My Life With IT

eMenang is holding a contest to guess the number of visitors eMenang will get from Aug 26 to Sept 15. A prize of USD25 can be won by guessing the correct answer. What’s cool about it is that even if you don’t guess the correct answer, you still get a chance to guess within the limits of 100, give or take.

eMenang’s main purpose is to provide contest updates from Malaysia and international. Other contests can also be found there. Do check out the site as I think the iPod Nano is also a good prize for grabs, just suggest a cool domain name and link back.

With these, I supposed I’m entitled to 10 entries? My guesses are 18 203, 24 504, 22 631, 19 306, 34 542, 27 485, 26 846, 29 268, 15 703 and 17 856.

As a Wordpress user, I’ve been installing plugins here and there. It’s been quite fun because I don’t have to change the template much. Just plonk in the codes in the correct position and it’ll work. Currently, I’m using the following.

Akismet - To catch spams.

Bad Behavior - To prevent spambots from eating my bandwidth.

Better Comments Manager - I don’t have to go to the individual posts to comment. Except, it broke with IE6, drat you, IE.

MyBlogLog - List of those from MyBlogLog.

Another Wordpress Tracker - This helps to put in the tracking codes without having to touch on the template. The plugin will place the codes near the end footer. So, don’t worry about changing your templates on your whims.

Bookmark Me - Adds bookmark links of common social bookmarking sites to each post. This will need a small code add-on to the template.

Enhanced WP Contact Form - Can be implemented in a page or post. Quite easy to use. So, you don’t have to give out your email unless you reply. Disable comments and pingbacks so as not to confuse the users.

Shylock Adsense - A really easy way of displaying your Adsense codes without having to change the template.

Wordpress Database Backup - It’s a must have. There’s an option to schedule backups too.

Wordpress Multi URI Ping - Just place all the URI given. Beware that each time a published post is saved, it’ll ping all the sites at once. Some sites frown on that.

WP-Cache - To cache my site. While it takes less time to load, it’s when I’m updating the site that I have to clear the cache.  Minor irritant.

WP-myPHPAdmin - A way to look at myPHPAdmin without having to install any software on your desktop.

WP Back links - A  plugin to track the trackbacks and get more links.

So, what plugins do you use?

You have wallpapers, I have wallpapers. No, not those that are pasted on the walls of your room or flat or house. Those that are plastered on your desktop. And, the desktop is the one that you are looking at when you login after you have booted up your computer.

I seen beautiful wallpapers here at Babes & Wallpapers. While the babes dominate this site, there are other wallpaper themes such as comic, anime and games. A few of my favourite picks are below.

• Simple design wallpapers
• Union Tech Abstract - Beautiful range of colours to choose from.
• Audi TT - Cars for those car lovers.
• Harley Davidson - For those who love Harleys.
• 250 Fun Pictures Gallery - The famous laughing cat is also included.
• Susuki Bikes - More bikes
• Pxl Crystal Wallpapers - I love the smoke-like effects.
• iPhone Art Gallery - For the iPhone lovers.

There is quite a list of erotic babe wallpapers too. Check them out. Do you have any site that contains such a huge list of free wallpapers to download from?

Having installed Advertlets on my low traffic blog, Guinea Chronicles, I was rather surprised to see that I had earned an amount of SGD0.08, I know it’s nothing to shout about but for a blog whose traffic is low, it was quite encouraging that Advertlets has something to offer, more than the SGD0.00 from Nuffnangs had to offer me. After some debating with myself, I felt that Nuffnang just wasn’t suitable for me.

After this encouraging news, I decided to place in this blog too. So far, the rate is picking faster than if I had just depended on the low traffic blog. Thank you, my readers. All this amount will go into the hosting fees.

While Advertlets is different from Adsense that I’ve also signed up with, it does offer me something, I have a poll that will get some demographic information from my dear readers who have so far been too busy to do or my poll is not height flexible. Oh dear.

Anyway, my experience with Advertlets so far is that the advertisements are mostly for Asians which can be a good and bad thing. My readers for this blog come from UK and United States too. Well, not much but still, they count, right? They won’t be clicking on those ads unless they are interested in renting rooms from RoomsDB when they are visiting Singapore.

