For someone who works in front of the computer all of the time, I am naturally prone to have a less active lifestyle in pursuit of a greater good. I serve people whom I care, I devote my time with them to be productive, and I think a lot of ways to have a pleasant future. Now, even though I’m just working inside the four corners of my room, it comes with some health risks as well, a gray area that I’m increasingly worried about: my health. The nature of my work have caused me to live a sedentary lifestyle – and I don’t like it.

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Previously I have mentioned that me and my online friend Brad from Melbourne have decided to launch a podcast program called Tech Webcast.  Well, the program is not actually exclusive to us (in fact, I only did a few episodes). The good thing was that it united some Aussie, Filipino and American self-proclaimed geeks and made the program touch a wide range of topics from computer, current events, up to personal lives of hosts. That being said, Brad and I made Episode 8 of Tech Webcast in the past week.

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I was very happy to know that my online friend Brad from Melbourne, Australia, finally got a web hosting account. Since 2006, he has been actively blogging using Wordpress.com’s free blogging service. He finally broke that record when he decided to purchase a Rudolf Mini hosting plan from Top Hosting Center. Now, he names his blog “Brad’s Blog” dot ORG and it appears crappy for the moment but will improve over time. It’s really weird for me because he chose to register for a .ORG than to pick another domain name (the .NET and .COM versions of his domain were already taken, which could have been better).

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 I just had a quick search today about "Top Hosting Center" (known as THC) on Google to know the latest buzzes about the web host I am with. I’m currently using their Speedy hosting plan and so far I got excellent performance to this blog perhaps of the enhanced SEO effect of the dedicated IP address that it came free with. The results on Google search towards THC are mostly positive, except one thing — there was an emphasizing post written by Aahz, a current customer of Top Hosting Center, with his blog website Philaahzophy.com that was stumbled purposively on StumbleUpon.com. I am not sure if he meant to write it to tell the truth, or he could have written it just for traffic’s sake. I’m a happy THC customer, and based on my hosting experience, I could say this blogger is shooting blanks to the best web hosting company I could ever find nowadays  — and guess what — I’m not alone!

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If you have the confidence, the right tools and the creative will to put a live streaming video on your web blog (or any of the sites you own), there is already a free solution for you.

Basically, you need to have a working web camera to participate. I used a digital video camera (Sony HC19E PAL) with USB streaming feature to act as my webcam and I put it on a cheap tripod I bought from CDR-King.

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For three days starting May 2 next month, bloggers inclined towards online business and marketing will meet in Chicago, United States, for an annual conference dubbed this year as “SobCon08 Biz School for Bloggers.” The conference will be held at Summit Executive Center, popularly known for hosting meetings of most influential international brands. The 48-hour summit will touch various topics concerning social business, social media, business management, and online marketing.

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Last March 29, I saw another notice in my WordPress control panel telling me that the latest version of WordPress, version 2.5, has been released and my installation must be upgraded. I’ve read from many blogs that this version will bring new looks and speed to the WordPress control panel. So, without further ado, I instantly downloaded the new version from WordPress official website and upgraded mine.

The upgrade process went very smooth and definitely transparent. As usual, WordPress guys made things easy – no “computerese,” no jargons whatsoever, just good steps. After I upgraded, I was redirected to the WordPress login and it is where my impression begins.

The login design has been changed for better. It looks very neat and fresh now, unlike the blue one that we used to see in the previous version which, in my opinion, was large.

The center of improvement came after I logged into my WordPress control panel. I was surprised – indeed, there are big changes. The first thing I noticed basically is the design. The new WordPress 2.5 default dashboard configuration displays recent comments, incoming links, WordPress development blog, popular plugins and the typical box news.

The default main menu now comes with only five items: Write, Manage, Design, Comments and Ratings. The Write menu item when clicked displays the Write Post page featuring the revamped (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) WYSIWYG WordPress blog editor. The Manage menu item lets you manage posts, pages, links, categories, tags, link categories, media library and like before, boasts WordPress Import and Export function. The Design menu, on the other hand, is equivalent to previous “Presentation” menu. The Settings, Plugins and User menu items are now displayed in small font to the upper right portion of the administration panel.

Another thing that is noticeable with the new WordPress is the speed. It is a whole lot faster than the previous one – one thing many bloggers will like (including me). The one-click plugin upgrade is superb. It asks for your domain’s FTP login information, and then it upgrades the outdated plugins for you.

My conclusion is that I very much prefer the previous blue-themed control panel. When I found that the color scheme can be changed to classic through the Settings, however, my little disappointment vanished. Now, WordPress 2.5 looks good and I love it like other bloggers do.

Becoming a blogger is a good thing. First, you’ll start learning how to write articles properly, then you’ll begin to appreciate doing research that you never really liked when you were still at school. You’ll learn how to promote your blog to various social networks, and then finally decide to monetize it at the same time. The difficult part is, when you immerse into blogging, you can hardly stop.

One thing about blogging is that is it very time-consuming but very satisfying when your published articles are able to make good traffic to your sites and clicks on your affiliate advertisements. Blogging is very addicting indeed. The bonus is that you also get to know with new people from anywhere in the world and befriend them simply because of a popular blog post you submitted on Digg or get stumbled in Stumbled Upon by other users.

Today, to celebrate the Fool’s Day, I’m going to show you the first craziest video I ever did in my whole life that was uploaded in YouTube. I did not make it for nothing, it is for this blog and for other bloggers. The video actually tells bloggers to take a while and get a break from writing or doing tasks related to blogging. And if you want to know what bloggers should do during breaks — well, just do the locomotion!

If you are a blogger and you want to join the “locomotion” phenomena, then just download that song, get your webcam to record a video, and use that dance step. Send it to me after and I’ll weave all our videos to become a global blogger locomotion.