I renewed my web hosting account more than a month ago. More than a hundred dollars for a bunch of websites that hardly pay for themselves — a steep price for all the work I put into them — but I’ve never ever thought of abandoning them.  That’s the pull of blogging I think. Once you’ve put up your place on the cyberspace — the one that you call home — you can’t let go. It’s your identity. You are attached to it and it to you.

Just a quick recap of this blog’s activity last year: a measly 30 published posts excluding 15 drafts. 20 of those 30 posts were written in the first 3 months of 2010 so there were some big gaps in the timeline.  Those drafts are either posts with some content that I wasn’t able to finish or posts that I had planned to write. LAZY. This is my main blog and it is a personal blog so it should account for the majority of traffic my web hosting account receives.

Just because I am inactive here doesn’t mean I’m totally inactive online though. I created two other blogs just for uhm… “lesser” posts. First is Random Thoughts… and the other is More Random Thoughts…. One is a blogspot and the other is at tumblr. I made a tumblr account just to check out their services and to claim the name “starmars” and I ended up liking it. Tumblr is good for reblogging and other “copy-paste” content. I’ll still use these two but I’ll try to post here more often from now on.

Note to self: Your goal is to blog as effortlessly, as naturally and in as little time as possible. You shouldn’t cared too much about speling and grammer mistakes. This is your personal blog after all.

Oh, while thinking of a title for this post, the song “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga popped up in my head so I chose the title “Just Blog…”

Read More:

• Blog hosting renewed
• What is a Blog?
• Add snow to your blog
• My chat with a hacker
• My main Warcraft III account sold

If you’re receiving traffic from search engine searches, you’ll notice that not all of your visitors come from English-speaking countries. This is specially true for image searches. One of the most popular pages in my Warcraft blog receives a bulk of its traffic from Google image search. Having a means to translate your blog into the reader’s native language is very handy. It promotes readability and encourages the reader to explore more of your site.

For me, having an on-page translator is necessary. There are many ways of translating your blog but I like using the visible flags the most. They are easily noticeable and recognizable and you can readily tell that it’s a translator. What’s the use of having a translator if the reader can’t even understand its text?

This is the exact code I used on my Warcraft blog. It’s a modification of a widget I found somewhere.

• Chinese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian and Spanish translation
• images in 24×24 PNG format and hosted by Google on Picasa web albums
• background color is transparent
• opens in a new window

Read More:

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To make a new page, go to the “Posting” tab* and click Edit Pages. Write the new page and publish. For your first page, you will be given an option to choose where to put the Pages list. “Blog sidebar” is the same as adding a new widget in your sidebar through “Add a Gadget.” “Blog tabs ” creates a new tab under the header with the page links. This may not work in custom templates. Read here for instructions in making your custom template compatible with Pages Tabs. The address of the new page is http://blogname.blogspot.com/p/pagename.html with hyphens replacing spaces.

In addition to the new static pages in Blogger, I also noticed some other features. These may have been available for quite some time. When writing a post, the Post Options just below the writing area gives you more control over some elements of your post.

You can disable comments for a particular post, show HTML literally in Compose mode (lets you type HTML code “as is”) and publish the post at a specific date and time in the future (scheduled posting).

For your current posts, you can now edit the time and date of the posting. What a neat feature! I tested this and it actually lets you change the order of your posts.

*I encountered a bug wherein Edit Pages is not visible. To solve this, go back to your dashboard and click New Post again.

Read More:

• Blogger Play
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The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).

• We now have rel=canonical support for better SEO.
• There is automatic database optimization support, which you can enable in your wp-config.php file by adding define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);.
• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• We’ve upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing and Simplepie.
• Sidebars can now have descriptions so it’s more obvious what and where they do what they do.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.
• The XML-RPC API has been extended to allow changing the user registration option. We fixed some Atom API attachment issues.
• Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
• When you’re editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save. (Thank goodness!!!)
• The Press This bookmarklet has been improved and is faster than ever; give it a try for on-the-fly blogging from wherever you are on the internet.
• Custom taxonomies are now included in the WXR export file and imported correctly.
• Better hooks and filters for excerpts, smilies, HTTP requests, user profiles, author links, taxonomies, SSL support, tag clouds, query_posts and WP_Query.

Source: WordPress blogRead More:

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Add this code just before the </body> tag:

<script src='http://snow-effect.googlecode.com/files/snow.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

This code simply calls a script hosted on Google Code.

Better version – Snow Storm

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• Translator widget using country flags

Since I also use Blogger, I wrote this to test new Blogger templates. It lets you see the template’s default design so you can, if you want change it to your liking. You can delete the test post when you’re satisfied.

Instructions:
1. Make a new post.
2. Make sure you are on the “Edit HTML” (not “Compose”) of the text editor.
3. Copy everything between the START and END lines.
4. Paste them as is. DO NOT change anything.
5. Add Labels.
6. Publish the post.

