Last July 31, 2009, Google sent my Google AdSense PIN to the shipping company. The other day, I received my PIN (as seen above with the most significant piece of my address concealed)!

In my case here in Quezon City, Philippines, I received my PIN just a day after the lower bound of the expected time of arrival (15 days). I’ve heard that delivery time is highly variable from place to place.

Can you share how long it took your Google AdSense PIN to arrive home?

Today is the last day of submission of entries for the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2009 writing project. The goal of this project is to recognize blogs that are gradually gaining readership and influence.

Here’s my list in no particular order. (drumroll)

One of my Plurk friends posted, Good Times Manila is tantamount to epic laughter.

When I first read an article in the website, I was rolling on the floor laughing + laughing my ass out + laughing out loud. I was fooled about the Joebert Sucaldito article. I really thought it was true until I read his disclaimer.

Are you into video blogging? Video Chops, in my opinion, is the authority when it comes to video blogging. The blog also have updates on vlog contests.

Hay! Men! Ang Blog na Tunay na Lalake caught the public attention even in it’s early stages. It became so viral that they are now selling Tunay na Lalake t-shirts. The blog also set a manifesto of a Tunay na Lalake.

Numbrd is a blog with a twist. It is a blog of photos and numbers.

Do you love dining? Patay Gutom is a great buddy when searching for places to dine. Just don’t expect to find carenderias here. LOL.

Lakwatsero is Batang Yagit‘s travel blog. He blogs his getaway experiences inside and outside Metro Manila the Philippines.

Adaphobic is a blog of mixed topics. The blogger behind Adaphobic shares her experiences in life, photography and other stuff.

Shortlisting potential travel or dining destinations? You may consider reading Let’s Go Sago’s experiences in his previous travels.

The Singing Blogger is a repository of recordings of Singing Blogger. He regulary posts recordings for you to watch hear out.

The Thirsty Blogger is one of a kind! It’s a blog all about beverages to quench your thirst.

This writing project would not have been possible without the support of Absolute Traders, My Brute Cheats, Business Summaries, Fitness Advantage Club, Events and Corporate Video, Events at Work, Dominguez Marketing Communications, Red Mobile and Blog4Reviews.com

The Mindanao Bloggers Summit 3 is obviously the third blow of the annual Mindanao Bloggers Summit.

The first Mindanao Bloggers Summit was held at Davao City last 2007 hosted by The Usual Suspects. The second summit was held last year on my hometown, General Santos City hosted by Soccsksargen Bloggers. This year’s summit will be held on no less than Cagayan de Oro City to be hosted by CDOBloggers.

I’m really looking forward to this annual event. I hope that it will fall on the semestral break of the revised school calendar so that I can fly to Mindanao in time for the event. I can’t afford to miss it!

So far, I have attended the two summits and even had the chance to have a super informal shout-out on one of them.

Mindanao Bloggers, see you there!

Some three days ago, I was complaining to RapidVPS that my websites were loading really slow. I logged on to my server thru SSH and checked the server load. To my amazement, it was on it’s 300+ mark. Way above my 1.00 average. The servers running my account could have been boiling by that time.

It was around 7 hours after my first ticket when they responded. They gave me a very surprising surprise. RapidVPS permanently suspended my hosting account after it sent mass-mails to tons of people, thus spiking the server load which was detrimental to their services. They said my data was too risky to host. Up to now, I don’t know how it happened. As far as I knew, I did not have any cron job on that account. Someone might have sneaked in to my server and ran a really bad script using my account.

So I was forced to host a 503 (maintenance) page thru DreamHost to avoid search engines to remove my pages from the index while waiting for the backup of my files to be sent back to me. It took me around 36 hours to get a reply. By the 40th hour, I got a link to a tarred file of my backups. I immediately logged in thru my A Small Orange (ASO) account thru SSH and wget-ted the file. Sadly, I can’t untar the file on my ASO server since I only had very limited web space. Tandandandan.

What I did was I sent a request to A Small Orange to untar my files and copy the files for The Geek Brewery to the root of conradmiguel.com. I also asked them to import my SQL databases. Within five minutes, I got a reply. They were willing to help me out even if it was not part of my subscription. A Small Orange, FTW!

DreamHost and A Small Orange Promo Codes

The Geek Brewery is hosted at A Small Orange again, whilst my other websites are on DreamHost! It’s surely time to celebrate. That’s why I am giving out DreamHost and A Small Orange promo codes.

THEGEEKBREWERY DreamHost Promo Code

Use THEGEEKBREWERY promo codes and get $97 off on a one-year unlimited web space and bandwidth order. That’s $119.40 – $97 = $22.40 a year or roughly $1.90 a month. It comes with a free domain, woot!

THEGEEKBREWERY A Small Orange Promo Code

You may also use THEGEEKBREWERY at A Small Orange and get $5 off on any order. It’s quite small but A Small Orange is more than worth the price. You get super fast support, faster than DreamHost and RapidVPS. Plus, they have plans for as low as $25 a year. The Geek Brewery is on a Medium Orange plan worth $10 a month. All of their plans come with a free domain!

I’ll be staying at A Small Orange, hahaha.

I have upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.8 codenamed Baker, thanks to Twitter’s (follow me) trending topics option. I upgraded my blog manually by uploading the latest WordPress tar file on my website’s root folder and untar-ing it on my server thru SSH. It was my first time to access my web server thru SSH as I only had my shell access activated today.

