I Need to Blog

Posted on May 31, 2012 by S

I’m seriously ashamed of myself for not blogging for long. Life is never the same as before and I have to neglect some hobbies sometimes.

Ever since I have started working on my tuition agency website, things have changed a lot. I’m a one-man-show for most of the back-end work. After more than a year, it does look like a professional website, but there are many features I have yet to implement or improve on. I have to worry about SEO and spend lots of time on them every week and eventually the daily boring administration work almost turns me berserk.

I’m also working on quite a number of blogs as well, which are either non-profitable or can earn me money in future. There is also a blog for the tuition agency. This makes my personal blog insignificant compared to them. My contents are also diverted to the blogs.

After all, my time management is really bad. It is not that I’m working 24 hours everyday but I’m always drained and thus operating at a lower speed.

It is definitely good to keep my blog running because it is one of the best ways to relieve my stuffed brain. I rarely get in touch with people and it is bad to keep things within myself, especially my frustration.

However, apart from having lack of time, people around me do give me problems as well. I’m not able to type whatever is in my mind sometimes because I have readers who are stalking my friends. Some people with lower EQ can also quote me out of texts to create problems for me. After all, many things have hit my motivation hard.

Another demoralizing thing is that my plan to move my blog from BlogSpot into my personal domain has stalled for very long. Somehow, I’m quite greedy that I want to keep my existing layout and structure, such that I would need to spend time learning how to edit WordPress template. Recently, updating WordPress for some of my blogs have also given me problems.

I have been tweeting a lot, which auto forwards the statuses to my Facebook, but the limited characters are pathetic. I have tried to forward the tweets over to my blog automatically through Hellotxt but it has shamefully failed me.

I’m a person full of thoughts but I do not have the chance to express myself freely. Blogging is almost the only way for me to become myself. Although it allows people with not-so-good intention to find out more about what is happening around me, it also allows people who are truly concern about me to show their support.

I’m always curious who will still bother to read my blog after so long of idling.

The Expensive Shopping at IKEA

Posted on December 11, 2010 by S

[Wednesday, 8 December, 2010]

After receiving a great guidance from Mike, I started revamping one of my blogs. I had a great challenge trying to work on the Blogger’s Layout. Eventually, I dozed off at around 1pm.

I woke up an hour later to meet up with Mike. I did not take the noodle that my mum bought and left on the table since I was running late. Together, we took cab down to Raeburn Park. We met up with David at the canteen. I had a “lor mai gai”. David started explaining the terms and conditions to us before we went up to Linda’s office to get the paper work done. Mike had a harsh time signing on more than hundred copies of paper.

Since David helped Mike to return the payment first using his cheque book, we went to the ATM machine at Tanjong Pagar to cash out some money to return him. It was pouring heavily again and David dropped us at Bukit Merah. We took a cab over to IKEA after that and thus we were not drenched like the previous time.

The first thing we did was to get an ice-cream each before we started shopping. Since we had already been there to plan what we wanted to get, it was an easier task. We had our dinner at the canteen before we continued with the shopping work.

Since the furniture exceeded $2000, I chipped in my ATM card as well. After paying up at the cashier, we went to the delivery department where we hit our high and low morale within the short time queuing up. We noticed on the wall that wrote postponement of delivery would cause $5 per day for storage purpose. We were so turned off for after trying so hard to save up, we had to foot an extra $50. Then, we looked carefully to realise that the first three days were not counted. Mike was worried that the bright green carpets that we took might not fit our design but we knew that IKEA allowed returning of items to exchange for other items. However, we looked carefully and saw the terms that the items had to be returned in original condition and packaging.

The lady gave us the latest date possible, which was exactly the next Thursday, which was our initial planned date. When we went over to another counter to ask, the staffs ensured us that we could return the carpets if they were not suitable, in order to exchange for other items. Everything went smoothly eventually.

We had an ice-cream each before taking bus 195 to Queenstown MRT station and going home.

Blogger’s Stupid Bot

Posted on May 7, 2010 by S

A programmed bot sometimes does stupid things like having false detection. It simply detects one of my blogs to display popular youtube videos as spam blog and disables it. During the interval of waiting for their staffs to check on it manually, I wonder how much traffic I would lose.

I’m beginning to wonder again how much trust I should put into Blogger in future.

My Carelessness with my Personal Website

Posted on April 20, 2010 by S

[Monday, 19 April, 2010]

Monday was a plain and boring day. I got so bored of working with my portfolio until early morning that I started playing game in the afternoon.

Progress of my portfolio was more visible at night but I got very bored of working on it and also on my daily blog and marketing work.

As I was doing Search Engine Optimisation for my personal website, I realised the footer of my blog was not amended since years ago. I was greatly disappointed with myself for being so careless. Anyway, the Blog’s title on each individual’s post entry page was improved and it would show the entry’s title instead of just my website’s name.

Blogspot – Template and Layout – Reliability

Posted on August 16, 2009 by S

My Saturday was spent quite usefully, except that my efficiency was low.

