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!
Check out my other posts: « On updating the Top Commentators widget & WordPress customized installation / B2.0 Borneo Bloggers + New Media Dialogue »
lawa lah.. congrats Lorna for taking giuk to the next level 🙂
indeed you are the right person to handle this!
Kau juga la bos! Thanks for putting up such a site in the first place!
Congratulations Vincent 😀