The popular Philippine noon-time show, Eat Bulaga, will celebrate its 31st anniversary on Sunday, ironically after the final episode of its competitor, Wowowee.

If you are a Filipino and you lived in the Philippines, it is impossible not to know Eat Bulaga.

Despite the change of channels Eat Bulaga underwent through the decade, many critics say it didn’t change too much of its format with regards to formatting, concepts and games. Maybe it could look that way if you watch the show every single day.

But it does not mean Eat Bulaga did not evolve with the times. They do come up with new concepts like the popular Pinoy Henyo. The show gives away lots of prizes in monetary form or goods. There also have a portion wherein they go to a random house and give away prize money as high as 25,000 pesos.

So maybe the format of the show does not go to far away from its 80s format but it still retains it’s number one goal, which I believe, made it stable along the decades… to make people happy.

Also, no one can beat the tandem of Tito, Vic, and Joey. They’re the legends of good comedy timing and they know how to host a show.

And as long as there are children, Eat Bulaga will be here to say, since I’m pretty sure the parents who also watched Eat Bulaga will make their kids watch them too.

It may not mean much but I really like what I got here. Even if I haven’t taken any formal lessons and I don’t have the equipment to delve into any kind of formal photography training, I’m pretty proud of the outputs I have here. It must be the place, the ambiance, the temporary peace I found within each pictures which made me see something better, clearer … and peaceful… at the right moment.

Click on any of the pictures below to view actual photos.

Amateur Photography

Camera used: Casio Exilim EX-S5 (black)

I wish I could find the same peace again… soon. I need it badly… badly…

What can we do? Such is the phase of technology. You just learned to master a software / technique / skill then a new update comes in to add up or overwhelm what you just learned.

There are already available sneak peaks of Adobe Photoshop CS5 features. Most of these boasts of this Photoshop Content Aware Fill feature, which automatically takes note of surrounding pixels of selected area and will make the necessary adjustments to tone out any ‘flaws’ in a photo.

Check out the videos below to see the feature.

With all these cool vids, I have to agree with what an office mate (and co-web designer) said.

“Trabahong tamad”. (Lazy Work)

LOL

You may view the countdown for the launching of Adobe Creative Suite 5 here!

In any blog tutorial, the first step to create a successful income generating blog is to have a niche. Having a niche will help in focusing the kind of posts you will place in your blog. You will need to recognize what topics you are passionate about in order to not run out of ideas to post. Being passionate will guarantee fun and playtime even while working.

But what if you cannot think of a niche.

Been there, done that. You have no idea how much trial and error (on many subjects) I underwent to arrive on my topic. Before I tell you what my topic is, let me take on a short background of my blogging journey.

Many years have I been blogging about stuff that interests me. I believe I started to blog regularly using a WordPress framework early 2005. I blogged for fun and for archiving of memories. I didn’t even see the need for categories because I perceived my thoughts to be so random I would have too many categories than necessary. I blogged about anything and everything under the sun! My rants, the food I ate, the happenings in the office, my chats with officemates, the ads I saw, etc. Posting was fun and I hardly gave any notice to typos and misspellings. It was my blog anyway. My blog so I am the boss!

Then, I learned all about Google Adsense. From Google ads placed strategically within your blog pages, you could earn money from visitor clicks and page impressions. Naturally, my eyes turned into dollars. I have been blogging for a long time and I knew I had enough blog posts to have search engines notice the existence of my blog.

Boy was I wrong!

Indeed, I had enough posts but they were not quantifiable enough to gain enough traffic for good Adsense output. I researched on how to resolve this issue and I learned the most important part of blogging…

(Good) Content is King.

It was the same time I learned about niche marketing. I also learned about usage of public domain, which anyone could use since content has expired copyright issues, and place it on their site for additional content.

I found public domain for herbal plants and (psychology) of making and saving money.

I made blog categories on herbal plants and money tips. Then I literally copied and pasted each content I found valuable (which are a lot) into my blog.

Sure enough, my blog traffic ranking increased. I registered my blog into some Text Link services and I got to earn a small income every month. It was happy time!

After a few months, an article about Google looking down at duplicate content made me afraid. Duplicate content is a major boo-boo on search engines. It may come to a point a site using duplicate content be banned from search engine (SE) index, which may result to the complete death of a website and any recurring income from it.

My blog has sentimental value to me. Even without high page rank, I didn’t want my blog to be removed from SE’s index page. So to ensure my blog’s safety, I removed all duplicate content I placed in it. With it went the small recurring income I had and my blog ranking went down.

I knew I had to seriously to work on a niche if I ever want to have a recurring income back. I tried to focus on blogging about herbal plants and making money but I realized I easily ran out of steam writing the same subject over and over again. Other than that, I get depressed reading other blogs of the same subject and seeing their high ranking value.

I realized I had been focusing on subjects that weren’t for me.

Many months went by and I couldn’t think of a niche I am passionate to write about. It was a frustrating time. It was drummed in my head I should have a niche if I ever want to take blogging in to the next level.

A few days ago, I leisurely went through blog feeds I subscribed into my Google Feeder. I regularly read updated feeds under category ‘Design Blogs’ since my job entails I should recognize latest web design trends. My other categories are ‘General Blogs’, ‘Money Blogs’, and ‘Winglica’. I only get to read feed updates on these latter categories when I have the time. Under ‘General Blogs’ are feed updates on mostly personal blogs I find interesting to read.

