Blogging is sweet when other bloggers acknowledge us. Blogging is sweet when we received some awards. Blogging is sweet when we have tags assigned to us. So, for those sweet bloggers who made this blog sweeter than ever, I am now answering tags and accepting the awards that you have given.

Cautions! Long post ahead!

A Special Post

Terima Kasih Untuk Kisah Beruang: This is a thank you post from KongsiBlog.com. A blog that goes around with a “Aku Bukan Seorang Artis Malaysia” (I am not a Malaysian artist) tagline. A very catchy tagline indeed.

Anyway., that’s his way of saying thank you for my visits and my help (I honestly could not remember how have I helped him). So, for that sweet effort, I am mentioning his post here as an honor that was well given and received. Thank you!

Award # 1

The Friendship Flower Award: This award is given by Windmill On The Hill. It comes with:

And lovely are the blossoms
That are tended with great care,
By those who work unselfishly
To make the place more fair.
And, like the garden blossoms,
Friendship’s flower grows more sweet
When watched and tended carefully
By those we know and meet.
And, if the seed of friendship
Is planted deep and true
And watched with understanding,
Friendship’s flower will bloom for you.

And I have to pass this to 7 blogging friends. So, I am going to give it to 10 latest commenter on my blog and they are:

1. ArZeq.com 2. Tekkaus 3. snv~ 4. The Temple Of Irreverance 5. Unlimited Bonoriau Weblog 6. Teens Make Money Online 7. Blog Zool Ligakampung 8. Taukey.com 9. BioTeck.NET 10. The Kaki Bangku

The rules for accepting this award are:

1. Copy the badge and put it on your blog.  2.  Link back who passed you this tag.  3. Spread this tag to at least 7 or more bloggers who you think you are friend with.

Thank you!

Award # 2

Cuties Award: This award is received from Stories in Life. I am going to pass this to the next 10 recent commnter on this blog but before that I have to give 10 facts about me. 1. They call me Papa Bear.  2. I love Mama Diah, my wife.  3. I love Pasha, my son.  4. I love my blog.  5. I love to doze off in a meeting.  6. I love to doze off while driving.  7. I love to eat  8. I hate doing tags.  9. I hate diet.  10. I am trying to exercise. See how easy it is to list 10 facts about me.

Now this award goes to:

1. Life is Simple! 2. Sawanila.com 3. lankapo.com 4. SufianPC 5. Aku dan Duniaku 6. my life 4 hire 7. Sweet Thinker 8. KNizam Artwerk 9.  Hot Shit Form Here 10. Geek’s Corner

The rules for accepting this award are:

1. Copy the badge and put it on your blog.  2. Link back who passed you this tag.  3. Each blogger starts with ten random facts/habits about themselves.  4. Bloggers that are tagged need to write ten facts about themselves.  5. You need to choose ten people to tag and list their names.  6. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’ve been tagged and also to read your blog.

Thank you!

Award # 3

Spread The Love Award: This award is given by ~Thoughts For Women~. Now this love is going over to (randomly selected):

1. The Arts of Fight 2. My Tramping View 3. I’m Richie 4. Adsense Alternative 5. azwanhadzree 6.  The Fitness Diva 7. Cashmere 8. Callister’s Little World 9. Ch@l!Zone 10. Hidup Biar Sedap

The rules are simple:

1. Copy the badge and put it on your blog.  2.  Link back who passed you this tag.  3. Spread this tag to at least 10 or more bloggers.

Thank you!

Note:

To others who frequent this blog but did not receive any of the award above, do not feel bad as it would be impossible for me to choose all of you and it would be impossible for me to select according to any criteria. Random selection is the best and those are the blogs that came up during the selection. That’s why I hate to give award…

Anyway, in other words, all of you are special as well!

People who arrived at this page were looking for:

I have just received another payment from myLot for my posting activities in November 2008. Why do I choose mLot even though many bloggers are telling me that there are other paid-to-post sites that are paying more out there? The answer is really simple. Here are the list of why myLot is my choice:

Firstly, in myLot, you can write about almost anything for as long as you are not writing something that is against or violating the provided guidelines. Most other paid-to-post sites require that you write your article based on a certain categories or based on the assignment given to you with a certain dateline. I am no good with assignments as I write what and when I want to write.

Then, on some other sites, the amount that you can earn is pretty much fixed whereas the amount that you can earn on myLot is dependent directly on your own effort. The more your write and the better quality your writing is would be translated to your earnings. 

On some sites, you would only get paid if your postings are voted by other people, If no one votes on your posting, you would not be getting anything. On myLot, it does not really matter if you your posting are read or not as the post itself is already counted to receive some earnings.

These are just some of the reasons why I choose to post on myLot and not other sites. In summary, the flexibility and the less formal environment on myLot are the main criteria that I considered.

