Like my Christmas Twitter edition? I have this on my Gravatar and Facebook profiles, too. Yes, I am considering letting the fine whiskers at the corners of my mouth to grow into a beard just like Santa’s.

Changing your profile picture to reflect your holiday spirits is a fun way to show off your personality virtually, and I’m not the only one who agrees with this. Among the people I follow / following me on Twitter, these three people took the time to display their merry sides, so allow me to give a hearty ho-ho Christmas shout-out to:

@cyrildason

@yukyuri

@leolaporte

And, for taking the time to drop by my barely alive blog, let me wish a blessed and peaceful Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah and season’s greetings to you and your loved ones.

Sabah bloggers got a different treat this year for the annual gathering, unlike the previous three years. It was more grand and complicated than before, (being that I only realized a couple of days before it happened) that this event, glamorously called B2.0, was going to be held over a 2-day, 3-night period! Wow!

Organized by the team at Borneo Colours (BC), the event started with a preview dinner on 28 October, followed by a seminar on the 29th, then a paintball get-together on 30th morning, and a closing ceremony cum winners announcement that evening. Being caught off-guard by the overwhelming activities at a last minute, I only managed to attend the preview dinner (see me mingle here) and the seminar a.k.a. New Media Dialogue. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the seminar itself was more impressive than I expected. In the morning, for some reason just more than half the seats were filled, but by noon, the place was packed.

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Remember to subscribe to giuk.net’s RSS feed for the latest from our fellow Sabahan bloggers!

A couple of days ago, giuk.net registered its 100th member into its aggregator database of personal blogs made by Sabahans. Congratulations, Vincent a.k.a. Ekimkee! (nah, ngam-ngam you got your link back like what you requested )

Since its re-inception in April 2009, it has modestly re-grown slowly and steadily. I’m not sure what the numbers were before, when it first went live to its temporary closure; mrBadak would know more about that, as he is the original owner and think-tank of this unique crawler.

Giuk.net is a service that’s close to my heart, because just with one RSS feed, I was able to keep in touch with all Sabahans in the virtual world. It helped me discover other great Sabahans in the blogosphere that I am proud to have met in real life. Many of their posts are amazing, humourous, and mind-opening. It makes you realize that Sabahans are a cool bunch of people

So when it went down for a while, I felt as if a part of my online life was empty. So weird. And when mrBadak needed someone to take over the management, I was estatic and immediately took the chance! And, yeah, it took me only hours to set it up, actually. The hard part was figuring out what plugins and themes, among the thousands freely available in WordPress.org, I should use to build it back, which explains the 2-day delay. If you want to learn how to make your very own blog aggregator, head on to Blogging Fu and read the tutorial on how you can set one up.

Aesthetically and functionally, giuk.net 2.0 is different from giuk.net 1.0 in a number of ways. One obvious difference is that there is no Popular Posts section in the site. I noticed that this service is easily gamed (i.e. manipulated) with a certain type of posts often being highlighted, so I decided to make do without it for now. I’m also a bit more strict on the content that I choose to add in the blog, to ensure that the aggregator content upholds the spirit of giuk.net (oh so spiritual).

Nevertheless, I hope giuk.net has served what it was originally intended to do — showcasing Sabahans’ talent in blogging. I humbly hope that the functions I’ve put up in this revamped version can live up to the reputation it first garnered when it was under mrBadak.

By the way, yeah mrBadak still owns the domain name and the whole idea of giuk.net; I just help host it and manage it. Monetizing-wise, there are exactly three spots — one in the header, and two on the sidebar. And, no, it doesn’t convert well (I saved the header space for mrBadak, I hope that one does better, though, or at least enough to cover his domain name costs). Me? I haven’t earned a cent since I got it up and running.

But I don’t mind, really. WP Webhost, a subsidiary of Exabytes, was kind enough to host this for me, free of charge (weehee! jealous???). Therefore, no investment whatsoever apart from my time, which I gladly offer.

So, to you giuk-ers out there, thank you for your support all this time, and I hope you’ll continue to blog with us in many years to come. Remember to subscribe to giuk.net’s RSS feed for the latest from our fellow Sabahan bloggers!

This blog has been quiet, but it doesn’t mean that my life as a geek has been put on hold.

Far from it, as you can guess from the title of this post.

First off, I’ve scheduled a release of the latest version of the Top Commentators Widget sometime in November. A couple of bugs were mentioned by users like you, which I hope can be addressed by v.1.4. So, thanks for taking the time to report the errors. Please continue to do so by going to WP.org’s Support Forum if you can find anything else that’s in the widget in need of improvement. Information like these help make TCW useful and usable.

Secondly, I’m cooking up a project that I started three months ago (infact, it was two weeks after I gave birth to my son with designer genes). And it wasn’t until recently that I found out it has a name, thanks to my recent endeavor into Drupal.

My project is called the WordPress Installation Profiles. It might not work the way the Drupal community does it, but the idea is more or less there. This idea has also been discussed before, but as the post mentioned, the closest one out there was done by WordPress QI, and that’s still not quite like what I was hoping.

This idea came about after I saw a couple of Internet marketers out there monetizing a “software” that supposedly improves your WordPress site’s SEO. Upon further investigation, it turned out that it was merely a collection of already well-known (and free!) WordPress plugins, packaged into a single zipped file, and can be installed with a few clicks through a customized install.php file. I realized that, hey, I can do this too!

I was thinking of building one, then selling them off. But then I thought, in the spirit of open-source and WordPress, why not make them free as well? So, yeah, it’ll be available for you to download, FREE!

My first WordPress installation profile will be created around the concept of affiliate marketing blogs, with the following plugin options built into it:

• autoresponders
• opt-in subscriptions
• affiliate products auto-detection
• ad rotator / manager
• those SEO plugins for sure

This profile should also include a suitable theme, which I’m still trying to decide which to use. Then once this is done, I’ll be leveraging my Blogging Fu web site, where it will serve as a repository for all the installation profiles which I will be building later.

I’ll figure out my monetizing strategy later, but one thing’s for sure, those readily-available installation profiles will remain free once they are up there for downloading.

Any comments? Suggestions? Feel free to vent in the comments section below.

Welcoming a new child into the family makes me feel like I have to re-learn how to be a mother again. However, since I did it twice already (my firstborn doesn’t count, I didn’t have to re-learn anything ), I had thought that the re-learning would be less hard, and I would be more prepared with dealing with it.

Nothing would have prepared me with Edry. He came into my world on 19 June, about 20 days earlier than his due date. He came out of my womb, shrieking like my other 3 sons had. He was healthy. And he was different. He has Down syndrome.

It’s not about re-learning to be a mother anymore. It’s about re-learning to live my life, and looking at my life in a whole different angle. Some days are fine, some days are questionable. I’m learning and coping with this reality one day at a time. Actually, that’s not entirely correct. I can’t handle it one day at a time. But I can take it, one task at a time.

Blogging-wise, I’m not sure where this will go. Priorities have changed. Expectations are different. I know I will still blog, but not the way I used to. But maybe… this is just another task that I will need to tackle, when the time comes.