NOTES:
*After posting, make at least 2 comments: 1 comment when you are logged in as an author, 1 after logging out.
*The white spaces between lines are single-spaced.
*The PARAGRAPH tags are removed automatically when you select Compose on the text editor so I didn’t include them here.

=================START=================
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. <a href=http://www.google.com/>This is a LINK</a>. Sed lacus mi, hendrerit vitae, <b>BOLD text</b>, risus fermentum, <i>ITALICIZED text</i>, tincidunt vel, dignissim a ligula ^superscript, quis congue nulla risus _subscript. Morbi suscipit, <u>UNDERLINED text</u> commodo magna, <s>strikethrough</s> non sem ut elementum aliquet mauris, vel facilisis ante accumsan sit amet.

<blockquote>
This is a BLOCK QUOTE. massa quis luctus fermentum, turpis mi volutpat justo, eu volutpat enim diam eget metussem ut elementum aliquet mauris.

2nd paragraph massa quis luctus fermentum, turpis mi volutpat justo, eu volutpat enim diam eget metussem ut elementum aliquet mauris.
</blockquote>

Maecenas elementum odio et urna imperdiet sollicitudin. Nam vulputate dui at elit venenatis tincidunt. Vivamus sem ut elementum aliquet mauris malesuada augue a libero aliquet eu suscipit massa sagittis.

<img src=http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif />
simple IMAGE tag

<hr />
HR tag

IMAGE within a paragraph. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet dio et urna imperdiet sollicitudin sem ut elementum aliquet mauris<img src=http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif /> Nam vulputate dui at elit venenatis tincidunt. Vel facilisis ante accumsan sit amet. Volutpat enim diam eget metussem.

<h1>
Heading 1</h1>
Compare text sizes.
<h2>
Heading 2</h2>
Compare text sizes.
<h3>
Heading 3</h3>
Compare text sizes.
<h4>
Heading 4</h4>
Compare text sizes.
<h5>
Heading 5</h5>
Compare text sizes.
<h6>
Heading 6</h6>
Compare text sizes.

<ol>Ordered LIST
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<ol>Nested LIST
<li>Item 2-1</li>
<li>Item 2-2</li>
</ol>
<li>Item 3</li>
<li>Item 4</li>
</ol>

<dl><lh>Definition LIST</lh>
<dt>Term 1</dt>
<dd>This is the definition of the first term.</dd>
<dt>Term 2</dt>
<dd>This is the definition of the second term. </dd></dl>

<ul>Unordered LIST
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
<ul>Nested LIST
<li>Item 2-1</li>
<li>Item 2-2</li>
</ul>
<li>Item 3</li>
<li>Item 4</li>
</ul>

<table><caption>Simple TABLE with caption</caption><tbody>
<tr> <th>Header 1
</th> <th>Header 2
</th> <th>Header 3
</th> </tr>
<tr> <td>Division 1
</td> <td>Division 2
</td> <td>Division 3
</td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Division 1
</td> <td>Division 2
</td> <td>Division 3
</td> </tr>
<tr> <td>Division 1
</td> <td>Division 2
</td> <td>Division 3
</td> </tr>
</tbody> </table>
=================END=================Read More:

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Blogger Play

Blogger Play is a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs.

*8/30/2011: I just checked this site again and it’s already gone.  Instead the page links to Google Reader Play: “Blogger Play is going away. Want to browse interesting stuff on the web? Try Google Reader Play.”

a Blogger Play image

The image shown is random but uses the SafeSearch algorithm to weed out inappropriate images. The image is clickable linking to the blog post where the image was posted. Controls at the bottom let you control the speed at which the images are shown, limited only by your bandwidth speed. By default, only the images are shown at the middle. By clicking the “show info” link at the bottom right of the screen, the post summary as well as the author’s profile will be shown.

I think this is a good way to spend your time when you’ve got nothing to do and know what others are blogging about at the moment.Read More:

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To understand more clearly what blogs are, just watch this video. No one could have explained it better.

Blogs in Plain English

This is my blog. Show me yours

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This had me worried. I haven’t checked my Drops Inbox on Entrecard yet so this means I can not drop back to my droppers who aren’t on my list. That’s why I decided to clean up my EC drop list. From almost 250 in my drop list before, I now have around 180.

This change was good. For the past 2 days, the number of people who drop back on my Warcraft blog increased. Before, out of those 250 on my list only around 40 drop back. Now, It increased to 70. I’m pretty new here at Entrecard and I don’t know the drop masters out there yet.Read More:

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Woot! I now have my self-hosted wordpress blog, and what better way to start it than with a First! post. Having your own webhost complicates things but setting up WordPress is a breeze. I’ll just tinker with the other webhost options in the future. For now, I’ll focus on customizing WordPress.

I’ll start by browsing the hundreds of plug-ins and themes. Sounds like a daunting task but I should learn a lot in the process. I’ll stick to this Premium Orange theme first, which looks like a Naruto-inspired theme. Hehe.

I’m not removing the comment left by Mr. WordPress himself btw. Read More:

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