Narrowband.org

Before my blog turns into some kind of a photoblog, allow me to slot in an entry that’s actually focused more on thoughts than photos. It’s been a while since I did this. I’m sure you’d agree. Some people asked me how long have I been a photographer. Well you know, for me, I think I am more of a blogger than a photographer. I love to take photos, and when I’m at it, 70% of the time I have my blog in mind. As far as photography is concerned, I’d say I’m still very much learning. I bought my first SLR camera after some months of saving, and when I showed it to my parents, Mom wasn’t very happy with the way I spent my hard earned money.

Obviously I do not make a living out of taking photos. I don’t get paid for taking nice photos. Yet, I splurged more than RM3K for an entry-level SLR camera which I love dearly even til today. For those of you who may not know, I had been eyeing an SLR camera since my early days of blogging. It was because I didn’t have the means to get one, I had to wait til I joined the workforce. The burning desire (to get an SLR) peaked during my first working trip to Singapore. I bought my EOS 400D in less than a week after I got home, and I never looked back.
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*Blows away dust* Ok it’s been quite a while since I updated. The entry (+ pics) on my trip to Australia will be published later. Hehe. Actually, I *thought* we would be able to visit Brisbane as well. But no, it didn’t happen. We took advantage of Air Asia X’s cheap (like, super cheap!!) fares and flew to one of its hottest (pun intended - it’s summer) destinations, Gold Coast. And we remained there for the whole trip. Anyway, meanwhile I wanna tell you guys about a boo-boo I did yesterday.

I bet some of you saw a password-protected entry in your feeds. And then when you came here and (I quote Angel) ’searched high and low’, there wasn’t any password-protected entry to be found! Look, it’s like this. I accidentally published an entry that I did not intend to make public. Yes it’s one of bloggers’ greatest sins, ever. How can such a stupid mistake be committed? Within seconds, that entry quickly propagated to my Feedburner via RSS and I panicked like a siaokia. Deleting the entry was no use - it wouldn’t be removed from the Feedburner quickly enough. Many of my subscribers’ RSS readers (Google Reader/Feedreader/Bloglines/etc) would have fetched the contents from my Feedburner.

So I tried a trick. In less than one minute after publishing that entry, I deleted it, and republished another dummy entry (the password-protected entry that some of you guys saw, which has since been deleted). This immediately sent a ‘ping’ to my Feedburner to update the feed contents, and voila!, as I expected, my Feedburner sync-ed with my blog contents! That unintentional entry was gone, and a newly-published, password-protected entry was up. *Phew*. Nevermind that the password-protected entry was visible, as long as the unintended entry was removed! Speaking of that ’sensitive’ entry, how many of you actually caught a glimpse of it in your Readers while I was frantically trying to remove it? ;p

Recap: In order sync my blog with my Feedburner, I simply published a new entry to ‘nudge’ or ping my Feedburner. The reason why that password-protected post still appeared (prior to this entry) in your RSS Readers even though I’ve deleted it off my blog, was because I didn’t bother to publish another new entry to sync things. As a result, it stayed in my Feedburner until your RSS reader had picked it up (and cached until now). Uhm… wakarimasuka?

P/s. By the way, someone hotlinked one of my images from her blog, but the image is not visible (cannot appear on her site lah). That’s because I’ve activated a feature that does not allow hotlinking of my images from another domain besides ‘narrowband.org’. Actually, it’s okay to use my images, as long as my watermark/signature is not cropped off. But I’d recommend that the images be hosted on your own server (Photobucket, Flickr, etc), so as to not share my site’s bandwidth. Yougetwataimean? So darling, download the image to your harddrive, and upload it onto your own Photobucket ok? ;D

The 2008 Quiksilver Revolution 2.0 at the Sunway Lagoon’s surf beach saw some of the world’s best boarding actions performed on and off beach, much to the enjoyment of the appreciative Malaysian youths who mostly turned up revealing more skin than they usually do on normal days. It was a wicked beach party!

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We’re seconds away from a spanking brand new year and let me tell you, 2007 has been nothing short of rewarding as far as blogging is concerned. I made many new friends and saw many new faces - each has their own writing style and their own legion of readers. Best of all, it is gratifying to know that some of these people actually do recognize you and have at some point in time dropped by your blog before.

Yesterday I had one such opportunity (possibly the final one in 2007) - to go out and meet several fellow Malaysian bloggers at Pavilion KL. Esther told me that there would be a free AVP screening, and asked if I was interested. As a freeloader, I’m always up for anything that employs the ‘no-payment’ scheme. After the movie, I was thankful that the ticket was free because otherwise I’d have kicked myself for actually paying to watch it. Oh right, this post isn’t supposed to be about AVP…

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It’s the time of the year again to review, recap and remember some of the highlights and most memorable entries on Narrowband.org. As many of you did not start reading me from January onwards, here’s an opportunity for you to walk down Narrowband.org’s memory lane (I know for a fact that at least one reader used to dig up my archives and read all the way til my maiden post on Narrowband.org!). The following are the selected entries, sorted according to the month in which they were published.