I manage to get more comfortable with Blogspot’s Layout after switching from Template a couple of times. Layout is a cool application of Blogspot that is much more powerful than the old Template, which is simply straightforward HTML coding with some special strings. Layout improvises a new language of Blogspot, which allows kind of server-side programming before Blogspot generates the plaintext – HTML. There are loop and if-else statements, which I have not had enough time to figure out the syntaxes yet.

Blogspot is, however, not perfect. Professional bloggers would try to host blog in their own webhosts, because some people claim that Blogspot would remove their blogs when they generate too much traffic. I cannot confirm on the statement but I have just experienced a deadly blow a few days ago when one of my blogs was deleted without any notice from Blogspot. Remarks from Google is that the blog consists of malicious coding, which is generated from external script hosted by Bloglinker – a link exchange site that display partners’ links on each other’s site.

From then on, I have lost a great source of traffic, which I have maintained for almost three years. I’m unable to retrieve the database of content. I would reserve my trust for Blogspot after this major setback.

Major Bug Fixed

Posted on July 19, 2009 by S

I just fixed a major bug on my blog last Friday. Due to the fact that I did the development on my own workstation, I had to change a line of code to target the pages. During my last transfer of files, I forgot to change the code and thus, the menu did not work well.

After so long, Soon Siong was the only friend who pointed the bug out to me.

Blogger’s Layout and Niece’s Birthday Party

Posted on October 20, 2008 by S

Last Saturday, a sudden intelligence strike me and I suddenly understood the new Blogger Layout’s coding. I had not heard of any new feature coding for the old Template style and therefore, there was certainly a need to move on to Layout. We had to move on with technologies.

In the late afternoon, I had to put aside my project and accompany my family to my little niece’s birthday party. The location was at Simei and my younger brother decided to take bus instead of the train since he was using concession pass.

We took bus 145 and alighted outside the Central and transited to bus 12. I was ready for the more than one hour journey, took off my spectacle and started dozing by the side of the bus.

We arrived late but were in time for the birthday cake cutting. The ice-cream cake was delicious but was of a little small portion. The food on the table could probably last us for another day. There were chicken wings, satays, fish balls, fish and chicken nuggests, otak, fish cake, eggs, mee hoon, laksa and others.

They had a big dog called Kenneth who wetted my entire hand with his saliva. There were chatting and soon, we switched the television from channel 8 to channel U for my favourite “鹿鼎记”.

At 9.30 PM, we left together with my auntie, cousin and her boyfriend. We walked to Simei MRT and took the opposite direction’s train so that we could get seats on the long journey back to Tanjong Pagar.

Blogger Downtime

Posted on April 16, 2008 by S

Blogger has been quite unstable for the past few days. Navigating around the “Dashboard” using Firefox is slower than Internet Explorer at times. It is definitely inconvenient especially if you are running a few blogs. The downtime has also affected the traffic.

The plan to switch over to WordPress has been a dream since years ago. Priority and urge have been battling throughout me.

Blogger Has Been Giving Problems

Posted on May 7, 2007 by S

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

Blogger certainly has lots of haters that smart asses have been trying to invade it. I used to think Blogger is brilliant until recently it has been giving me serious problems. I conclude that if you have to post many blog entries daily, you have to leave Blogger out as your free provider. People who hardly blog more than once a day are still safe to use it.

I’m still waiting for Mike to get his Singapore server before switching over to WordPress. I have waited for more than half a year already and even Da Zhang has started using it before me. I just have to wait on because I do not want the trouble of transferring files from the existing server to the new Singapore server.

Blogspot’s Problem

Posted on March 21, 2007 by S

[Wednesday, 21 March, 2007]

I demonstrated my hardworking spirit since before the start of the new day. One of the three new fishes that my brother bought was found dead when I tuned my head to the fish tank; it was quite sad. Daylight finally ended my work.

Louis waked me up at around noon for he realised I was holding to the Ang Mo Kio block 219 keys which I had forgotten to return. I thought I could wait till the next week so that I needed not go back to the office just for that.

When I realised I could not get back to sleep anymore, I decided to start the day soon. It was pretty rewarding to stay up till the morning for somehow it aided to my ten-bucks-per-day project. Actually, I was not sure if it really helped.

I spent the afternoon editing photos to update my old blog entries. Besides that, web editing was a routine.

Into late evening, I was dealt a blow when I witnessed the fact that Blogger did not allow too many entries at a day. I saw the verification column but when everything was filled nicely, Blogger logged me out immediately, which could be a bug. This was the first time Blogger was slowing down my development and I was so afraid that my hard work would go into waste any time.

I started chatting and discussing stuffs with Mike. A few friends messaged me as well despite the fact that my MSN was set to “Busy” mode. I did not mind if it was for serious matter or at least a friendly chat, but would definitely be annoyed if someone were to message me just to ask me for assistance.

I went to the bed a few times but waked up very soon after dozing off. Eventually I was up at 11pm, just nice to catch the “Four Famous Constables” on channel 8.

Dear Dreams

Skai Chan

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