I hope you don’t mind if I pour myself a cold one while writing this post. You can grab one too and share this one with me.

I’ve been blog browsing because I haven’t found any Entrecard credit contest that hasn’t ended yet. While it’s nice to find out what other bloggers are talking about, there’s a side effect to this. I am now unashamedly admitting that I envy themes that other bloggers use. That once again, for the nth time in my blogging life, I feel the urge… to change my site’s theme.

*sighs and drinks*

I won’t bore you with the details of how I was with every new theme that I installed: like an ecstatic babe with a new toy. Messaging my friends and inviting them over to view my new theme. From the moment I fall in love with a theme, I download it, modify it, install it and then worship it for a month or so until … I tire of it. This theme now is Abstractshylock and I adore the compact look. My only trouble with it is, since it’s a “fixed width 2-column” theme, my readers (and I) have to scroll down, down, down to view my sidebar accessories.

I click my bookmarks to browse ewebscapes.com and think of buying a custom theme designed by Becca Wei, but then again, what if I tire of that too? If anyone wants to design a theme for me ‘free’, you can advertise on my blog for 3 straight months. *winks*

On a positive note, being discontented might be a good thing as this shows how I’m growing as a blogger. I’m getting exposed to others’ work and my blogging knowledge improves.

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No, this I-feel-the-urge-to-change-my-theme is not a metaphor for some other urge I might be feeling now. Though, it could be. *evil grin* But seriously, there are some envy-worthy blogs that I really like and here are some of these:

jdonuts.com - Japan life and culture

Sam freedom - I followed his Entrecard how-to, and voila, visits increased

Girl Geeks Do It Best - I feel physical pain due to envy when I read this blog, primarily because I wasn’t the one who thought of this domain name (afrogtokiss.net…it’s just so cool), and secondly because she proclaims the sentiment that geek girls all over the world have known for a long time… geek girls do it best. Visit her and get hooked, too.

And I wouldn’t have known of these blogs if it weren’t for Entrecard.

:D

Before the promised dating posts, I just want to briefly promote this new blogging promotion strategy that I really like. Entrecard.com enables bloggers big and small to get the chance to promote themselves to other bloggers, including the A-listers and famous ones.

The scheme is simple. Once you sign up with Entrecard and created your widget (logo), you must immediately accumulate credits. How? You visit the other blogs who are members of Entrecard already, and on their sidebar, look for the “E” (Entrecard) widget and “drop” your card. That way, he earns credits and so do you.

What are these credits for? There are campaigns within the Entrecard site that enumerate blogs belonging to different categories. You can see the message “5 (or any number) credits per duration to advertise here” at the bottom of each blog’s logo. If you have en0ugh credits, you can apply for advertising on his site. Note also that there’s a message that says “slots full” or “1 day to advetise here”, which mean that that blogger has a lot of pending requests and if he accepts all those advertisement requests first, it will take a day before it’s your turn to have your logo on his site (IF he accepts your advertisment bid).

The trick to landing the spots on the best blogs will have to be accumulating a lot of credits by (a) letting other bloggers advertise on your site (they pay you in credits per duration), or (b) visit other blogs like crazy and drop your cards on all of ‘em. The more active a blogger is with this scheme, the more expensive his ad slots become. So the really popular ones will want 50-100 credits or more for you to advertise on their sites.

But it’s all in CREDITS, no real money involved!!! And in the process, people will be visiting your site looking if they’ve already dropped their cards on your widget (the message “thanks” appears if they did already), and you will be visiting theirs to see if you have dropped your card already.

Traffic… lots of traffic. In fact, I’ve been inviting friends to join with the promise of doubling their pageviews on their first few days alone. I won’t spout that kind of guarantee if I haven’t tried it myself. Traffic from Entrecard members is great!

One other tip I could think of is making your logo as cute as possible. Other bloggers may want your logo in their blogs if it’s elegant, even if they don’t really like the category your site belongs to. The default templates are attractive enough, but there’s an option to place your own 125×125 image, so make it a good one. Important note: your logo that appears on other blogs’ sidebars links directly to your blog. So, no going back to entrecard to view your site, unless it’s the “E” logo that they click.

