Ouch. Just like Marshall Kirkpatrick said here. I had but two subscribers to my blog seven months ago. But that was when I wasn’t serious about blogging.

Fast-forward to present: I now have 2800 subscribers. Looking at my Feedburner stats, most of my supposed subscribers come from feed aggregator Rojo. I have reported this concern to the Feedburner crew, and they replied with this (not verbatim):
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Post-Digg kudos are in order:

Angelo Racoma - For telling me what to do before things went out of hand and when they did get out of hand!

Abe Olandres - For exhausting every option possible to help me out. You da man!

RJ Palabasan - For allowing me to rant like there was no tomorrow. Brib Wariur you are! Oops, did I just steal those keywords from you?

Cool! Alleba Blog now has a PR 5! Up from a 4. Other pages on this site also enjoyed a boost.

Again, I ask… how did your sites do?

Here’s a cool way to figure out just how “big” a fish you are in the ocean that is the World Wide Web. Uses backlink information from Yahoo!

Find out if you’re a Big Fish. Sad, I’m just a small smelt.

Related Link: Debt Consolidation free quote

Easier than I thought, whew. I just upgraded my Wordpress software from version 1.5 to 2.0.3. Even though I’ve read a lot of bad things about it, it’s still way better! The best thing is that all my plugins are compatible. But I think I have to upgrade them to their newest versions.

Some plugins I cannot do without:

• Photopress
• Related Posts
• Bunny’s Technorati Tags

If you know of other essential plugins I should include, leave me a note!

Google now gives webmasters the option to add a simple meta tag to their webpages to tell the search engine not to display their ODP (Open Directory Project) information:

Insert the following anywhere between the header tags:

<meta NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOODP"></meta>

This news came fresh straight from the bakery, so not every search engine who uses the ODP will immediately follow suit. But here’s the code that applies to all search engines:

<meta NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"></meta>

Being an ODP editor myself, about 90% of the site descriptions contained in the ODP is outdated. So displaying them within search results subtracts relevance for the end-user off the bat.

From the Inside Google Sitemaps blog.

I thought it would be cool to create a plugin just for the Isulong Seoph contest.

So I did. Look at the lower right side and you’ll see the fruits of my work or my Isulong Seoph entry for a more updated demo.

That list is pretty much in real time, which makes it a cool widget to add to your own Isulong blog that’s on Wordpress.

Update: Plugin now works in Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0.

Plugin Name: Isulong Seoph
Description: Displays top 10 Google results and site rank for the keywords ‘isulong seoph’ in connection to the first ever Philippine SEO contest. Configurable to display results for a different set of keywords for other SEO competitions.
Version: 0.1d
Author: Andrew dela Serna

Click here to download the plugin.

Installation:
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I got an invite to beta-test Gmail for Domains. Setting it up was a breeze, it only took under 10 minutes to get everything to work!

I personally do not use Gmail that much because I do have an @alleba.com address where I do all my official transactions. But I have to admit that I’m far from happy with Dreamhost’s clunky default webmail interface (Squirrelmail), that’s why I opt for POP mail access with Mozilla Thunderbird instead. Now I have the best of both worlds — Google’s reliable technology and my very own email domain. How cool is that.

Here’s a screenshot of Gmail for alleba.com:
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Every now and then I get to apply my graphic design skills on our site logo on special occassions.

Just recently, Valentine’s Day:

Christmas Season 2005:

Halloween 2005:

I also made quite a few more in the past using our old logo, but I’d rather not show all of them (hehe):

Edsa I Anniversary 2003: