A.P.P.L.E

Today, I’m going to announce the winner of my first ever blog contest held on 20th Feb 2008. As stated earlier, 3 bloggers will be chosen as the winner and awarded USD5 each via PayPal.

Unfortunately, there are only 3 honorable bloggers who participated in this contest. So 3 of them will be awarded USD5 automatically. I would also like to give them some link love and introduction to their blogs in return.

The three winners are:

Darren
Darren is a 20 years old blogger from Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. He is good in online making money. Check out his blog to know more about him.

Cherry
Cherry is my real life younger sister. If you like cute stuff, make sure you check out her blog too.

LeeChien
I’m glad to see LeeChien has many loyal readers as time pass by. She shares lots of interesting thing which is worth reading. Check out her blog and you may become one of her loyal readers too.

Congratulations to the above winners. Do check your PayPal account to confirm the transaction. USD5 is not a big sum but that’s what I can give. Hope you all don’t mind. Thank you for participating. Sorry to say that this might be the very first and last blog contest I host (due to less popularity).

Traffic is important for a blog as it’s part of the PR factors, and also for blogs that serves ads campaigns. Or simply just - you want someone (new visitors possibly with same interests) to come to your blog, appreciate your posts, etc…

You can increase your blog traffic in many ways such as:

• Join social networking (eg. MyBlogLog) community or social bookmarking (eg. StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc..)
• Join forums, directories.
• Visiting blogs and participate in discussion (leave comments, but don’t spam)
• Create events like blog contest.

Read more…

a Chinese flute

Tomorrow will be the last day of Chinese New Year, known as the Chap Go Meh (meaning: 15th night). Most Chinese families will once again, gather around and have another reunion dinner. Some even get a day off to celebrate the last day of Chinese New Year. (Unfortunately, I still have to work.)

I’ve always wanted to come up with something happening in order to celebrate this blog’s 1st birthday. In conjunction of celebrating the last day of Chinese New Year for 2008, I would like to hold my very first blog contest. It’s very simple and if you are interested, read on.

Read more…

“Religion”, with the double quotes, I mean. Early February this year, eight (8) Super Heros claimed themselves as the “Blog God”. Taking the Blog God as the leader, 7 angels were assigned the tasks to review blogs in the blogosphere, by publishing all their reviews in a blog named “Blog God” with a tag line “show me your blog and I will tell you how much it SUCKS“. (which I personally dislike the way it sounds)

Just before they stand a chance to (possibly) review my blog, I would like to say how I feel about them. Read more…

Once again, it’s Kuma-Kuma and apple featuring in the new blog theme. But this time, they appear in some what different outlook. The cute Kuma-Kuma is now facing everyone and the apple has become blue. It’s an apple green + blue theme. I personally like this theme a lot (because initially, blue is my favorite color).

Thanks to everyone who left his/her precious comment in my previous post regarding my blog redesign. I’m really getting excited with this new theme and more new things to share. It’s 3.00am in the morning yet I’m still not sleeping. That makes me having only 2 hours of sleeping time. (I usually wake up around 5.00am - 5.30am) I might have panda eyes when I get to work later. Oh dear~

Anyway, I’m glad that everything has been through smoothly. I’m leaving my old host due to the dissatisfaction of the frequency of server down time and insufficient customer support (really slow feedback). I don’t mean to say bad things about my previous host, but I did make a record whenever my blog was down. January 2008 statistic shows that, my blog has been down for more than 10 times!! (Including database connection error, or 5 - 10 minutes down time, and really slow server respond time.) Starting from the beginning till the previous day, the down time is more than 30 times! (I signed up that hosting plan in October 2007)

The lesson behind this story is, choose your host wisely. Every host will say their server has 99.99% uptime. That’s not really true. What you need to determine is the customer care support. Rapid feedback is what you need. Currently, this blog is hosted by THC (See the square banner at my sidebar). I love the server respond time, you can feel that my blog now need lesser time to load. I love their fast feedback too.

Basically, I’ve finished setting my new blog theme. However, please give me some time to add in my blogroll list. Don’t panic, friends from the blogosphere, I will add your links. Just spare me a little more time. Now, what do you think about my new blog theme?

Introducing new feature:

The “Give me an apple” is a “stumbleupon-like” feature, that allow you to read a random post available in this blog archives, when you click on it.

Have fun~

Gotta get some sleep.