January 2007

And as the Internship Draws to an End… (Read)
One of the main highlights during this time of the year was my internship with a company that gave me much more than just a working experience. It marked the beginning of an extraordinary friendship that I thought I could only dream of.

How to Create a CSS Photo Gallery (Read)
I did a CSS Photo Gallery based on an online tutorial, and modified the codes to fancify the whole thing. I then wrote my own tutorial on how to do that - and for the first time in my life, I experienced the “Digg effect”.

Widening Narrowband.org (Read)
Some of you might have seen the original Narrowband.org layout - a two-column theme called Intense, created by Sadish Bala. I then altered the CSS to widen the layout and accomodate another column.
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It is my pleasure to share with you some good blogging tips that have been passed around the blogosphere. With each pass, a new entry will be added to the list and I’m honored that it has been passed to me, not once but twice. Thank you, Che-cheh and Bengbeng! Does that mean I get to add two tips instead of one? :p

-Start Copy-

It’s very simple. When this is passed on to you, copy the whole thing, skim the list and put a * star beside those that you like. (Check out especially the * starred ones.)

Write your own blogging tip for other bloggers.Try to make your tip general.

1. Look, read, and learn. http://www.neonscent.com/***

2. Be, EXCELLENT to each other. http://www.bushmackel.com****

3. Don’t let money change ya! *****

4. Always reply to your comments. http://chattiekat.com/****

5. Blog about what you know & love. http://sugar-queens-dream.blogspot.com****

6. Don’t use filthy language-buy a dictionary. http://shinade.blogspot.com***

7. Blog about something educational http://climateofourfuture.org**

8. Be yourself; others will follow http://sfgirl-thealiennextdoor.blogspot.com

9. Don’t have too many blogs that will become a chore to maintain http://cubicledenizen.blogspot.com*

10. Keep it simple, user-friendly, interesting and organised! http://erishaling.blogspot.com****

11. Keep the blog simple and sweet!! http://www.leslieho.com **

12. Share with others your thoughts and don’t be shy! http://groovy-olives.com/blog

13. Never ask for link exchange. Blog hop to increase traffic. http://www.jessieling.com**

14. Blog about something uniquely you. Or post some unique pictures. http://bernardchan.net

15. Avoid too lengthy posts e.g. less than 200 words if you can help it. http://www.mylongkang.com*

16. Avoid Doing Tags.. clementwongpy.blogspot.com

17. Remember to go to the toilet when nature calls, don’t just sit glued to the computer or you’ll shit in your pant! http://wuching.blogspot.com

18. Blog hoping is fun. You’ll never know what gem you’ll find in the blogsphere. che-cheh.com/

19. Do. Not. Plagiarize. http://narrowband.org/

–End Copy-

Number 10 and 13 got my star ;). And to pass this on, here are my hot-picks…:
Angel
Giddy Tiger
Jasonmumbles
Rinnah
Eastcoastlife

Consider yourselves tagged, my friends!

I confess, I can get pretty obsessed with my site’s traffic. That said, I don’t go ‘all-out’ to draw in hits - like posting up something totally crazy or something. Of late, I’ve been pretty busy and that explains the slow updates. However, my site’s traffic hasn’t dropped! And I know that if I don’t update ASAP, I’m gonna feel really bad.

Paiseh, I feel compelled to pixelate the numbers also… Don’t guess lar, ok? *Shy*

From a blogger’s point of view - any blogger, for that matter, the hits are a great source of motivation. It is what keeps me going, you know. Thank you guys for dropping by (come back often too ya!). I have been going out almost every day now besides working, which leaves me with little time to write. I tried to publish this last night, but I couldn’t finish writing in time for an appointment, so I had to save it as a draft (which, in normal cases, would end up unpublished).

Ok, let’s move on to something else. Here’s a little bit about what happened last weekend. I took my little cousin (who’s about a year old) to Toys ‘R Us and boy did she work my legs off. It took some time for her to get ‘warmed up’ and once she was comfortable, she really enjoyed herself. So did I, actually. I don’t think she gets to go to Toys ‘R Us often, so I was really happy to make her day.

She went all over the place - for a moment I wondered where’d her little legs get all that energy from. But what I liked most about her was that she was very smart. She understood the things that we tell her and she listened. Very mature for her age, I’d say. Absolutely adorable.

P/s: By the way, check out Google’s Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video project. I’ve already got an idea. Hopefully, I’ll be able to publish my video before the deadline’s up. (Ahaks, talk only lar. Now I no time to blog also lar - wanna do filming summore meh -_-”)

Crap. I decided not to publish the entry I was drafting, again! It happens, haha :). That leaves me with almost nothing to write now. Been out for the past 4 weeknights. Company annual dinner was an eye-opener. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s PC Fair, where I hope to get my new harddisk. Although I’m happy with the laptop I’m currently using (newer, higher-spec and faster), nothing beats using something which you can claim is yours. Haha.

