People like me who work on the Web are usually willing to drown themselves with work in an effort to earn more money. They are willing to sit in front of their computers or laptops whole day and work on the edge to focus on being productive or aggressive with money-making. Well, that reason alone sounds very noble indeed. However since two years of work as a freelance, I learned that some employers with higher standards of living exploit people’s ignorance or strip one’s fundamental rights to protect their businesses and money. For me, as someone who doesn’t have the economic power yet, that’s purely depressing. It’s very difficult to be generous to people who upholds selfishness.

The physical, mental, emotional and economic depression brought about by the events and people in the business world have made me grow so weary. So, I’ve decided to take another break just like what I did last year — but this time, I’m gonna do my break on a dance mat! Funny how this article’s topic changed in an instant (this is actually the purpose of this post per se).

I have been looking for a good dance mat for ages that I can use on the computer or laptop and that search just came to an end last month. And I know, the technology is not new. I just want to have an escape from sleep-eat-work lifestyle by adding dancing on my daily routine. You should know that when I was younger, I was very active in participating dance contests (from amateur folk dances to campus-wide modern-style dance cheering competitions). That being said, I have a dancer’s spirit inside me.   (In fact, there are so many spirits inside me: see picture below at your own risk). LOL

Back to the gist, the dance mat somehow reincarnated my forgotten dancing skill to a limited point. Well, I bought it for my health and a good physical break from daily mental challenges. The dance mat cost me PHP 500 (or $10.63 USD). It’s actually meant for PlayStation 1/2/3 – but you know as a geek, I know for sure there’s a way to hook that onto my PC. So I roamed around the mall and went to CD-R King, one of Philippines’ most popular tech store that sells amazingly super-cheap computer devices, and stumbled a PHP 150 ($3.19 USD) PS2 to USB adaptor on the shelf – and bingo – solution found. 

When I returned home I quickly downloaded and installed StepMania, a free dance game for my Windows Vista laptop. I was truly surprised by the quality of the game. Its at par with the ancient commercial-grade Dance Dance Revolution games. The great thing is that you can add any dance music that you want due to the game’s open-source nature. Well, it requires a bit of tech knowledge so it’s going to be a challenge for beginners. Nevertheless, their official website provides in-depth tutorials which you can explore.

Hooking and detection of the PS2 to USB adaptor was flawless on Windows Vista until I spotted an in-game problem that ruined my excitement: the adaptor didn’t recognize simultaneous directional button presses for jump moves. I was truly sad when I learned that and I ended up dancing basic songs. It was “no challenge,” and here comes the evidence:

Hahaha! Isn’t that more depressing?

So, here’s what we did it: Brad called me out of the blue in an afternoon on Skype and said we’re going to do a podcast for Tech Webcast’s Episode 8 – and so I decided to go for it as I wasn’t so busy during that time. The problem was that we had no solid outline of topics to discuss. So what we did is that we just picked randomly the things what we have in mind and elaborate them. Good thing that I recently went to a mall’s arcade center so I had something to share. Plus, I remembered trying VMware Workstation software and played Linux Ubuntu and Windows XP Service Pack 3 Professional with it so I already got good things to discuss about. Have a listen below:

As you’ve heard, episode 8 turned out to be a funny podcast! I was laughing at myself when I heard this recording for the first time especially on several portions where Brad tried to stop me from talking a lot. Honestly, I was not able to clearly hear him saying “stop” from my side and I just kept talking like crazy. The most hilarious part on the podcast is the part where Brad said that we didn’t get “too many emails” on our official podcast email – and then I replied innocently and seriously “That’s good, that’s good” and Brad laughed and said, “Not really.”  The quality of our podcast is not that great as we have done our podcast through Skype.

I invite you to listen to all other episodes that we have.

If you want to know how I met Brad, well it happened last year when I was broadcasting at Justin dot Com and he stumbled on my video channel. You can read a brief story of how we met in my previous post where he ranked #8 as one of the top people of my life last year.

Being a tech enthusiast who honestly doesn’t know much yet about more technical things as I do, he aspires to become a figure similar to Chris Pirillo, Zane Savage and all other geeks-for-show personalities on the Web – of course, with his own style. Why not when, since last year, he has been gradually acquiring a lot of gadgets and computer things that made me drool so much. He started with a single laptop when I first knew him; now he owns several gadgets and equipped with dual-screened LCD monitors and stuffs that could expose him into greater learning through actual experience than me.

That being said, he is planning to start a podcast program every week and guess what? He wants me to host with him! LOL That’s quite a cool combination right there.

