“How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon.
December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”
- Dr. Seuss

For some lame excuse or another, I have failed in writing about this. I’m not sure how it got off my radar but it did. I’m sorry for the delay but I am truly grateful. I have very little “online buddies” and to get these awards mean a lot to me. BIG THANK YOU…

Two of the few blogs I do follow and read, check them out sometime!

Amazing Site Award from Bing of Warmstone!

Blogging Buddies Award From Stacie’s Blog!

Keep blogging you guys!

By now all Friendster bloggers must have gotten the memo sent out by the Friendster team, of the sudden migration from Friendster Typepad to Friendster Wordpress in early September. I wrote about it first on September 3rd, in shock that no word was said about the transition.

I didn’t stop there. When I re-visited the Friendster Official blog site on September 9 looking for answers I still didn’t find it so I left an exacting comment (#31) on their most recent post at that time, dated August 12th to express my frustration! Yay, I heard back from them and Ross of Friendster commented back on my Friendster blog the following:

“We’re sorry about the confusion and lack of information. We’ve focused our communication to our most-active bloggers. Unfortunately for you, that meant you were not emailed. We plan to make a general announcement in the coming week or so.”

Hmp! I’m hurt not being considered their ‘most-active’ blogger just because I have not blogged in Friendster for a year! LOL. I don’t know about that lousy excuse because two days after my comment on their blog, they finally announced the new format and sent out the same information to all members of Friendster who owns a blog via email! How much effort did they exert creating that simple post and email? I bet it didn’t take 5 minutes to create! So why they waited for over a week to transmit the announcement to non-active bloggers boggles the mind! In the first place, what’s the difference? Active or not active, when you get the announcement, it’s up for the user to react or not. Why hold the information to non-active bloggers?! Isn’t it as simple as hitting the SEND ALL button?!

Enough said on that.

P.S. Friendster Typepad didn’t have “tagging,” a key feature in Wordpress! So now all my old posts have no tags and I am too lazy to put any!!! Grrrr!

P.S.P.S. Would Friendster add more Wordpress themes please???

I have decided to make September 28 my blogversary. This was the date I bravely shifted from Friendster blog into Blogger blog exactly a year ago (I went live on September 30th). At that time, I knew nothing about real blogging even though I was already into it early 2005 via my Friendster account.

Since this is my first SOBA, I wish to give a background on the simple steps I did to get me started into blogging in my niche and my current position and state. I don’t have bragging rights- I’m not claiming to be anything. I don’t have any official blog awards. I don’t get a thousand or more views a day, I don’t earn much from it and I’m not trying to be the best blogger.

What I do have is decent and consistent traffic and page views. There’s something to be said there. Blogging shouldn’t be complicated. Blog happy and simply! This is dedicated to all newbies- what I was a year ago!

First step: Blog hopping and Finding your niche

For the most part blog hopping helped me a great deal while starting! It’s the best teaching tool for any newbie wanting to start their own blogs. It’s like window shopping for a website with live working themes and plugins and sidebars. As I navigate from one blog to the next, I learned what could work for me or not! There are some really sleek, neat looking blogs out there but there are also tons of crappy, sloppy ones! Sifting each, taking the best and discarding the rest- I was able to formulate what I want in my website.

I wanted a personal mixed bag for this site, allowing me the flexibility to talk on any subjects from family, travels, music, media, entertainment, opinion, photography, TV, the internet, technology, love/dislike of country, etc. I wanted a simple theme layout with black as the main background.

I followed up this site with a hobby blog, showcasing my interest in postcard collecting and then later on with a blog for a restobar I co-own in the Philippines, and then a Filipino Quotes blog to post quotations related to anything Filipino or the Philippines either by Filipinos or foreigners.

The best learning experience is going out there and blog hop! Call it lurking, spying, checking out, snooping- the only way to discover what you want in your blog is by learning from others. That’s what I would call it.