Came across this from Rinnah’s. Only 78% addicted lah me! That’s a good sign leh, not so serious yet. In fact, I haven’t been updating my site as frequently as I used to, no thanks to not being able to blog in office. Not that there was any restriction; it’s just me. But I do read my feeds ;). Google Reader has been wonderful. Nevermind the slow updates, I simply love the Gmail-like interface. Oh, I just found out that my colleague keeps a blog. I don’t know if anyone was supposed to know, but I accidentally caught a glimpse of his screen, lol! I was trying so hard not to blurt that I’m a blogger myself. I succeeded. Heh!

And then I’ve been going online using my phone lately. That explains - to some of you - why I couldn’t open the URLs you sent me. I tried opening both applications (web browser and MSN) simultaneously but after a while, the MSN automatically exits. I guess my phone hates to multi-task.

By the way, using MSN on phone is made possible by Fring. Have a great weekend, peeps. If you bump into me at the PC Fair tomorrow, dun shy shy yah?

P/s: Convocation next weekend!! *Excited*

Edit@Sunday, Aug 15 Aug 5 (Oops, thank you HC!): Finally bought a new internal drive for my laptop! Got it for a little over RM200 (120GB capacity). Spent the whole night formatting, re-installing OS, security apps and drivers. And because the PC’s relatively empty, it’s blistering fast now! *Whee*

Yes, the drive has journeyed on to the Land Where Consumer Electronics Are Eternally Blessed. But it’s not the end of the world. Surprisingly, I’m not *that* upset about it. I mean, I have back ups of the really important stuff - like photos. Documents… I can’t think of any important documents that I’ve lost. I have back ups of my lecture notes and slides throughout my years in university though - if you consider that important.

That’s my harddisk, being treated under Intensive Care Unit. It didn’t make past the critical stage. It showed some positive signs, after more than 15 minutes plugged into another laptop - signs that say the drive was successfully detected. However, efforts to access it were futile. The clacking noise made was pretty loud. I could actually feel something knocking against its casing when I held the drive in my hands. Something mechanical has apparently gone terribly wrong. I’m in the process of getting a new hdd. Meanwhile, I’ll be using another laptop at home - which has become somewhat like a ‘common laptop’ in the family hall. It’s much newer than mine, and has better specs so it’s not that bad.

By the way, Google Reader rawks. I just love the interface. Remember I was talking about my feed management in Feedreader? Well, the downside is that it’s offline. Therefore, it’s gone together with my dead harddisk. I’ve since been using Google Reader. I guess keeping things online does have its advantages. In fact, a number of my installer (setup) files have previously been uploaded onto my server too. As for mp3s… ahh… they were my prized collection. But then again, I hardly listened to all of them, only a select few. And guess what, I have my favorite tracks in my phone already (especially one super rare track). Thank goodness.

I don’t like Mondays. Especially when it rains. But I like Monday nights - because it’s my workout night. Heading to the gym now, adios!

Here’s a community service reminder: BACK UP YOUR HARDDISK TODAY! Or, at least your important files. Failing to do so may cause severe depression. Be very afraid.

This is gonna be for the noobs. Once upon a time, I used to click on my own blogroll to visit, one by one, my friends whom I had linked up. Of course, not all sites had updates so I just closed the window. Meanwhile, some others had up to 5 new entries and often, I read only the latest. This was of course, before I learned to enjoy the convenience of RSS feeds. I’ve used all kinds of feed readers, including those you can install in your PC, those that are web-based, and those that are installed as an extension to your browser. I’m now a long-time user of Feedreader.

Blogs and online news websites have frequent updates that you can hardly keep up with, especially if you have more than 10 sites to follow. Thankfully, there’s something called RSS. All blogs and news sites allow you to subscribe to their RSS feeds, and you will need a feed reader in order to read them. RSS strips the site down to its bare content, therefore they are lightweight, simple and fast. No background images, advertisements (well, RSS ads are slowing creeping in nowadays though), and other irrelevant information that are not related to the content.

Basically, you receive only the updated content; that is to say, only the text and images of the latest entry. Each time when there is an update, you will be automatically alerted via RSS, so you won’t miss it. For sites which have not been updated, there will be no alerts, so you don’t have to waste time visiting them. This is definitely more efficient than manually checking a site for updates.

Narrowband’s Feed Subscriptions

Basically whatever you see in my blogroll, is whatever I’m subscribed to. The list is identical, except for a few who requested not to have their blog linked up. For those cases, I prefix the feed’s name with a hash (#) in my feedreader.

Normally, when I go around bloghopping, I don’t subscribe to new feeds on first-time visits. But when I chance upon the site again two or three more times (usually via PPS), then I’d add it into my Feedreader. But, it will be prefixed with a hash, unless I decide to link it up in my blogroll as well.

I know most of my readers are subscribed to my feeds. For those who’re not, it’s time you hopped onto the bandwagon feedwagon. I’ve put up a big RSS button in my sidebar, in case you can’t find my feed URL (copy the URL and paste it into your feed reader!). With RSS feeds, keeping up with your favorite blogs couldn’t be easier.