We’ve jointly setup Twitter and other social network accounts in preparation for this. He’s pretty good on marketing side and he was able to allure people to follow this podcast’s official Twitter account. The start of our Podcast appears to be rough this week as I am drowned with a lot of priority work to survive. We call our program Tech Webcast and hopefully it will be in good path soon. I will be talking about hosting stuffs and programming if I can so please participate check it out if you have time.

As far as I can remember, Philaahzophy.com is not new to me. I think I’ve seen and mentioned this site on this blog way before when I had a grand review about THC’s lifetime Rudolf hosting plan last February (which is now unavailable — unfortunately). He was still positive to THC that time — far different from his views now.

On Philaahzophy’s latest post as I checked it entitled "Top Hosting Center Can’t Keep Own Website Online!," I believe Aahz missed to read something from his H-Sphere control panel. I am not sure if he is on Rudolf hosting plan or Speedy (I didn’t have interest to research) but I know he is one of THC’s customers and claimed that he used to be a "big fan" of the web host. His post was a bomb to THC and considering that THC announced the event prior to their downtime, this blogger once again shooted blanks.

While it is true that the official homepage of Top Hosting Center was down as of this writing, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve read yesterday from the company’s H-Sphere control panel news section that they are going to change their IP address as they’ve always done in the past months (this is something Aahz missed to read). I’m not sure how many hours had it been in downtime status but I have asked some friends abroad and they told me that they can fully access the website (which makes me believe that DNS information propagation is complete on some places). I don’t know if other THC users noticed the advisory but for sure it is conspicuous enough to get noticed. Since I’m in the Philippines and THC servers are in North America, I guess I will have to wait for the site to go up. It is a good thing that this blog or any customer sites (and hosting functionality) was not affected by their downtime otherwise it would be real shitty.  

As far as I know based on my working Cisco networking knowledge, changing an IP address does not take effect immediately and unfortunately domains undergoing IP changes will experience downtime. Changes that undergoes downtime include IP updates, IP transition from shared to dedicated IPs and vice versa, and name server changes.

To THC: Aahz May Be Right, But Not Completely Right

I do not say that Aahz is completely wrong. He was just shooting blanks on some ways; he may be right, but well, not completely right on his claims since I highly believe he missed the advisory. Plus, he could be on a shared hosting — and you can’t expect a dedicated server quality on a shared hosting plan!

Now this is for you THC: like what he said on his first post,  I agree that there have been quite a few times that THC had problems with their hosting services. Although they are fast in responding to support and delivering solutions to problems, complaints like from Aahz’s is a sign that THC needs to be consistent and make their impatient customers feel what a good host is. It doesn’t feel good to defend something that doesn’t deserve to be defended. Fortunately, THC isn’t as worse as Aahz described it based on my experience. He was a bit too extreme. Perhaps he needs to get a dedicated server. Believe me, you will never find a host that doesn’t experience downtimes especially on shared hosting.

Bottomline

If Top Hosting Center wasn’t good enough, as it never became a perfect web host, I would have flown to other web hosting companies. I’ve got lots of sponsorship offers for this blog from other web hosts yet I’ve denied them all because I like the way THC handles its hosting services. Plus, I don’t need to worry about a thing because they have backups accessible. An anonymous hacker tried to devastate this blog earlier this month and THC was very, very quick to restore my database. I’m sure other customers can have similar experience as THC’s support is just a matter of clicks away. In my case, I write to them via email but I can also use their live chat for basic issues and trouble ticket on my H-Sphere control panel as well.

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.

The next thing to do is to register to Justin dot TV (the service provider of our live video streaming feature). Follow the on-screen directions on how to create an account from there and then setup your webcam to begin your broadcast.

After registering, login to your account at Justin dot TV and click the large Broadcast button on the top right corner of their website. A window should pop up and from there you will have the choice to broadcast your webcam in “good” and “best” mode. Good broadcast mode is perfect for videos with static background while best, on the other hand, is perfect for high frame rate video. Take note though that the quality of the video being transmitted on your broadcast will depend on your Internet connection speed.

Now, if you want to embed your video to your blog or website, click Channel on the main menu. On your Channel page, you will find the embed code under the Channel Info section. This is the code you need to “copy and paste” to load your live video to any online web page. Just like that!

As you can see, I also used it for this blog (found on the right side bar), and so far it is doing well in making my blog more interesting (or distracting ) to my viewers. Justin dot TV is the future of online videos and making YouTube’s slogan “Broadcast Yourself” null and void — hands down.

