Since last night, I’ve been busy uploading and tagging, tagging and uploading photos and videos of this year’s fine Sabah Bloggers Gathering. Seriously, I don’t know where to begin, so I’m just gonna do my story-telling in bullet-form. But before that, here’s how I looked like.

I am Soulja Grrrl. Get it? *ROFLs to self*… Dressed to kill, coz I’m a mean grrrl. And playing too much Half-Life: Counterstrike will do this to you. I also made it a point to have an “official” pose to make things more tacky, like so.

• Enemy spotted! The first costumed guest I saw as I went out the elevator was a Japanese-uniformed dude. And he had no weapon! Dead meat
• My action plan was to get to know as many people as I could, under the pretense that I wanna take pictures of each and everyone who came to the gathering. AND EVERYONE FELL FOR IT! MUAHAHAHAHAHAH! Seriously, though, everyone was so cool, and you can count only a handful out of more than 100 guests didn’t come with costumes. I really enjoyed taking pictures of and with everyone. You peeps really rocked the house!
• The Allies ruled! It was three Allied US Army soldiers versus one Japanese Axis soldier sans ammo. But I’ll exclude the masked terrorists (you people know who you are). And luckily our War Correspondent was neutral, though he did don a US Army colour. Yeah, lucky Axis guy   The cool thing was us army troops – Charlie, Vera and I — were lounging together in the same table. That’s the spirit — stick together, team.

More photos!

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Honestly, I have no idea what to do with Twitter Lists as of this moment, but it’s nice to see that the option is made available for me to use once I figure it out. A post in Marketing Pilgrim suggested that it could be treated like a blogroll, i.e. collection of favourite Tweeters based on a theme. The trouble is, as pointed in another of their posts, having such lists will probably attract a bunch of whiners. For example, if you create a list of WordPress Experts and I don’t see my Twitter handle in that list, then doggone it I’m swearing you and your Twitter followers off to Twitter hell! It’s kind of in the same lines as people who whine that I’m not following you anymore coz you don’t follow me even though I’ve followed you and read your boring tweets for days and you still don’t care, nyeh nyeh boo hoo.

Yeah, whiners.

I created a list called Blogging Fu, just for the sake of it, although I have a feeling that I might be deleting that one soon. Since Twitter did say that I shouldn’t tweet about it yet, why bother having one?

I wonder if anyone of you reading this blog are seeing this option? Are you planning on using it, and how?

Oh em gee, Sabah Bloggers Gathering is barely a week away! What makes this year’s gathering special is that it’s held on Hallow’s Eve, and you bet everyone’s gonna get crazy with their costumes!

Speaking of costumes, the theme is suppose to be anything really freaky looking, but I’m not planning to dress like that. I worry that my kids may have nightmares when they see their mom dressing up as a boogie (wo)man. Therefore, I am dressing up as something else but no less grrrl-looking, and I’m keeping it to myself till that night comes.

The hot and hunky organizers are doing a great job, yet again. Venue will be the the scenic loft of the classy Imperial International Hotel, in the heart of Kota Kinabalu city. Local supremo guitarist Roger Wang, and Alvin from the Malaysian reality show group Infinatez will be joining the list of entertainers for the night’s show. And, will Nuffnang and our wonderful bloggers from Tawau make a surprise appearance?

So for those of you who are in Kota Kinabalu and would like to crash the party, entrance fee is just RM20 per head. If it’s anything like last year, get ready to delight yourself with some scrumptious food and gourmet/premium desserts! It’s so worth it just for the food itself!

I’m off to pick up my kids, and then do some costume shopping, see you all there!

My penchant for using long titles in my blog posts, and my now active involvement in all things Facebook and Twitter, drove me to install this nifty but challenging plugin called YOURLS. I took for granted that this was going to be one of those normal WordPress plugins you get to install through the dashboard.

But it’s not.

My number 1 mistake was thinking that all I had to do was install the WordPress plugin version of it and it will run immediately. Nope, it doesn’t work that way. You actually have to download the package and FTP everything into your web folders. Next, you need to do some manual configuration for both the database and config file, then run it the first time via the admin panel, and ONLY THEN should you install and set up its complemental WordPress plugin within your WordPress dashboard. And I’m explaining these in way too simplistic terms.

My number 2 mistake was to not understand enough the statement in the FAQ that says “You cannot install YOURLS and, say, WordPress, in the same directory” because YOURLS needs its own .htaccess file.  I ignored that and tried anyway. Didn’t work, of course.

I tried to rectify it by reinstalling everything into its own subdirectory (e.g. http://webgrrrl.net/z/), as advised in the FAQ.

Guess what? IT DIDN’T WORK, EITHER!

But then, I had a light-bulb moment — why not set YOURLS up under a subdomain instead?! And that, ladies and gentlemen, did the trick. I hazard a guess that since my WordPress was installed in my root folder, my blog’s mod_rewrite settings were waging war against YOURLS’s, which in turn causes the shortened URL not to work. In any case, I’m fully satisfied with using the domain z.webgrrrl.net for my personal URL shortening service.

I’m currently using YOURLS / z.webgrrrl.net for this blog as well as Blogging Fu. My favourite option in YOURLS is its bookmarklet ability. Whenever I’m on a web page that I want to tweet and get its URL shortened, I just click the bookmarklet on my browser, and it will automatically bring me to z.webgrrrl’s console for me to generate the short URL. Nice.

Hey, by the way, did you get it? z.webgrrrl? As in Ze WebGrrrl? Hahah, hahahah!

Have you ever looked back at your old blog posts and think, dang, I am good! Those were not the words I would use when I did exactly that these past couple of hours, but it’s close enough.

It’s now a little past 4 years since the inception of WebGrrrl.net in September 2006 (I bought the domain name a little later, though, around November 2006, I think). She’s grown up quite nicely since then. One thing I like about this blog is that the content is more focused. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I lessened my ranting that would have included anything non-WordPress, non-blogging, non-Internet, non-Web related. No regrets, though.

Except that there are a few posts that I wished I hadn’t posted. Namely ALL those posts concerning the Malaysian reality show sensation Akademi Fantasia. Blech.

The rest of my posts, I like. The few impressions I get when I read back on my blog posts were:

• I can be damn funny… some times.
• Wow, those sites/links/plugins/whachamacallits really are cool… I wonder how I found them in the first place?
• I can be SO good at monologue-ing.
• WebGrrrl.net has personality.
• WebGrrrl.net rocks!
• I am so full of myself.

I hope you love your blog as much as I do mine.

Update: So 2009-2006 = 3 years. So I didn’t exactly get an A in math. So sue me.