Narrowband.org

*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

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!

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.

More and more people are setting up their own blogs to write and share their thoughts, opinions, experiences and even skills with their readers. There are a number of things that I wish I could tell all new bloggers when setting up a blog. Here are 11 things I have in my mind:-

1. Get a Hit-counter!

One of the first things you might want to do when you first set up your blog is to get a hit-counter to monitor your traffic. The earlier you install your counter, the better. This is so that you won’t miss the first few visitors who visit your blog.

Personal tip: Stay away from Webstats4u.com (aka Motigo webstats, formerly known as nedstats), because your visitors will be annoyed by ilead.track.it popups.

2. Use a Nickname

I personally know many bloggers who choose to use their own real name or initials when they blog, which is fine, really. Short, given names are okay but full names? I would suggest to use your full name only when you understand what you’re doing - because it takes away your anonymity online and that’s irreversible unless you start afresh again. On the other hand, if you start off by using a nickname, you could gradually shed away your cloak of anonymity whenever you’re comfortable.

3. Blog Selectively

Think carefully before publishing an entry, because (and I always stress this) no matter how personal or private you claim your blog to be, it is always accessible to virtually anyone in the world who has an internet access. Whether it is something very personal, controversial, or offensive, be aware that in the cyberspace, you’re never alone. Your contents could be indexed and cached by search engines, or reproduced in forums, other blogs, or heck, even newspapers! So you think removing an entry solves everything? Not really. Unless you understand and do not mind the consequences, think twice before you write.

Related example: Last year, a teenage Singaporean blogger, Wee Shu Min had to remove an offensive entry just one day after publishing, because it drew a flak from thousands of people worldwide. She admitted that she didn’t expect to receive so many readers overnight. Indeed, her average daily hits was never that high. (It’s a long story but if you’re interested, Wikipedia could help you out. And yes, her original text is there too.)
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Today I’m gonna spend some time to share with you how to produce something like this:

This was a special request by Eunice, who was clearly hungry for more tricks after reading my previous Photoshop entry (by the way, she turns 23 today, so Happy Birthday Eunice!). She showed me an example on Ladyshanice’s blog (I was told that she was some beauty queen… which I’m not surprised), and she said that she wanted to produce something similar. To be honest, I hadn’t done this before but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Let’s try it, step-by-step:
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A friend just asked me if I had any software to resize photos, not knowing that Adobe Photoshop could do just that. If you have Photoshop installed, look no further. We’ll do something called ‘Batch Processing’ in Photoshop. It’s the same way how photos on Narrowband.org are watermarked and framed. It’s a pain to manually repeat the same steps for every photo, especially if you have more than 40 photos (in my Siem Reap photo gallery, there’re more 400!).

This tutorial is widely available on the internet, but I’m just going to share it here with Narrowband.org audience (I know for a fact that many among my friends do not know this). Here it is, step-by-step:

Step 1: Open a photo in Photoshop.

Step 2: Create a new Action in your Actions Window. (If you don’t know which is your Actions Window, hit ALT+F9 repeatedly).

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[Author’s note: This is a repost dated Oct 23rd, 2006 - taken from my old blog.]

If you’re unsure whether your guitar is classical or acoustic, fret not. Some people do not know the differences simply because they have not been introduced to a different type of guitar before. Generally speaking, all non-electric guitars are acoustic guitars - they include both metal- and nylon-strung guitars. But by convention, we usually use ‘classical’ when referring specifically to nylon-strung guitars. Otherwise, the term ‘acoustic’ refers to metal-strung, non-electric guitars. My classical guitar needs new strings.
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[Author’s note: This is a repost dated Oct 16th, 2006 - taken from my old blog.]

Ok, this is for noobs. It’s gonna be done on J’s guitar. It is a decent Fender, pretty trustworthy. We used it for most of our practices back when we were in school. The high-E string was broken when I borrowed it. Maybe it was left untouched for too long. Or maybe it was a case of mishandling. Anyway, the rest of the strings were in bad shape too so I figured that I’d have all of them replaced.
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This is based on the article on Dynamic Drive. I applied the technique in one of my posts early this month. That single post contained 32 images. To display all of them within a post would take up a lot of space, so the CSS Photo Gallery is the perfect solution.
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