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Note: To all Friendster users who are not Wordpress Bloggers and are confused with how to use the new blogging platform, email me with your questions via Contact (on the top right of this page) or leave a comment- perhaps I can help! You can ask me anything at all regarding how to use Wordpress blog in Friendster! Hear from you soon!

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I couldn’t believe it! I just got finished writing my newest post on my Friendster blog, updating this and that on my profile and then came the biggest surprise!

SUDDENLY, without any warning or any sign at all- my Friendster blog magically transformed into a new website!! A Wordpress website!!

CRAP, all my sidebar except for the comments and recent entries- gone!! I just updated my blogroll, added new links- it’s all gone!! All the HTML codes and whatever else on my sidebar- gone!!

How can Friendster do this without alerting its users?? I immediately Googled for news, anything that says about the “merger.” Nada. Zilch. I looked at their Help section, it still covers Typepad blog stuff. I went to Wordpress.com/.org- still nothing there. Is this just experimental? Am I dreaming all this? If I wake up tomorrow, will it return to its old format?!

I really should be happy with this huge move by Friendster. Here I was ranting about Friendster’s lame platform for a long time- the very reason why I moved to Blogger and eventually Wordpress because of its makeup and now, like going full circle, I may decide to actually maintain the friendster site just because it is now using Wordpress.
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When I finally made the move from Blogger to Selfhost Wordpress in late December last year, I took a leap of faith that I could do it! I knew nothing about terms like HTML, CSS, FTP, MySQL databases, cmod, php, MyAdmin, .htaccess and plugins. But I was committed to learn them.

Once settled, I could not believe how much was in store for me in my new ‘home!’ It seem to have opened a whole new door of interest for me- coding. While I’m in the very least NOT an expert of it, I think I know enough to get me through creating decent sites for me and for my other undisclosed network. I still don’t get most of it and I think I’m only lucky getting things right by trial and error. Still.

I now understand why “code is poetry” in Wordpress. The infinite usage of loops, strings, quotes, tags, divs and ul-li is almost like metrical forms in verses that means something imaginative and that creates beautiful results.

My first WP theme was Helios, very basic and simple. A good start off point along with OrangeSense at my other site, The Postcard Collector. About the same time I started blogging, I also created a homepage for a small Restobar I co-own in the Philippines named Tatay Pepe’s. It was an even simpler design and there was nothing much to it at all. I finally got sick looking at it and decided it was time to reinvent the website.

The hunt for a theme was on and I found a great one in Arthemia theme. What a premium quality template given away for free! But that’s not even the amazing part. It’s the designer! Free as it is, he patiently takes time answering each and every repetitive questions regarding install and coding. He is almost at the beck and call of every blogger who decides to use the theme!

It took me 2 days to have the site up and running! It was a pain to install only because my knowledge to WP coding is still limited yet I didn’t need to disturb the theme creator! I managed to decipher everything myself. I’m loving the whole process of discovering something new with Wordpress- unleashing its power and pushing its potentials.

Just over two weeks old in Wordpress, on to my new theme- it jumped from 9million or so Alexa rank down to 1.3million Alexa ranking! Impressive! It did manage to have a PageRank of 2, ten months after I bought the domain.

Just over two weeks old and it is already nominated for Filipino Blog of the Week over at a fellow blogger’s site who is an ‘authority’ himself to blogging. Kindly Visit Tatay Pepe’s.com, stay awhile and vote for the site please… Would you also let me know what you think of it?  

Tatay Pepe’s is my poetry at the moment.

I chanced upon the term “do follow” about a month ago (November 2007) and I’m quite surprised that it hasn’t really taken off when I found the whole idea ‘nonconforming’ and even defiant of Google! I embraced the concept instantaneously!

My previous post here has been about my growing discontent with Google in general and Blogger in particular. The change Google made a few weeks ago included a permanent rel=”nofollow” attribute in its comments page. Since it is a separate page from the main blog, there is no way to manipulate its template making it impossible to remove the tag. Regardless of whether you want to be a Do Follow blogger or not, you can’t make the choice because there’s no way for one to remove the simple yet powerful tag. Your hands are suddenly tied in that regard.