I hope that Adverlets can improve in the following ways.

• Provide a better table for the stats. When I saw the table, I was confused, was the alignment wrong? Please correct that. See the screen capture here.
• Resource page has been empty for too long. The coming soon doesn’t really sound like anytime soon.
• Provide more ads if possible to those non-Asian countries.

*This is post is submitted for a contest.*

As most of you know, John Chow has sold off all his space for those advertisers to promote on his blog. How I wished that I can do that as well. The money goes into my hosting fees, by the way. I have tried various ways to earn something and so far, have not been lucky as those who have managed to earn S$7 for the 1st month using Advertlets and still not satisfied. Perhaps in the long run, it’s not sustainable for my case. Looks like I shall have to pay out of my own pocket unless someone help me out on my Adsense, Advertlets and affiliate links here. (Shameless self promotion here :mrgreen:)

Now, eMonetized is running a contest to give away a 125 x 125 banner space that will be placed on Mr Chow’s blog to 4 lucky winners. Cool, huh? Your very own banner for free This contest is cool in other way because a comment on the post will give you one entry while a linkback/trackback will give you 5 entries. The 1st 10 linkbacks/trackbacks will on the other hand, give you a 468 x 80 banner rotated on the top page of eMonetized.com for a full month.

So, take part bloggers! It’s ending on Aug 29. No timezone stated yet.

The Comex Show is coming again. This time, I have a list yet again. Well, not a long list, besides, I’ve never bought anything much from such shows despite all the freebies.

With the Odex issue, I’m pretty sure subscribers may want to change their ISPs during the show. The issue is being discussed why PacNet did not have to release the names of the subscribers based on the IPs while Singnet and Starhub had to. With the high and mighty attitude by a certain Mr Stephen Sing and MIA Mr Peter Go, some dirt was dug up from their Games Mart Pte Ltd.

My list of stuff to buy or consider.

• A mouse (as long as there is a scroller)
• A laptop (upgrade from my current beloved lappy)
• A PSP Slim (nah, not really)
• A DS Lite (perhaps)
• Change my ISP (I still have a year to go)

Where should I place my money on?

Ok, I’ve been entering such contests lately. One of it was a total scam. The rest were all genuine. For this contest, I’ve to guess the number of linkbacks the post would receive by September 12. The dates are the ones that I have slight problems with because which timezone? McGrath informed me about the timezone for his contest, very kind of him.

The prize consists of the following (copied from the post).

• Brand New Playstation 2 (yeah, we know there is a PS3 now, but we don’t have one, so a PS2 it is)
• Grand Theft Auto Trilogy (GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas)
• 16mb Memory Card for PS2
• Six DVD’s (The Cavern, Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo, The Polar Express, Health Inspector, The Departed, Stuck On You)

Which sounds cool because even though it’s not PS3, PS2 is brand new.

This contest is held by Blog Aught.

Not to forget, my guess for the number of linkbacks / trackbacks / whatever-you-call-them, is 73.

I’ve signed up for paid posting with Blogitive. Unfortunately, there’s no affiliate link that I can place here despite them saying that I can refer bloggers. The only paragraph I read is quoted below.

You will be paid after their first paid posting. We will be doing this until we hit 10k bloggers in the network. Make sure they put your email address in the referred by so we can give you credit for these.

The problem? I don’t see a field in the sign up that remotely represent “Referer”.

A few reviews I found on Blogitive. It doesn’t sound optimistic at the moment. Since the referal post was posted in May 2007.

• Nails on Blogitive - Not a lot of advertisers so the posts will be quite rare.
• Dosh Dosh on Blogitive - Comprehensive review that tells you how it works.
• Get Paid 2 Blog on Blogitive - The downside of Blogitive is that you won’t get emails if you have new reviews to write. You have to log in frequently in order to check on the offers because they are snapped up quite fast.
• Blogitive Wordpress plugin - Steps on how to install, including a video tutorial.

I’ll see how things goes. All posts will be tagged as “Sponsor”.