By the way, I want to thank John MacDonald, my distant friend from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, for introducing me all this (well actually, he didn’t introduce, I just saw it from his nice blog). Cheers!

The speakers of the said event are popular bloggers and known corporate professionals who have established their own business brands on the Web. So to speak, these people surely would share their online strategies, experiences and business tactics to the attendees.

• Anita Bruzzese from Gannett Today, online reputation management
• Brian Clark from Copyblogger, an online business models that work
• Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress, which focuses how to put your business on spotlight
• Chris Garrett, editorial management
• Chris Brogan, social media and social networking choices
• Dave Bullock, effective sales model that converts
• Liz Strauss, building an irresistible offer
• Wendy Piersall on success management

Event organizers are expecting over 200 participants to attend the conference. Most of them are professional business bloggers representing their own business brands. The conference would give each of the attendees a chance to share their online business experience. The coalescence of effective business methods and ideas that would be shared by each participant is expected to actuate new strategies towards successful online business. Participants are guaranteed to bring home a business action plan that can be immediately executed for measurable success.

The registration fee costs $450 for new participants and $350 for returnees. This fee constitutes the participation to the whole event and access to giveaways. Hotel accommodations around the venue will be shouldered by each participant, costing around $139 to $225 per night.

The conference is sponsored by the following online organizations and companies:

• WordPress
• Network Solutions
• b5media
• Top Hosting Center
• Chitika
• Wiley
• ProBlogger
• E-Junkie
• Blogger and Podcaster
• Plante Moran Financial Advisors
• Summit Executive Centre

It is good to note that Mashable, a popular social networking news website, has listed the annual SobCon event as one of Top 10 Events for Bloggers.

My Personal Standpoint

Well, basically I wish I could attend conferences like that. It is good place to meet business people. They give connections and open doors to new opportunities and partnerships. If you have the bucks and the will to succeed, attending SobCon08 definitely is not a bad choice.

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.

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.

So what I did is that I unzipped the files to my local disk and uploaded them to this WordPress-based blog. I logged in to my blog’s control panel and see how the theme looks. The theme is called “THC Alpha,” a two-column WordPress theme that looks good. I was impressed of the decency of the design which carries an air of formality.

Download the THC Alpha theme for WordPress here.

Here are the screen captures of THC Alpha WordPress theme:

My review for THC’s Speedy hosting plan is still being written and no matter how many WordPress themes they will send me, it will never influence my judgement to their Speedy plan. Anyway, THC made it clear that what they gave was just a token of appreciation – so there is no bad motive behind unless you think otherwise.

Visit official Speedy hosting plan page at THC.

I just added another item in the menu called “Resources.” That page will be populated with useful media (themes, e-books, among others) that you would like to check and download. It is pretty barren as of the moment though, but you will love that page eventually.

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

This year, most bloggers started with a different perspective. They begin to take advantage and favor services believed to be “top Google alternatives” which, in their view, are less obtrusive to their ideals, more flexible, and more lucrative. It indicates a healthy competition and preludes another possibly more intense search engine and online advertising war this year.

My Personal Standpoint

In my personal standpoint, though I know I am quite a fan of Google services, I share sentiment with other bloggers that Google’s dominance could be an imminent but indirect threat; they impose policies and indirect guidelines associated with the usage of their services, or in relation thereof, that rather inhibit bloggers to be able to benefit from the Web as much as before. Google is giving free services to the masses but isn’t it their strategy to bait our hearts toward their products? This is debatable and I know there are many positive and negative points of view for this. However, for many bloggers, they view that the moves of Google imply that it tries to become the “Microsoft of the Web.” Well, in fact, I suspect one day Google and Microsoft will come to a head-to-head bout in creating their own standards with all people under them. Fortunately, we got alternatives to Google and they are fighting for themselves and for us.

I believe that Google will continue to be in the top ranks in 2008. There are many factors supporting this assumption. One of these, for instance, is Google’s reaction (and to least extent, Yahoo and Microsoft) with the depreciation of the US dollar. Google has safety nets that would ease hurt from the dollar crunch as other US-based companies are feeling. In the second quarter of 2007, Google’s financial report reflected that 48% percent of their income comes outside of the United States. Another point is Google’s acquisition of companies in 2007. If they are able to prove in 2008 that they did a wise move, these innovating companies under their control will push their business further.

In conclusion, like what bloggers predicted, Google might reach its plateau in 2008. Unless they make a good turnaround, its downfall will begin at least to most bloggers’ hearts. This should never be underestimated: bloggers are very influential people and they can badly damage a company’s reputation if they move together towards a similar direction.