Yes, sir. I am going back to my unit for reservist duty. That’s right, me a soldier if you would believe it. Me ready to defend my country against external and sometimes even internal threats. Me going to sacrifice me job and career and defend this great land of concrete buildings. Me don’t care what others says, me do good things by wearing smelly and uncomfortable itchy uniform. Me take up arms and go die for rich and fat people who say they supermen, they alone build up country. Me glad, leave in small pigeon hole while they live in big palaces. Me sing song proudly when march to certain death and glory like American Civil War shows and that one about Saving some stupid private. Me body make fertile tulips and cabbages to feed the hungry children. Me go get free running shoes at eMart. Me gone bonkers.

Anyway, it’s for 2 weeks and I will not always be around to update this blog. But do come and visit, I will be around in the weekends and if time allows, I will update the blog as frequent as possible. I will also appreciate some comments from you guys as well. It would be good to make this an interactive blog, instead of just a monologue. So ciao guys. See you in two weeks time.

As you guys already know, I have several directories under my belt. One of them is a business directory meant for local small Singapore companies. It’s doing okay, I mean I get a number of visitors here and there. But there isn’t much advertisement or promotion involved. I solely depend on Search Engine traffic and this has worked very quite well for this directory. Better than what I expected actually.

In the recent months, from my web stats program, the traffic has increased gradually. However, I realized that there is a difference between number of unique visitors and number of visits. It seemed that during the months of June and July, the number of unique visitors and the number of visits has been increasing. But after that, the number of unique of visitors drops significantly. From 16,000 unique visitors to like 9,000 this month. But the total number of visits has increased. I am not very sure what to make of this. Is this a good thing or is it going to be a problem for me?

Does it mean that fewer unique visitors is bad for my site? What’s will the overall impact on the directory be? Although my overall traffic has increased (which I am glad), but the number of unique visitors has decreased. Does it mean that I get a lot of repeat visitors but also fewer new visitors? And where does these repeat visitors come from? Are people starting to bookmark my site for future reference? That’s a good thing right? Search Engines are still the number one source of traffic for me. So again, I ask, what does this mean for me? Are these people doing “multiple searches” on Search Engines?

Well, I am pretty confused by these. Not very sure what I should do. And it’s my feeling that I should rely less on Search Engines nowadays, seeing that there will bound to have an increase in competition soon. I believe that offline and forum advertising could work better in the run long. And in Singapore, offline advertisements like newspaper or pamplets are still important sources, even for an online service like me. Look at mocca.com. Of course, we can never compare the monetary backing of mocca.com to my directory, but newspaper advertisements can be low cost too. I think it’s approximately S$33 per regular advert.

Got an interesting topic from Digitalpoint Forums today. Finally something useful from the forum. It’s about a case study on a website and how it grew from zero traffic to 400 visitors. It’s sort of like a step by step tutorial to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a website which has wallpapers for downloads. You can check it out here. Yes, if your website is of a different subject, it is still a good read and it has all the important basics writen down. As you can see, the most important parts are still keywords and backlinks. Getting indexed by Search Engines should be the easy part, the next thing would be building links and content.

And the article take on social bookmarking sites is right on. It gives you a powerful backlink as well as traffic, if you get enough “votes” or “diggs” or whatever. Although it is often abused, it is still effective as an SEO tool.

Content is probably the only thing nobody can teach you how to optimize. But it is an integral part because without content, any SEO will not be effective at all. Even if you do get visitors, they will not stay long or visit again either. The trick is for them to actually remember or at least bookmark your site. So, add more useful content to your site. The problem is the term “useful” has different meaning to different people.

The thing I would like to point out is there are a lot of web stats programs or scripts out there. Don’t be afraid of using them. Awstats and Google analytics are good web stats scipts but there are many others with more features. And it is one of the most useful tool you will ever get when doing your SEO. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, which page they visit most often and what keywords or keyphrases are these visitors searching for. And you can use these information to further optimize your website. It’s surprising that a lot of webmasters don’t make use of such tools.

I think that there is a part two coming soon, so please visit that site again soon.

Yup, it looks like it is the raining season again down here in Singapore. It rained the entire day on Monday and Wednesday. And today, which is Thursday, it looks gloomy and it has already started drizzling. It’s going to be yet another wet day I gather. It seemed to me that the rainy season came earlier this year, usually it is from November to December or January but this year, it started in September. Oh well, we just have to make full use of it. And the weather in our region is always so unpredictable. So, the next week we could get hot weather again. But the overall weather pattern should be rainy, I suppose.

One thing great about raining in Singapore, you won’t get the oppressive heat! Although you need umbrellas or raincoats, you won’t be sweating like a pig everytime you leave an air-conditioned place. Singapore is always so hot and stuffy, a little rain would help a lot. It’s just too bad that instead of rain, we get gales. And it’s so strong that umbrellas are useless. You seen rain moving towards you horizontally before? Yes, that’s what we get sometimes. The shelthers we have in Singapore are not enough even block the rain! And we get flash floods in the low lying areas. The worse effected are those shop-houses built a while back which offers no protection against such flash floods.

