another 2 more blogs which I ever mentioned it here. Those blogs have less visitors but still I am glad to keep them operating. Read more…

This morning, I was informed about the release of the Go, Enjoy, Snap, Blog Contest results. I’m pleased to know that my blog entry has managed to be in the top 3.

Rewards? Yes of course, this is what I will be getting:

• 1 EZO leave in conditioner valued at more than RM40.00
• 1 My Privilege Book+ 1 My Privilege Pillow
• Your post will be printed and a copy of the post will be sent to My Privilege Book merchants accompanied by a photo you

If you haven’t know, My Privilege Book is created to provide consumers a smart guide to dining, retail, entertainment and services in Kuching while enjoying great savings at the same time.  Means, get discount offers using the coupons!!

I would love to say thank you to the organizers - Sarawakian.net and My Privilege Book for organizing this blog contest.

Side talk: My recent posts are about food, and I did notice Sarawakian.net advertised in Google Adsense. That’s a good approach to attract visitors!

Few days ago, I was given a question like “How do you increase your blog traffic?” If you have been paying attention on blogs that talk about blogging, most of them will give you similar answers and one of them is - Join social bookmarking / networking community.  There are so many social networking communities around the web, which is the best to join? Well, in my opinion, there is no “best” community to join. The more communities you join, the better. However, please do not spam the communities.

For starters, I would recommend you to join social communities that are widely known or popular.  I have joined some of those, but didn’t pay much attention to it.  After some time, I feel the need of being involved in these communities. Not only for blog traffic, but also for discovery of new sites, great articles, etc… You will really be amazed with the results.

I was thinking of sticking to one social bookmarking community, but it is insufficient as you cannot omit the great possibility that other useful articles are shared among other communities as well.  Once you join such communities, you can also submit your blog posts that you think is worth sharing. Hence, another possibility for you to gain new readership.

Today, I’ve made up my mind to join Digg.  I’m still very new there and will have to spend some time to get along with it.  If you are a Digger, remember to add me to your friend list as well. And of course, if you find any of my posts worth sharing, please feel free to Digg it. That will be much appreciated.

Read more…

Hey everyone! Thanks for visiting my blog. Some of you have noticed that I’ve changed my blog layout. Looking for a great layout is sort of hard for me. I’ve been favoring 3 columns design for some time, until recently I feel that I don’t really need a 3-column layout.  This is because I’ve cut down a lot of “not-so-useful” widgets at my sidebar.

Of course, I am still not capable of designing a layout from scratch. So I found a nice 2 columns blog theme and start modifying it. I found it more comfortable to do all the modification work in my widescreen laptop, as there’s more space available than using my old box with 15″ CRT monitor.

When you pimp your blog, it is very important that it is compatible in other browsers other than the one that you use during development stage. I’m a Firefox fan, my blog will definitely look better in Firefox. During my first attempt (with most of the original code setting), the new layout looks great in Firefox but it totally looks bad in Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari (assuming Netscape and other browsers too).  After modifying the codes and structures, I tried to make it compatible in Firefox and IE7. From my laptop, it looks good in both browsers, however, I bet the alignment is still ruined in other browsers other than Firefox.

Other than that, I have also successful upgraded this blog to Wordpress version 2.5. Like I said before, I still need some time to get use to the interface and the new features available.  And this is my first post made in Wordpress 2.5.

Conclusion, this blog is now best view in Firefox.