The rewards of Karma

27 June 2008     •     6 Comments
Tech Things

I‘m not really into social networking. Browsing profiles really isn’t my thing… I just don’t have time for it, and I honestly think I have better things to do than going through each and every one of my contacts’ profiles. I accept the invites, sign up, approve Friend requests, customize my profile a bit—but that’s about it. I don’t really spend too much time on those things after that. So yeah, it’s kinda hard for me to get into web app “fads” as easily as others do.

Plurk is different. It’s like Twitter, but I like it better 🙂 Read more

The good in bad decisions

24 June 2008     •     6 Comments
Daily Dose Tech Things

Ah. It feels so good to be blogging again. I’ve been stuck with an awful DSL service by Digitel for more than three weeks AGAIN that I think I actually had a “blogging withdrawal.” This was the second time Digitel conked out on us. Having a web design company, three weeks of no high-speed connection makes it extremely difficult for us to do business properly.

You can just imagine how happy I am to finally be able to surf all I want, upload whenever I want, test sites without worrying of bad uploads, and blog whenever I felt like it. We only had Digitel late last March (that’s like about three months only), and we’ve been experiencing nothing but bad service. Marc was already tired of the support representatives’ spiel to pacify his anger (it actually pissed him off more), and I was so frustrated not to get any work done. It took Digitel weeks to fix our connection the first time. You’d think the second one would be better, but it was just as awful as the first. We barely enjoyed DSL speed nearing 1mbps when it conked out again.

We had downtime—lasting about three weeks each—twice in three months. That was the last straw. Read more

Shakey’s V-League’s big online PR mistake

14 May 2008     •     7 Comments
Tech Things

My husband Marc had been covering Shakey’s V-League volleyball games ever since he started his volleyball blog. He’d been successful gathering the “Friendster crowd,” a fan base that you’d probably call “photo-happy.”

Marc often tagged along my dad whenever he covered it for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, and got free training from one of the country’s best sports photographers in the process. Eventually, dad trusted him enough to forward one of his photos to Inquirer’s chief photographer, which gave Marc his first-ever print byline.

That Inquirer stint made Marc cover and take photos of V-League diligently for his blog and as a “standby” just in case Inquirer needed a photo but all of their photographers were busy covering more important things. He was so diligent that sometimes he forgot his work priorities.

Marc’s just one of the amateur photographers who covered V-League diligently and gave the league free online exposure—there are a lot of them out there. Some have blogs like Marc, while other share their photos through their social networking accounts. We bloggers know better than anyone how blogging can “light a fire and keep it going” in Public Relations (PR). Advertisers won’t waste their time and money inviting us to their events if we didn’t. But apparently, the management of Shakey’s V-League didn’t think the free online mileage they’ve been getting was important: Photographers can no longer take photos of their games unless they have a press pass, even if they paid for their own tickets. No one can take photos other than those with press pass, period. Read more

My first traumatic Xoom experience

11 May 2008     •     18 Comments
Tech Things

I’ve been a regular user of Xoom‘s services for more than three years already. I primarily used it to receive money from my offshore freelance and corporate web design clients, but ever since Paypal became fully functional here in the Philippines, I’ve been using it to send money from my Paypal account.

I already tried using Paypal’s withdrawal service. Albeit free of charge (transaction fee is free if it’s more than a certain amount), it took so long to reflect on my account that Marc and I even thought that the money was already floating in space or that some schmuck got lucky and spent our money. No schmuck got lucky (fortunately), but we received the deposit about one and a half months after I initiated the transaction from my Paypal account.

So what we do now to “withdraw” our money from Paypal is through Xoom. From our Paypal account (which is under my name), we send the money to our Xoom account (which is under Marc’s name). There’s a transaction fee to pay, but at least the money gets deposited straight to our BPI (Bank of the Philippine Islands) account in a day or two if we made the transaction during a business day. We never had problems with Xoom or Paypal, until last week, that is. Read more

Events recap

10 May 2008     •     1 Comment
Tech Things

Sorry guys, I’ve been sick for the past two weeks, I haven’t really been able to do much. So this is going to be a “quickie” post. I have so much backlog in blogging lately, so I figured a short update will do. I’ve been meaning to post a new entry once I’ve finished my new design (I’m already in the coding phase!), but I got sick and some of these things can’t wait anymore.

Events recap for April

Read more

Filipinos and text-messaging

4 June 2007     •     7 Comments
Daily Dose Tech Things

I’ve always considered my dad as a tad bit more tech-savvy than the “average” dad (well, at least those who don’t blog). Heck, his cameras are way, way out of my league.

I guess I’ve been so used to seeing my dad salivate over the newest tech gadgets, that it didn’t seem odd when he started texting. My dad and I got our first mobile phones back in 1998 (you know, those really bulky Motorola phones? They seemed so cool back then), and our first SMS-enabled phone a year after. Once my dad and I learned how to text, we finally abandoned our pagers, which used to be the rave when texting wasn’t popular yet.

Texting text-messaging

Maybe the reason why I thought it seemed natural for my dad to be texting was because I’ve always gotten the “daddy-ish” messages from him like, “where are you” or “what time are you going home.” It was annoying, but at least it didn’t seem weird.

But when an aunt, uncle or grandma texts me, I can’t help but feel a bit strange—especially when they seemed to understand “text speak” better than I do. Read more

The iBlog 2 summit, FilmCrowd

17 April 2006     •     5 Comments
Tech Things

I hope you guys had a great Easter. I sure did! My dad and I struck a deal… Instead of me paying half of this month’s electricity bill, I just bought the family Peking Duck for our Easter dinner 🙂 So there. We had yummy duck for Easter! I’m still so stuffed that I didn’t eat much today. I think the duck is trying to get itself digested in my intestines.