Then I realized, some of these blogs don’t necessarily have a niche topic. They owned personal blogs and yet they were earning extra income that was enough to pay most of their bills! I regarded this as a sign that I was somehow on the right track and I just needed to know how to optimize my posts to gain back higher traffic and bring my ads back.

I researched on ways on how to do this and I landed on these tips:

NOTE: You do not have to follow all of these tips to the letter. Some are optional if you deem them not that important to implement on your blog.

1. Use a search engine optimized theme
For WordPress, there are many SE friendly themes to g o around to. Having a SE optimized team easily makes a “bot”, a SE’s algorithm , to judge if a blog has good data to get into the first page of SE results.

2. Join in communities, forums, and other blogging community
Interacting with other communities will also give traffic to your blog. Talk to other people, gain friends and convert them to become your blog visitors. You can also learn things from them to blog about. Social networking (using Facebook, Twitter, Plurk and other similar tools) can aid with this method.

3. Write! Write! Write!
This is the number one rule in blogging! Content is King! Make sure to write interesting and informative articles so you could have regular followers. Use video and good pictures to add more “jive” to your posts. You could also write an article on your local papers and put a link back to your blog within the author’s bio section. Socialize offline and online and let everybody know of your blog!

4. Make use of “trend” keywords
You may know what keywords to use to optimize your post via Google Trends. A good tip is to use keywords with high traffic rank but with low density value. If you do a keyword search in Google, look at the number of Search Results found at the top-right section of Google search results. Usually you find this results in this following format:


Results 1 - 10 of about [number of competition] for [keyword search]. (time generate for SE results, usually accomplished in seconds)

Look at this for an exact Google Search example:

Google Search Result sample

If your keyword search results in millions of competition, then chances of your post or article to place high in SE results is very slim. So you have to research well on your keywords before making a post.

5. Know the basics of SEO
Whether you like it or not, learning the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) will aid in structuring your post and easily permit a ‘ bot’ see how informative your post is for a specific keyword.

6. Blog on what you are passionate about
This is already self explanatory. To stress the importance of this tip, if you do something you enjoy, work will seem like play. It will be fun and it will help your creative juices to do more and not be frustrated if the outcome is not what you intended it to be. It’s working in a positive note and that is the most important part of all.

7. Blog Frequently
People like constant information on what are interested on. If they feel your blog has become ‘stagnant’ from a long time of ‘blog-sleep’, they might think your blog has died and will not expect anything anymore.

8. Blog for people
Blog for people not for search engines. Also, try to blog with a ‘personal touch’ as if you are directly taking to a person in front of you. People like to feel a sense of companionship and they will stay if they feel that with you. Generating relationship is a good thing to be successful in blogging.

9. Patience is a Virtue
Blogging is NOT a SCAM. Meaning, this is no get-rich scheme. This is the same as any other business venture. It will start out small, slowly build its way up. You will need to work, sweat and maybe spend some sleepless nights on it. When it reaches that level of stability, that is when success will come in. ^_^

If we look at these tips, we can see the progress of correct blogging as so:

- You will write good content for your readers.
- You will optimize your post on search engines by getting some links.
- People will find your post in SE and the links you made.
- People will like your post.
- When people like your post, they will link to it.
- Your post will gain higher ranking for search engines.
- More people will find your content on SE and from links and writings of other people.
- More people will like your post! Woohoo!
- More people will like your content!
And the cycle goes on! Here we go! \o/ (cheers!)

I believe I have found the start of a new path. I need to work on this now and set my goals straight.

Personal blogging it is!

I believe anybody could get a substantial income through blogging even WITHOUT a specific niche in mind. It definitely took me a lot of failures (and a lot of time) to realize this but at least I find a source of inspiration to continue what I’m doing. So don’t be frustrated if you are on the same path as I am. There is still hope!

If you think I missed out a few more tips on optimizing a post for successful blogging endeavour, please do share!

Belle de Jour 2010 planner

I always needed a tangile evidence of my plans.

Something to look at a whole, at a glance, then per detail…

I need an Organizer -slash- Planner -slash- Journal…

I already placed an order for the Belle de Jour 2010 planner. It will be delivered to the office on Monday! Yay!

I guess for any creative output, the individual gets really hyped up to have a perfect product of imagination and ideas.

I delved into this digital scrapbook for a long time. Arranging, re-arranging, deleting and pasting photos, changing texts and erasing them again.

It may not be perfect to some but it is to me.

Wow! This is my second digital scrapbook. But for this one, I think I will have it printed soon to be my first creative image book on cellphone images. Neat!

I’m so happy though that I stumbled upon a site that does digital scrapbooking. It has an easy to use interface wherein you could drag and drop your photos (which you could get from facebook, picasa, photobucket, etc.), edit your images, place on various stickers, letters and other whatnots, publish your scrapbook online, share it on any of your online profiles (e.g. facebook, blogger, myspace, etc.), have the option to print it as a book, postcard or calendar and more!

I absolutely adore it! Go to ScrapBlog.com and enjoy a lot of its features!

Below is my first digital scrapbook in ScrapBlog. Once I reach 20 pages, I will have it printed as a book and delivered to my doorstep for keeps. I really want one!