For me, I think it’s time we celebrate the cooler weather by staying indoors where it is more cozy. Why leave the house and get wet when you can stay at home and chat on the Internet, right? Or you can just surf the web like I do. Almost everyday. You should also think again on the plans to go to the beach at the weekends. I would suggest you to cancel it and try for somewhere indoors. The best thing for Singaporeans is to go shopping in the shopping malls, that’s what Singapore is famous for anyway right? Just don’t forget to bring your umbrellas or raincoats. You won’t want to be caught in the rain, you will bound to get sick.

Hello guys, it’s me again and I am “back”.  And today it’s my back that is giving me problems. I sound like a little 5-year old kid complaining about everything but my back is really killing me. Well, I think the likely cause is how I sit when I am doing work in front of the computer. I am sort of skinny and I tend to hunch when I type. Worse, I like to put my face very near the screen when reading from the laptop monitor screen. That’s in my workplace. At my home, I have a bigger LCD Monitor (22″ monster), so I don’t tend to put my face near the screen. And my home table is much higher as well. So when I do stuff on my computer, I would sit back , a bit like tilting backwards, so it should be okay for my back. It’s my workplace that is causing the problem. For laptops, the screen also tend to be lower and then adds to the hunching of my poor back.

Anyway, I have started to adopt a better sitting posture. You should too. Especially if you do things in front of the computer for long periods of time. First of all, get a good chair. The back should be slightly curved so that your back can rest easily on it and it must feel comfortable. And you should sit upright when typing. Do not hunch when you type, as it strains your back hard. You should also position your screen so that it is directly in front of you. Not too high though, you won’t want to strain your neck too. Get those LCD monitors which height can be adjusted. If not, chairs usually can be adjusted as well. So if your screen is lower, you should adjust your chair lower.

Adopting a good posture is not as easily as it seems. We tend to fall back to our old habits like slouching when we are doing work without realizing it. But I think your work (and your health) will improve if you deploy such good posture. We won’t want to wake up one day realizing that we could have prevented all the old age problems like back pains, should pains, neck pains and so on if we just spend a little effort.

It’s perhaps now time for reflection on my little blog. You know, if you keep on carrying on without any reflection or thoughts on what you have done, it sure isn’t going to be productive in the long run. Mistakes and errors goes unnoticed. And nothing good may come out of this little experiment.  So, I will begin by asking the question “what do you guys think of my writing?”

Yes, I know it isn’t professional copywriting. I am not aiming for that. Those are meant for sites selling porn or adult entertainment videos. This is a blog and my skills need a lot of improvement before it can even reach the standard of a copywriter. What I am asking is whether the blog is readable and whether you guys can understand what I am writing. And does it work for my readers? The thing is that I have been using simple words all these time. I think that blogs should be simple enough for the regular readers to browse. Not with those big words meant to impress (or to confuse).

But I have been reading up on copywriting and it seems that sometimes simple words don’t get the message across. Some professional copywriters recommend adding some complicated words into the mix. Although I don’t completely agree with this tactic, I feel that it could work at times. If you write something, the most important thing is to make the important parts stick out. And by using big words, you can help achieve that. But it should be used sparingly.

Well, what do you guys think? Do you think that I should start using big words to help improve the appeal of my blog? Add a few complicated words from the dictationary here and there to sow seeds of confusion and annoyance to get the appeal effect. Or should I stick to just simple words?

Looks like the holidays are coming soon. In Singapore, the peak periods are usually the school holidays (around June/July and November/December), where parents will take leave and start a trip with their children to far away places. Or even just nearby like in Bali or Malaysia. I guess in Singapore where the stress level is extremely high, everyone wants to take a break. And everyone wants to take a break out of Singapore. I understand that. I live in Singapore too. The stress and the pressure we get from work, family and society itself is like a huge load on us poor mortals. We need to get the hell out of Singapore! Even Singapore millionaires need to get away from Singapore.

The problem is that during the school holidays, it’s like packed to the brim. So, in order for you guys to get that dream holiday you always wanted, you need to plan way beforehand. So if you have a thought of going overseas, now is the time to start planning and start looking for what offers the travel agencies have. So I have complied a list of Singapore Travel & Tour Agencies for you guys to check out. It is not arranged in any order and you should always compare prices from different agencies when doing your planning. And don’t rush for anything. Before you commit, give yourself a few days to think about it (use it as a cooling off period). I think you should also get recommendations from your friends and relatives, since getting personal experience is the most reliable form of information. Also, visiting forums and blogs can help you read up on what others have experienced and help you choose which travel or tour agency to use.

Remember, a good travel agency is very important. A good travel agency makes the trip as smooth and as enjoyable as possible. I am sure you don’t want to go on a holiday and get frustrated from poor service and bad attitude travel agents right? And a good travel agency makes all the difference. The bad thing about travel nowadays, the competition is cut-throat. This results in tour agencies cutting off corners and this can be rather bad for their customers. So please beware, if the price is too good to be true, it probably is.

Sad, if only I could afford a trip to Europe, that would be great. But I guess all of us must live within our means right? So, I will be stuck in sweaty Singapore for a long long time.