Google launched the “rel=nofollow” attribute in early 2005 to combat spamming in blogs. Major search engines like Yahoo and MSN liked the bit so they followed suit. It was initially seen as a great idea because really, spamming has become uncontrollable at that time.

What is the rel=nofollow tag?

Rel=nofollow according to wikipedia, “is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.” Simply put, the rel=nofollow tag aims to blacklist spam comments left on message boards, forums and blogs. Spam comments are comments with no relevance to what the post is all about and is usually just a link URL pointing you to a site selling or promoting something- unfortunately, most sites are of obscene nature. Spammers come in huge numbers and it is a pain to remove the comments one by one when they come by the hundreds in your various posts. Blogs where the comment moderation is turned off are the ones mainly targeted.

Why do spammers love to spam blogs?

The reason is simple. Blogs have a wide, diverse audience and usually has huge content. Most blogs also have strong PageRanks (another Google owned trademark!) and spammers want to benefit from that. When you link with a blog, search engines crawl that link and will consider that link almost as important when attached to a page that has a PageRank. So then when one is searching for something and that blog shows up, most likely that spam comment will show up in search engines as well.

With the rel=nofollow tag attached to a template by default, spam comments WILL NOT be indexed by Google or other search engines thereby will be ignored by the search engines and will have no value at all whatsoever. It render the comments totally useless from a search engine’s point of view.

Now you see where I am driving at here.

While the objective is firstly seen as a deterrent for spamming, it is not totally beneficial to any blogger who cares about its readers and its blog’s ranking because the search engines CAN NOT determine what a spam comment is from a legitimate comment. What it does is totally ignore all comments- legit or not!

With the rel=nofollow tag on, the reader’s comments are never included when search engines rank a page’s importance. So from the standpoint of PageRanking, the blogger gets nothing from the comment and the commenter gets nothing back. It’s a dead end for both.

Is Do Follow the answer to rel=nofollow?

I strongly believe it is! Do Follow, writes a supporter, “is an action or a step a blogger initiates to remove the attribute rel=”nofollow” in its blog codes, either by installing a plug-in: Wordpress plugin or this Wordpress plugin, or manually for blogspot and for movable type. Most bloggers would refer to it as a campaign or a movement against rel=nofollow.”

Google does not prohibit one from removing the nofollow tag. It is therefore a choice we can make. I choose to reward my readers for taking the time to comment on my posts. Personally, I only try to leave comments now to blogs that support Do Follow. We all are busy people and there are millions of blogs out there. It’s impossible for us to visit all of these blogs so why not just visit the ones that will also benefit us in some way? I’d like to be able to give that to my readers and perhaps may encourage them to leave a comment knowing that their URL link will be counted by google and other search engines.

I’ve read that even with the rel=nofollow tag on, spammers are still out there! It doesn’t stop them from doing what they’re doing. So why not remove the nofollow tag to benefit us and our readers?

Blogs have other ways of fighting spams now like entering a word or sets of letters and numbers before submitting a comment or just having to enter information manually and clicking submit; these are moves a spam-robot can’t do automatically hence preventing the spam from occurring. One can also turn on the comments moderation to filter comments before appearing and going live on your site. I like the idea of comment moderation because it gives me control over what’s going to be attached to my site before it hits the blogosphere! I have had a small number of spam comments which I’m truly thankful moderation is on since the comments were nothing but objectionable links leading you to lewd sites!

Again, I think every blogger should make a choice and support Do Follow. It’s a win-win and the benefits definitely outweigh Google’s reason- that of punishing spammers. Why would we punish OUR readers?!

(Now is a great time to become a Do Follow blogger. Rob from Blogs that Follow whom I met on Blog Catalog and MyBloglog and whom I’ve exchanged a few emails with on the subject, is giving out Grey’s Anatomy 2008 calendars to bloggers who become Do Follow supporters! Kindly visit their website to know more about the ongoing promo.)

© 2007