If you are looking for a light and easy paid-to-post site, join me on myLot by clicking here!

Related Posts:

myLot Pays
Side Income with myLot

It is good to be back after a few days away due to the celebration of Aidil Adha recently. I have been receiving a few queries on how to put the link to my RSS feed using the widget at the bottom right of this blog page and therefore, I might as well share it with all of you who wants to have that as well.

Before I go on, please take note that I am not a programmer and therefore, my explanation would not go beyond my limited technical knowledge. Furthermore, I found this piece of code while hopping around from one blog to another and I could not remember where I learned this but this method was mentioned in a few blogs out there. So, blog hopping is not really a waste of time after all…

This method is the simplest that I have found so far. The other method that I learned was more complex and required that you have access to your hosting server. So, for the benefit of those who are not self hosted, I have decided to teach you this simple coding and it is what I am using too.

CAUTIONS: I am not responsible for any damage to your blog so do this after you have backed up your code and at your own risk!

Below is the code that you need to copy to your HTML file.

<div style="display:scroll;position:fixed;bottom:5px;right:5px;">
<a href="http://your own URL here" title="your own title here">
<img style=border="0" src="the location of your image file here" alt="your own text here"></a></div>

You need to copy this code right after the <body> tag if you want to load it first or before the </body> tag if you want to load it last, in your HTML file. If you do not know how to do that, I suggest that you go and read a bit about your theme file / HTML file as without that basic, I do not recommend that you touch it.

After you have copied the code above, replace the part as indicated in the code above with your own URL as well as your own image location. The texts are optional but it would be nice of you to add them in.

You can experiment with the location of the image by changing the value starting from the "display and before the closing ".

You may need to press F5 if nothing happened after you have updated your HTML file and if still nothing happenen after that, you must have done something wrong. This should work on any self hosted wordpress blog as well as any Blogger blog. I have no knowledge about any other blog platform out there.

Another thing to note is, if you have copied the code above to your Notepad, just pay attention to the ” sign as Notepad tends to change it and it would not work if you just copy from it directly. Just retype all the ” and you will be okay.

That’s all for now and enjoy your new skill.

Notice that this time the title does not say Top 10 but only Top EC and that is because starting this month,  I would be displaying top 25 Entrecard droppers on this blog. However, only the top 10 would get their banner displayed while the rest would only get a text link to their blogs.

There you go! The top 10 droppers. Random Ramblings, Bioteck, Lainy’s Musing, Joan Joyce, Kuerdas, The Fitness Diva, Windmill on the hill, The Natural State Hawg maintained their presence at the top spot. Last month, two new blogs made it to the Top 10 and they are Online Social Networking and Steven Humor.

The rest of the blogs that made it to the 11^th to 25^th positions are:

Sports 2000, Life is Simple, Crotchety Old Man, Nazham.com, Ask Ms Recipe, My Review, My Notes, Toltec Insights with Dr. Susan Gregg, Money Saving Pro, Work at Home, Spicybugz World, Look Around, Reenashwina, Time Recursion and Angels on Your Shoulder.

Thanks to all who have been actively coming over to Kisahberuang.com and thanks to those who do not make it to this month top 25 list as well and hope that you would be in my December 2008 list.

Today I feel like sharing about my Twitter and what do I use it with. Twitter is one of those so called micro blogging tools  and the only other similar thing out there is Plurk. I have seen Plurk with its fancy time line display stuffs but somehow I am still sticking to Twitter, which I find simpler and more straight forward. Furthermore, with the number of followers that I have right now, it would make it harder for me to move away from it.

Here are the tools or programs that I am currently using to complement my Twitter:

TwitterFox – I just need to see what are my friends and and the people I follow talk about and it would be not practical for me to log in to my Twitter account and refresh it all the time to see the latest tweet. With TwitterFox, an add-on to Firefox, this is done automatically and I have the option to reply as well as put in my own tweet. This is a must have for those who are following the tweets.

TweetLater – This is a powerful program that allows you to schedule your tweets, auto follow those who follow you and many more things. So far I only use this to auto follow those who follow me and send welcome and thank you message to my new follower.

TwitterCounter – This is for the vain pots out there. It gives you a little counter that you can add to your blog as display the number of folowers that you have. I have it installed at the footer of this blog. It does not do anything much but it is a nice little thing to show on a blog.

FriendOrFollow.com – This site helps me manage my Twitter contacts. I use it to review those people who I followed but not following me back and it gives me the option to remove those people from my list. It is very useful for doing housekeeping on your Twitter. There you can find, 1-People who don’t follow me back. 2-People I don’t follow back. 3. Mutual Follow.

Magpie – Last but not least, why not make some money while you tweet. This is an affiliate program that let you tweet some paid advertisements using your Twitter account based on your own preferences. I have made Euro1.96 so far on this. It is free to join but the competition is high and it takes time to get something there.