In the case that they click the “E” logo, the entrecard site page that appears belongs to the one who actually owns the blog that housed your logo. There’s an option there to “write a recommendation for this site” which means that letting other people’s logo in a blog site will also fetch reviews for the blog owner.

Confused? Just give it a try, will you. Be visiting your blogs soon!!! *waves*

This is where you get the cool friendster designs

There’s a debate in my mind on which is more popular, Friendster or Multiply. I have visited a lot of Friendster logs and sites, and even more Multiply sites, and finally reached a conclusion: both have wide audience bases but multiply offers a lot more in terms of personalization.

With that said, I still like Friendster better because it’s more user-friendly. The prompts for inviting and looking for old and new friends are easier to work with in Friendster.

Back to Multiply, I like it that their sites look like actual blogs (Whatta, they ARE blogs!). Navigating the site can be a bit confusing because everyone has a unique way of organizing their templates. Some of the more gregarious multiply sites I have encountered look a lot like photos everywhere, videos here and there, all-comments pages.. etc. But what the heck, it’s YOU! That’s how you like it, that’s how it should be. Luckily, your own friends may always understand how you think so that they will know exactly how to navigate your page.

Commenting and reviewing. This is a feature that I’d really like for Friendster to adopt. Though comments/testimonial pages in Friendster (and shout outs) are nice, Multiply has this chat-slash-review capability that allows the author to actually interact with his audience. It’s like a shoutbox, but with photos.

I could go on and on about the similarities and differences, but these are the most striking ones I noticed.

Find friends according to race of preference:
Filipinos - Asians - German - Latino - French - Chinese - India - Italian - Jewish - Korean
Find friends according to hobbies, interests and age:
Seniors (40 yo++) - Fitness Minded - Success Driven - Food and Dining Enthusiasts

The average person’s internet curiosity is high, but the know-how is low. Anyone wants a place in the net, but the technical details make creating an internet presence tedious. I have been through all that:signing up for blogs in publishers (such as blogspot or wordpress);looking for themes that fit my personality; dressing up and editing themes to suit my needs; and developing an over-all package for my blog.

The more frustrating side of blogging is conquering your technical limitations. Not everything is presented in a neat little menu. There are times that you will have to deal with scripts and html, and what-not.However, one must always put the goal on top of everything, and that is having a venue for self expression. With that in mind, everything else should be marginally easy.

I also learned that in the net, most of the free things are DYIs (do-it-yourself). Most offers for hassle-free webbie building come in expensive packages. To the budget-aware blogger, this is not even an option. I’ve come up with a few tips to help out the new ones. Or the ones that have been at it for a long time and would like to be amused on how a non-techie goes through these blogging stuff.

Hassle-free blogging is a dream. This site is my effort to make it come true.

If you know a friend of yours with a website (like mine. http://evilwoobie.com), it’s easy enough to let them host your blog, if their space will allow it. Hopefully, it will be free.

In essence, you blog will be a subdomain of the main website, and is thus also subject to the ups and downs of the site parent. Example, your friend’s hosting service provider has server problems, the main site and all of the subdomains experience all these at the same time.

Make sure your friend pays his hosting dues. But being a good friend and a subdomain owner, I suggest you pitch in on his/her investment. The usual payment cycle in most of the providers I’ve viewed is annually. Do ask your friend if he plans on renewing his contract with the provider or will pay the next cycle of the domain name. If he doesn’t, your beautiful blog will disappear.

My blog http://woobie.pinoygaming.net is being hosted by pinoygaming. That’s another tip. It’s usually nice to blend the overall genre of your blog with that of your host. In my case, I’m a gamer, and that blog mostly talks about my gaming. So the main domain’s name “pinoygaming.com” fits, and gives surfers an idea on what my blog will be about.

This is a nice way to move out of the generic blog host options, such as yourname.blogspot.com. It will give you more identity, without the nitty-gritty of managing your own site. It helps if you maintain a very good relationship with the administrator of the main site, as your blog’s health will depend on that.