16.06.07 Why blog?

Blogging is probably a household name now. It seems that everyone and their mother has a blog already. But the thing is, the “blog mania” is still starting to get major exposure here in the Philippines.

Most, if not all, bloggers in the Philippines use blogs as means to generate income through ads. Blog ads can buy you a car, or even a new mobile phone. Blogging definitely has transcended beyond the “dear diary” type of journal, and became a new form of media. But other than being income generators by itself, blogs can also be a way to increase online presence of a business.

Philippine-based ad agencies have begun to tap local bloggers in increasing the online presence of their clients. Getting bloggers as allies can definitely help spread the word about a new product or service, getting their wrath can make it very difficult to clean up a business’ online reputation. Blogs, being a personal perspective of an individual or groups of people, can easily generate a viral effect that can either make or break a business’ online reputation. Tick off one blogger with a horrible experience of your service or product, you can expect most of that blogger’s loyal readers to swear never to use your product or service because of the bad review you’ll get. Not to mention the readers of that blogger’s readers, and the readers of the readers of the blogger’s readers… If the review was positive, the same thing will happen. But instead of turned-off prospects, a shower of new customers can come your way. It’s actually up to you on how to make that viral effect to your advantage.

But what if press cons and product freebies are out of your advertising budget? Well, you can still use blogging… By starting your own company blog.

Having a blog for your business gives people an updated “personal” perspective on your company. Basically, a “personal touch.” You can feature new product or service releases, or even news about what’s happening within your company. You can even add a section on industry news, which, I think, could show how familiar you are with your company’s industry.

Sheero Media Solutions offers customized blog design using the WordPress platform. We can format the design with your current site’s design feel, taking into account your company’s branding. For more details, send your custom blog design inquiries to my partner Marc through our contact form.

05.05.07 Blog resurrection

What if you had a blog that remained stagnant for about a year, then one day you decide to resurrect it? Kind of like this one hehe. We haven’t touched this blog for about a year already. And sadly, people don’t know anymore if there even exists a Sheero Media Solutions website/blog.

The first step in resurrecting a “dead” blog is addressing the issues that made the blog die in the first place. Aside from wasting investments, it’s really silly to commit the same mistakes twice.

I can tell you honestly that our blog before didn’t really have much of a direction—basically, it was just a group blog of our managerial team (kind of like telling you that there are humans running the company). That was it. Nothing more. No clear direction whatsoever.

I don’t know if it’s already safe to say that our blog has a better direction now. It’s not yet that polished, but it’s getting there. We more or less ironed out the major issues, like, how this blog would be differentiated from our other tech-related blogs (ie. The Filipino Web Designer) and our personal blogs (ex. Kutitots and MarcVill). Basically, what we’ll be talking about will be more focused. Topics covered would no longer be just outposts of our personal blogs.

Hopefully, our blog restructuring would pay off.

07.03.06 Building a budget PC for someone else

I have been given the task of building a budget PC to donate to an underprivileged family. I was given a budget of P10,000 to assemble the whole package (that should include the monitor, printer, and a computer table if possible). So I did some canvassing. I bought new parts: casing with psu/kybrd/mse/spkrs, cdrom drive, floppy drive from PC Express. As for the base components such as motherboard, processor, video card, memory, and hard drive — I bought used parts from friends and people from TipidPC. TipidPC is an online community-based website that basically draws hundreds of Pinoys to buy and sell computer parts online. I got a slightly-used AMD 1700 socket A processor at a bargain price of P1,500. I got a used 40G Seagate hard drive for the same price. Unfortunately, I just recently determined that the hard drive must be defective to begin with since I was unable to fully format it. Hopefully I can still find the person who sold it to me. TipidPC is a very good place to get used computer parts but you just have to be careful and be cautious always when buying from strangers.

So after several weeks of canvassing and buying used parts, I was able to complete the P10,000 budget PC. By the way, as for the monitor, I decided to have my old 15″ CRT monitor repaired for P850 and will give this as part of the PC package. I got all the parts to build the actual PC. I am still looking for a used printer and then hopefully get a used computer table for free.

This underprivileged family that I am helping have never had a PC before. Their children are about to go to high school and a PC will surely help them with their schooling. This budget PC I am building should give them the basic internet, word processing, gaming functionality of a good PC.

14.01.06 Choosing between CRT monitor and LCD display

I decided to invest on an LCD display a few months ago. After long hours of Google research and canvassing, I got he LG 1780Q (”17inch) for about Php20,000 which was considered an expensive panel at that time since the rest fall under the Php15,000 range. I fell in love at first sight — this is the most gorgeous flat panel display I’ve seen that is superslim, has a unique Pressure Sensitive control buttons, and can actually be pivoted/rotated in almost all directions. Unfortunately, these features are just eye candy and nothing more. Even the attention-grabbing f-Engine feature of this panel which at first I thought was a specially designed chip that enhances color quality, is nothing but just display setting presets — Text, Movie, User, Normal. continue reading

13.01.06 Long URLS: Not good!

It’s hard to type really long URLs, let alone remember them. The chances of mistyping are great, which means a greater possibility of getting directed to a non-existent page. Copy-and-paste isn’t a good solution either, especially if it’s an emailed link (email clients usually truncate long URLs, making them lead you to nowhere). Security-wise, it isn’t very healthy too. What to do? Setup up a mod_alias or use the meta refresh tag to setup redirects.

Source: “Why rewrite your web URLS,” by Jennifer Kyrnin