Well, you do not have to do anything but just use your Twitter as you always do.

There you go! Do let me know if you have are using or know any other Twitter related stuffs that I should have. Happy tweeting my fellow twitters!  To those who wants to follow me, just click on the blue bird ya!

I love blogging but in order to blog I need a domain and a hosting service. I do not like free blogging platforms such as Blogger because I just don’t like it and it does not like me too and I am not kidding. I also need an internet connection to blog at home and all of that needs money.

So, traffic means money. More traffic means more money. People often said you need contents to get traffic and then you make money. Well, I said, that is true. But I also want to say that you need money to have a blog so that you can put in your contents. In the end, it would be a chicken and egg situation.

Before chicken and egg becomes omelet with chicken meat, and this post become irrelevant, let me go back to this post about getting traffic to your blog.

There is a new program in the blogging world and it is called Adgitize. If you are familiar with Entrecard, then this is something almost similar in the sense that it is about getting traffic to your blog. Some people said that it would be competing against Entrecard but I said it would just complement it.

There are some differences between Adgitize and Entrecard but the differences that I want to highlight are:

1. You need to pay to advertise in Adgitize but you use credits to advertise in Entrecard.
2. You advertise on specific blog on Entrecard but your ads will go to all blogs in the Adgitize network.
3. You only get traffic while using Entrecard but you can get traffic and money while using Adgitize.

Those are the main difference that I know or want to know and if you need further details, just go to Adgitize.

Well, since this is about traffic, let me update you on my Mission Alexa. My rank has taken a little dip and this could be related to some busy time at work as well as unexplainable laziness during the weekends that caused me to be less active online. The Alexa ranking has dropped from 124,364 to 125,308 as of today.

However, the good news is in the chart below:

The ranking in Malaysia has gone up from 3,805 to 3,479! Anyway that’s the only good news as the other rankings have gone down especially the United States.

Hey, has this got something to do with the financiial crisis over there?

For the past few weeks I have been reading about Alexa on many blogs that I have visited. So, I have been asking around about what it is all about.  After a few replies that I have got from some friendly bloggers out there, now I know that Alexa is generally about traffic to our blogs.

I love traffic. I am just like one of those people who built super highways and then collect tolls from the users. The only different is that while it is mandatory to pay the tolls on the highway, it is not required here since your toll would be paid by the sponsors. And, my “toll” is not a fixed amount too…

Never mind, sometimes, I am not completely sure about what I talked or wrote here so just let it be. especially this post came after reading some stuffs at Alexa…

Anyway, back to Alexa. Kisahberuang.com has a traffic rank of 124,364. Not that bad for a less than a year old blog when compared to some blogs that are still in its million.

Then I went on further reading the stats and love to see all the green arrows on the 3 mos. Change column there.

Then, at the end of the stats, I saw that note: *Daily values are not available for sites ranked outside of the Top 100K.

That’s what Mission Alexa is going to be about. I am going to aim for Daily Values to be available on my Alexa stats. That could take years or forever but that will be the mission!

Kisahberuang.com must reach top 100K on Akexa!

Now back to some stats again.

Now I know why my Nuffnang ads revenue are not that hot. My Malaysian traffic is only 11.2%.  So I need to get more Malaysian to come over here. I hope that they are not staying away because I do not write in Malay…

Well, nevertheless, Kisahberuang.com is ranked quite high as far as Malaysia is concerned and that is good. So. let’s see what will happen next week.

See ya!

I love Firefox not because many claim that it is the safest web browser in the world. To me, there is no such thing as safe surfing on the internet. It is just like there is no such thing as a car that is totally safe to drive. You just need to be careful and not do some stupid things while you are at it.

At the same time, many claim that Firefox is the fastest web browser in the world. There is some truth in that statement when running it side by side to the fat Internet Explorer from Microsoft. However, when it is timed against Google Chrome, that opinion might not really hold 100% as some sites are loaded faster on Chrome compared to Firefox.

So, if those are not the reason to fall in love and to be still in love with a fox that is on fire, what is it then?

Well, it is none other than the Add-ons! Those little programs that hop into the back of the fox and make its fire hotter are the answers. Now I am going to share with you what Add-ons I have on my Firefox 3.0.3:

1. Download Statusbar – I use this download management add-on a lot for downloading pictures, plug-ins for my blog as well as some other things that I need to download. I chose this because it does not give me one of those big download windows that pop-up on your face when you are dwonloading something.
2. Downloadhelper – This add-on is primarily used to download YouTube videos to my hard disk so that they can be viewed offline. An FLV player is needed to play those video or you can install a video converter program and get this add-on to convert it to the format that you want automatically.
3. Entrecard Toolbar – I am an Entrecard member and this one helps me to do my daily drop.
4. Extended Statusbar – I like the status bar on Opera web browser and finally I found this. It shows percentage of the page loaded, number of loaded images, bytes downloaded, average download speed and load time. It is more for fun than anything else.
5. FireFTP – FTP program is a must have for those running their own sites. So, instead of installing a separate FTP program, I use this add-on and it has done nothing but wonders so far.
6. Flagfox – It displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and web server information. For example, if your site/blog is on Blogger, then the US flag will appear. If you load this blog, the Malaysian flag will appear.
7. Gspace – Not G-spot! This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host. I have never actually used this so far.
8. Linky – A handy tool if you need to open multiple links on a page into multiple tabs and then you can visit them one by one. You are going to be sure that you would not miss a link.
9. Resurrect Pages – This one performs like magic. Dead pages, broken links, the scourge of the internet. Powerhouse sites like Slashdot and Digg can bring a server to its knees. What do we do when a page is dead but we still want to see it? Call in the clerics, and perform a resurrection ceremony! Or, the easier route, use this extension. I had even managed to copy some entries from my defunct blog at Modblog using this.
10. SeacrhStatus – A quick way to view that PageRank and Alexa rank of the site/blog that you are visiting. It displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and other SEO tools.
11. Tweak Network – I was using Fasterfox on Firefox 2 before and it is still in the experimental stage form Firefox 3. Therefore, I switched to this. With Tweak Network, you can tweak these settings, and you might be able to speed up the loading of web pages. You can also increase the maximum number of simultaneous downloads from a site (the default is only four). Please bear in mind that it can not do anything if the bottleneck is your own internet connection.
12. TwitterFox – I need to see what people that I follow on Twitter are doing and talking about. This is the best tool to do that so that I don’t miss a tweet.
13. Zemanta – An excellent blogging companion for me. Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.

There you go! What about you?

If you are not a Firefox user, you can go here.

It is a great honor for a blogger to have visitors to his or her blog and it is an even greater honor if the visitors left some comments after reading the posts. However, many visitors would just come and go and only a few would really read and comment.

Due to that, I have been looking around the blogsphere for ways to reward people who took the trouble to read and leave comments. I have seen many ways from different bloggers but I am impressed with they way Bonoriau rewards his first commenter. He would put up your banner on the spot dedicated to the first commenter.

So, based on that, I looked around for a nice spot to put a 125 x 125 banner on this blog. I needed a spot that provide good visibility to others who read and comment on this blog and I found one. The spot is right below the shoutbox and next to the Google Adsense ads and right above the Entrecard drop box. I could not have any better space to give away at this time.

So, my visitors, from now on you are going to be rewarded for your comment. The first commenter to the latest post will get his or her banner (125 x 125) displayed on this blog for FREE! You may put your own ads or whatever you want there for as long as there is no bad stuffs.

So, here is a short FAQ on how this reward works.

Do I need to have my own 125 x 125 banner to get the reward?

No. If you are a member of Entrecard, I will use your Entrecard banner for that spot. If you are not an Entrecard member, you can include the link to your 125 x 125 banner in your comment and I will put that up. If you are an Entrecard member but wish to use a different banner you may also include the link to your other banner in your comment. If you do not have or do any of the above, I will take a thumbnail shot of your blog and put it on the spot.

How long will it take for my banner to appear?

I can’t promise you the time. I am doing this manually in order to avoid spammers. My time is GMT +8. If I received your comment and I am still on my blog, you banner would be up within a short time. If I am already asleep when you put in your comment, it would take a longer time for your banner to be up. So, try to comment when the post is still hot.

How long will my banner be displayed?

For as long as there is no new entry posted on this blog. The total time displayed would be between the time I put your banner up and the time I posted a new post. For your information, I normally update my blog with a new post on daily basis. Sometimes, during weekends, I do not post and you may get a longer time for your banner.

Is there any catch to this reward?

None! This is free and you will not be asked to do anything. All you need to do is be the first commenter.

What if my question is not answered here?

Please contact me by filling up a form here.

Kisah beruang.com loves to sponsor high profile contests and this is one of those contests that offer lots of interesting prizes to the winners.

I have sponsored 1000 Entrecard credits out of the total 76000 Entrecards credits offered as prizes.

Among the other great prizes to be won are blog templates, banners, logos, reviews, e-books and ad spaces for you to advertise your blogs.

The contest is titled Lets Win This Contest Together – Season 2 by Shanker Bakshi dot com.

The contest will run throughout November 2008 and the winner will be announced on 1st December 2008.

If you love participating in blog contests and want to win any of the prizes that are being offered, click here for details. All the best to all of you!

PS: Need Entrecard credit sponsor for your blog contest? Contact me!