Anyway, tomorrow’s the second iBlog Summit. I’ve been actually looking forward to this one, to be honest. For once, I’ll be able to experience being a participant, and get to know the faces behind the blogs. Last year, I was a speaker. And it so happened I had a deadline that week. I went to the Summit with a sleepy head (I spent the entire night preparing my lecture), and only had enough energy to grab a bite after my presentation. I wasn’t able to enjoy it much because of that 🙁

This year, I’ll be a participant! I’ll finally be able to enjoy it. I really seemed fun. Marc and I will be going there with Anne, our Marketing Director. I just hope Marc won’t be late. His shift ends at 8:00AM. It takes less than 5 minutes to go here at my house from his office, “technically” 10 minutes from my house to the Summit venue, but we’ll be needing at least 30 minutes to find the place. Hehehe. My honey is really bad with directions. 😆 we ALWAYS need to allot time for getting lost everytime we go to a place we haven’t been to before. Ah, well. I just hope we don’t miss the snacks 😀

Looks like Marc and I will be seeing Boom and Aaron again tomorrow. Abe‘s going too (duh, he’s a speaker again :P), though we probably won’t be able to talk much about our upcoming projects. Marc will be going to the Summit without any sleep, so we’ll probably just go straight home after it. Anybody else attending iBlog? Look me up. I’ll be in black. Hehehe.

MAJOR PLUG: A very happy birthday to Luis! To celebrate his day, he launched this new cool community: FilmCrowd. This site allows people to review movies. Marc and I love watching movies, new and old. If only I didn’t have a lot to do, I’d probably be one of the frequent reviewers on that site. Ah well. Anyway, do check it out!

Plagiarist tracker tool

11 April 2006     •     1 Comment
Tech Things

Before I get back to work, I thought I’d blog about this first.

Copyscape

I found out about Copyscape from the Philweavers mailing list. Most of the emails I usually get from that list are ardent nonsense, but thanks to Naz’s patient policing, it has really improved. Anyway, Jose Olarte posted this link as “your new bestfriend.” And I must say I agree… Not for me, but probably for other people it COULD be.

I’m really not “sensitive” about my writings or designs or whatever (well, as long as it’s not paid for hehehe). My personal projects is open for everybody to use (well, maybe except for my Kutitots character. I’m kinda sensitive about that hehehe). Besides, if somebody plagiarizes my content… WHAT A LOSER 😆 I won’t get mad, but I will laugh at you. Why would anybody plagiarize a personal site? Kutitots is like a pseudo-journal. There must be SOMETHING about your life worth blogging about right? Hehe. Anyway, I don’t think anybody’s stupid enough to do that to my text.

I think Copyscape might be more useful for blogs like Abe’s Yugatech. Abe’s the one who writes his own content based on his personal experiences that people find useful (yes, Abe, I’m hinting you give this thing a spin and see if it’s really worth becoming “a new bestfriend” hehehe). Anyway, if this Copyscape thing really DOES work, even non-probloggers with “sensitive” content can still find this useful. I don’t particularly enjoy reading poetry blogs (it’s a personal preferrence, no offense), but these authors worried about other people copying their content might benefit more from this tool than I ever will.

Anyway, if you have “plagiarizable” content, give this thing a spin and do drop me a line if it works for you or not. I have to admit that I am curious 🙂

A new breed of SPAM

8 April 2006     •     Comments Off on A new breed of SPAM
Tech Things

Bloggers are getting creative, and so is spam. I normally just automatically delete spam comments, but today I decided to set aside some time to read the spam Akismet caught for the day. As I said, they truly are getting creative:

Name: Pets | E-mail: dragonman@orientationbreak.info | URI: http://orientationbreak.info/site_map.html | IP: 62.254.64.18 | Date: March 31, 2006

Nice Site! I have a bearded dragon called Gucchi and a border terrier called Ruby.They both hate each other and run a mile when they see each other! I enjoyed your blog- Thanks. R

OK… Gucchi is now a bearded dragon. Funny. But what the hell is a Ruby? Is that a brand?

Damn. I gotta get out more.

CSS Go Naked Day

6 April 2006     •     3 Comments
Tech Things

Dammit. I missed it!!! Oh well. There’s nothing to strip from this design anyway, but STILL. It would be nice to take part in something that I’m slowly becoming an avid fan of: CSS! Besides, it would be nice to shock people looking for support on the Dapit Hapon Theme if they see The Filipino Web Designer stark naked. Not ME, the SITE.

Anyway, speaking of the Dapit Hapon theme… If you’ve also been reading the support blog, you’ll know that I’m planning to merge these two sites. I’ll be combining the entries from the two into Kutitots, and just park the filipinowebdesigner.com domain here. I really can’t keep track of the people downloading and installing the theme, and the footer copyright there links to these two sites so I really can’t just remove them from existence.

See? I AM working on a new layout. I’m in a “go Pinoy” mood, so you can expect it to have an ethnic feel. Sorry it’s taking a while. Aside from my work (I’m currently working on a print project right now, hence the lack of online presence), I’m also trying to push the limits (or at least, MY limits) of WordPress theme customization (not just the CSS part) for client and personal projects. Pretty interesting really. I’m learning PHP 😀

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Have some shame. Don't copy my flea, my layout and my design.