The upgrade process went smoothly. Since I already had access to my web server’s shell, I was able to fix all security issues especially the permissions stuff. The process of changing the permissions was smooth, I just used issued the chmod 755 /wp-includes /wp-admin -R command.

One of my favorite features introduced in WordPress 2.8 is the syntax highlighting (they call it CodePress). It’s easier to identify functions, html tags, attributes and parameters now. One thing I don’t like in CodePress though is that it doesn’t produce a tab (the whitespace) when the TAB button is pressed, instead it shifts its focus to the next clickable element just like before. An autocomplete feature for CodePress would also be a very great idea.

Other new features are the theme browser, improved screen options and some speed optimizations.

The only problem I encountered was when making a post, specifically saving it (even as a draft). It dumps the following error: Fatal error: Call to undefined method SearchSpider::_weak_escape() in /some_path/here on line 478. After Googling the problem, I learned that it was caused by the Search Unleashed plug-in. I had no other choice but to disable it.

Build that Geek is now The Geek Brewery! And there’s more, The Geek Brewery is now on a slicker, neater and cooler theme than before!

The Geek Brewery has the following promises:

• lesser ads!
• more juicy content!
• more user interaction!
• and many more…

You can now see a more detailed archive of this site on my archives page. There’s still the contact page in case you need to contact me.

Have fun and expect more on the days to go.

Anyway, do you want to win a MacBook Pro?  Just sign up @ eYP and read the mechanics there. Promo is valid to Philippine citizens residing in the Philippines.

iBlog is an annual gathering of bloggers to discuss state of blogging in the country and other sorts of stuff. There are also lots of informative talks, both for new and old bloggers.

This year’s iBlog is more successful in terms of attendance. I met a lot of new bloggers but unfortunately I was not able to remember all of their names and URLs.

That’s it. My very short and boring iBlog post.

For my loyal and not-so-loyal (shall I include bypassers?) readers, you may have noticed that this blog was offline. My web host suspended my account after NOT paying the bills three days after the due date.

So what happened?

• Actually, I was expecting that there’s still enough money in my PayPal account, which happens to be the latter.
• I’ve prepared for the situation above. I’ve linked a debit card to my PayPal account so that it automagically debits funds from the card whenever my PayPal funds go low.
• So why did it still happen? Wahahaha. Still, my bank account (linked to my debit card), also, did not have enough funds to fund it up.

It’s hilarious. And guess what? How much do I lack in my PayPal account to have it paid? Less than $0.50! Wahahahaha. $0.50 costed this blog around two-digit dollars of earnings.

The moral of the story? Check PayPal and bank accounts at least once every 15 days.

I still can’t believe it happened to me. Amf.

As you can see above, I’ve only done the header part (actually, the footer too). The main contents area is not finished yet. I’m planning to relocate my sidebar somewhere on the bottom part. Basically, the screenshot above would be far from the end-result.

The screenshot above is open for suggestions and criticisms. If you have brilliant ideas out there, just share it to me.

Thanks.

I posted just to let you know I’m still alive

I’m currently on the process of removing clutter in this blog in almost all aspects, from the technical slash geek side down to the content. I’m planning to do this project for the entire month of January. I intended to dedicate that much time because I don’t want to set an unrealistic goal as I always did for the past few years. Those unrealistic goals just brought me disappointments to myself, and I don’t want that to happen.

In this post, I’ll be sharing my insights on my initial stage of the big revamp. I hope you’ll share yours, too.

Paid Reviews; those were the days

While reviewing my old blog posts (mark the useless ones for deletion), I’ve realized that it’s been a very long time since I made  a paid review. It was still dated April 17, almost 9 months ago. To my last count, I made 10 of them. From those eleven, one signifact thing I learned aside from having my Pagerank penalized by Google was that I make superb reviews. To further strenghthen the statement, let me boast my success in a local review-writing contest.

Those were the days. I earned a lot from them but it costed my blog’s Pagerank and credibility. To date, I don’t have any plans to continue writing paid reviews for stuff I haven’t really tried. I’m planning to focus more on making good and credible content.

Poor Layout

Lately, I’ve been reading web design and web development websites. I sure grasped a lot of good lessons and ideas from the experts. Reviewing the layout of my blog, I saw a lot of aspects I’ve overlooked; as follows:

1. The search form was not that visible right away. When users get lost, they usually look for the search form. My search form before was stuck on the middle of my sidebar making it hard to see. I decided to relocate it on the most prominent part of the sidebar, the topmost area.
2. The area above the fold was a total disaster. The area above the fold refers to the first area seen after pageload. My initial remedy was to remove the big advertisement block. I’m planning to reduce the height of my top horizontal navigation bar soon.
3. What’s clickable, what’s not? On some areas of the blog such as the top horizontal navigation bar, it was unclear which part was clickable or not. Initial action taken was to put an underline below the clickable text.
4. Advertisements were everywhere. Yes they were. Remedy was to put advertisements only on profitable posts.

A Better Theme from scratch while maintaining a same old feel

I’m thinking of making another theme for this blog while maintaining the same old feel. Maintaining the feel would be hard but as much as possible I’d try to.

Interesting topics?

Let’s hear it from you. You suggest any topic to be discussed here, who knows I might be interested on writing something about that, too. It’s okay if it’s not a geek stuff, I’ll try my best to put a geek touch on it. (laughs)