Google and other search engines offer webmasters a way to provide a little map (or we can say directions and locations) of their site to their Search Engine bots. It works like a normal map, but just for internal links on a website. This way, Search Engine bots can more effectively map out the entire website. Google uses an xml format while Yahoo supports a text format. There are various formats of sitemaps available. And I think the best is an html sitemap, since ALL Search Engines can read and understand. But no matter which format they use, the basics is essentially the same. It should provide links to different parts of your website. And you can submit these sitemap location to the Search Engines and Search Engines will make use of the information on these sitemaps to crawl your site.

I have complied a little list on why you should have a sitemap for your site.

1. Allows Search Engine to effectively map out and index your site. Help Search Engine bots navigate your site much easier.

2. Provide a way for Search Engine to check for new webpages on your site. Especially useful for huge sites with a lot of pages and links which can be difficult to find. However, there is no guarantee that they will even follow the new links.

3. For new websites, it provides a map for Search Engine to crawl. Submitting a sitemap can help get your site crawled faster, but this is of course, debatable.

4. It cost very little and there are a lot of free sitemap generators on the Internet. A lot of CMS comes with their own sitemap generator as well.

5. Gives you some control over what Search Engines can or should crawl.

I am using GSite Crawler to generate my sitemaps. It is free but can only work on Windows, so if you are a Mac or Linux user, you are out of luck. Remember, this is an software, not a script, so you need to install and then the program will crawl the site for you. You can configure which pages or file types to crawl and so on. There have available options and settings for you to choose from.

Do note that Sitemaps are not the answer to your poor Search Engine rankings. It’s to help Search Engine bots crawl your site. So if you are having problems with your rankings, at most, Sitemaps can help improve the way bots can crawl your site. It won’t help you get high rankings. For that, you should write solid content and get good incoming links to your webpages.

This piece of software, I have been using for over a year now. I used it mainly because I do a lot of web coding and a little web programming myself. Yes, I used it to replace Microsoft’s ridiculously useless and featureless notepad. But I guess Microsoft’s Notepad does what it is suppose to do, do simple editing of text files. Well, if you do web coding, I am sure that you will need something more powerful than that. You definitely need proper formatting because web coding can be very messy and confusing at times. You need highlighted syntax for easily identify mistakes or errors in your coding because you need to save time when doing troubleshooting.

And for the web coding, there is even more! PsPad comes with Colour Selector and Colour Translator for you to choose your site’s colour scheme. And it comes with an eye dropper so that you can get the correct colours for your site. For all you CSS freaks, it comes with a solid CSS editor. Time to perfect that very cool web2.0 site you have and make it even more web2.0.5 or whatever.

PsPad supports opening multiple files in one window. Works pretty well if you have a wide screen monitor. It’s actually kind of cool to be editing two files at the same time, kind of like those hackers you see in the movies. And you can always impress your boss with that trick. Two slave workers for the price of one. And it supports synchronization between the files.

PsPad is free for all but I don’t think it is open source. Anyway, for most of us, it doesn’t really matter right? If it is free, it is free. We just use it. Of course, don’t forget to support the project either by telling your friends and relatves about it or you can give a little donation. I am sure the authour of the software will be glad.

If you are using an older version of PsPad, I would recommend you to upgrade to the latest version. The older version seem to have a bug which prevents PsPad from opening when you open a file directly. It gives an error. Upgrading solves it.

Well, not exactly in real life but when I was playing Civilization IV! I have this computer controlled civilization whose leader is called Boudica and who is supposedly very friendly towards me. But I guess friendship doesn’t mean much to computers, so when I was fighting against some rival group, instead of helping me when I need the help most, she declared war on me. I had thought that she was going to be my best ally! And I had to fight a battle on two fronts. Damn computers, how evil can they be? Ironically, Boudica was the Celtic Queen who rebelled against the Roman invaders but was later defeated in one epic battle.

Anyway, this is a game and I guess Boudica was programmed to be a backstabber and backstab me she did. Her actions nearly had me defeated but with some luck and some brilliant thinking, I managed to hold off both my rival and her armies. However, I suffered massive losses to my units and my economy was in bad shape. Worse for me, my science rate was way down and I am losing my lead in technology. This is rather bad because once you lose the technology lead, your rivals will start looking for an excuse to plummet you into oblivion with their high tech toys. But that was sure fun! That’s what I like about playing Civilization, it’s so very fun. You will never know what will happen in the next turn. One moment you could be smashing into your enemies, the next, you could be fighting for your very survival.

This sort of mimic the real life too. History is full of evidence of backstabbing and betrayals. If you were to pick up any history book and read, you will agree with me completely. Perhaps it is just human nature to try to get ahead, but I think backstabbing is the worse of the lot. Or perhaps it is because I nearly had to quit the game because of the backstabbing Boudica. I am a bit pissed with that Boudica. Next time, I will bash her up first before I turn my sights on others! Backstabbers deserve a taste of their own medicine. And I plan to deliver it in the most painful manner possible! wuhahahaha!