TechBays my new blog

I have created another blog called TechBays that will feature new or updated technologies that simplify or enrich our lives, or at least my life. Most of the technology related topics will be posted via TechBays.

I grew up in Iligan City, in the southern part of the Philippines, known as the industrial city of the south. The industries are situated along the Iligan bay. Currently I live in San Jose, California, part of what is known as Silicon Valley, which is situated in the San Francisco bay area.

My passion for technology plus the bays of my interest. Hence TechBays.

Hope to also see you guys in TechBays. Thanks!

Blogging II

What has changed?

I've been playing around with posts and templates. I moved some posts to other blogs I created, that is, for Iligan related postings I recreated them in CMonIligan.blogspot.com. Ditto postings related to business, technology, consulting, and perhaps more if necessary.

I played around with templates in Blogger. Previously I thought I can only use two column templates as made available by Blogger. I googled and found three column templates that you can use by tweaking your current template or use preset three column templates, but you'll have to trust the source on this one.

I also created a blog by Wordpress and Typepad. Wordpress is more flexible in terms of template usage. The blog CMonTech and CMonBusiness are Wordpress managed. Wordpress has a dashboard that allows you to see your postings from your different W-blogs. Management of pictures and videos is quite different. I have never successfully embedded a video yet.

You will need some CSS skills though to tweak your template. It's not as straightforward as Blogger. So this is an area to learn and do.

I started to add links to other personal sites found at the right hand area with title CM Links and, in the process, found the service Spock. It’s a person search facility that allows for multiple tagging criteria. It’s easy to use it’s like a game. I noticed that LinkedIn members are preloaded.

(By the way, this post was interrupted by Blogger access issues and some paragraphs were deleted, which sucked. So I will be looking for offline editors that can interface with Blogger.)

Typepad has already charged me $5 for this month. Since my blog CMon.Typepad is only experimental, I may want to remove this in the future. Typepad has a clean user interface and is probably most user friendly.

The idea to have multiple blogs for different categories for me is again experimental. I may want to revert to a single blog for all postings that will show notes from serious to trivial. I find that awkward but we’ll see.

Well, it’s fun. So many blogs to read.

And thank you for reading this blog!

Blogging

I think I tried to post my first blog by Blogger more than two years ago. I received two long spam comments within a few days. That wasn't what I expected. So I stopped.

Since late last year though, I have been enjoying reading blogs such as TechCrunch, AVC, Joel on Software, Paul Graham, Paul Kedrosky, Mashable, GigaOm, Boing Boing, Scobleizer, even recent ones like How to Change the World, Pmarca, among many others.

Some of these work like a brotherhood, referencing and linking within their network or group of friends. I find it fun to read how they hit each other and then shake on later.

I didn't quite get blogging at first. It really starts with oneself and extends to your group of friends or interests. I would want to have most of my friends in the blogosphere and have fun hyperlinking. Perhaps they're already out there and I just need to look and browse more.

The first barrier I had to overcome was deciding on a blog provider. Blogger, Typepad, or Wordpress. Finally, I chose Blogger probably because I had some experience using it. And I think it's the easiest. But certainly I would want to try out Typepad and Wordpress in the coming months.

The next barrier was deciding on templates. But I found out these are changeable. Then off to your first post. I had one anomaly sometime March. But it's like that. It's a blog.

Then you do your second, third, fourth, and so on. And so far it's not stopping anytime. I feel good blogging to tell you honestly. And it works in a different time in your mind.

So you have the widgets, which two months ago for me sounded weird. But there you go, the videos, the embeds, the photos, the news, the logs, widgets are your closest friends in your blog space. And they continue to grow and interact and make sense and make nonsense.

Ah the adsense. Ads on the right panel, header, footer, in texts, in blocks, by auctions, by Google and more. You have to read statistics if you prefer; reports that show daily, monthly cpms. But so far this has not been an issue for me. Because with all this talk on millions, my total so far is, get this, $1.

But I'm having fun. That's really the point for me.

Just try it!