Every time i go back to blogging after hiatus i am unable to interact and emotionally accommodate the mess of the information i’ve dumped prior to my absence.

Hence, i’m revamping this blog once again.

The old blog was admittedly simply a Search-Engine Optimisation exercise for myself and i didn’t quite bother to slap on a proper site design.

Perhaps this time i shall, but i doubt so, given how long it will take to design custom motifs and css them into place.

What i know is that i shall arrange the content into a more accessible hierachy.

Let’s see how it goes over the course of the month. =)

p.s. At first glance i thought a magazine dedicated to renovation psychology should be nothing more than a laugh. Come to think of it, if i did have the time to undertake such a project with my (future) wife, i reckon i’d enjoy the experience immensely.

Every web developer and site runner knows the golden rule of attracting more visitors: WRITE POST GOOD CONTENT.

This blog in its current iteration was meant just for me to have fun with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as opposed to sharing my thoughts and views, given how time consuming the latter was, is and would be.

One tedious technique i employed was to link several of my articles in comments i posted on several significantly more popular sites. That with rudimentary SEO tweaking has resulted in close to five thousand unique visitors per month.

However, i honestly am not in this for the web visitors – this whole blogging endeavour seems a pointless one for the moment.

I reckon i will have to realign my objectives with not just my schedule, but what i deem important.

Stay tuned! :)

Guess, i shall start feeding bits of what goes on in my head back to this blog.

I’ve always know that blogging does take up a significant portion of my time. A conservative half hour per article means 1/48th of my 24 hour day or 1/32 of my waking time. Having 5% of my day devoted to penning a piece doesn’t seem all that great.

Anyways i’ll do what i can.

More importantly, i’ve been more or less offline since late last year and i’m still quite surprised that i’m receiving close to five thousand unique visitors every month. That’s surprising for a dormant site – i’m guessing i’d call this a (small) success for my Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) exercise.

Hmmmmm,

At the moment the hit counter on my site states that this blog has seen 10,295 unique visitors since i set it up on 140209.

However, the Awstats utility on my site’s backend breaks down my unique visitor count to this subdomain (cogito.faii.net) into:

feb – 1175

mar – 2611

apr – 2338

may – 2599

jun – 6632

jul – 4730

aug – 4362

01 – 04 sept – 655

That makes for a staggering 25,102 unique visitors… with 23.99 GB of bandwith used since the inception of cogito.faii.net.

And i’ve not even fully optimised this site for search engines…

*scratches head*

I’ve finally fixed the issues with my site’s music.

Aside from the choice of music, which in all likelihood can’t be helped (heh), the biggest problem was the constant reloading of music with each page (e.g. my old joomla sites).

The first nonperfect workaround was to load the basic html music callup only on the front page, which meant that other lower tiered pages did not have the music in the background.

With this new wordpress site i decided to add a pop up. It worked fine till the user returned to the home page and the music file would simply reload.

So, after a bit of googling, i’ve finally gotten a mishmash of a solution, that surprisingly, works. Well, maybe not surprising to those code geeks out there.

Anyways, here it is. Feel free to copy and paste – just don’t forget to replace the url of my site’s music page with yours. Javascript doesn’t allow access to files outside your own domain due to security issues, so you’ll still have to change it anyway.

<SCRIPT TYPE=”text/javascript”>
<!–
function popup(mylink, windowname)
{
if (! window.focus)return true;
var href;
if (typeof(mylink) == ‘string’)
href=mylink;
else
href=mylink.href;
window.open(href, windowname, ‘width=400,height=200,scrollbars=yes’);
// if we just opened the window
if (
mywin.closed ||
(! mywin.document.URL) ||
(mywin.document.URL.indexOf(“about”) == 0)
)
mywin.location=href;
else if (refocus)
mywin.focus();
return false;
}
//–>
</SCRIPT>

<BODY onLoad=”return popupnr(‘http://www.faii.net/sitemusic.html’, ‘music’)”>

(the post title again is geared towards SEO)

I’m quite surprised. As of typing this, i’ve had 136 visitors for the day, with a 106 from singapore alone.

That’s mainly due to searches about the huge rainbow yesterday.

For me, it’s another lesson in search engine optimisation, even though this blog is simply just an exercise. It enforces how unique articles and title phrasing influences search engines and thereby web traffic.

I’ve added the date ’25 Feb 2009′ to the start of the article and bolded it. The removal of parentheses would be better. The title to this post also seems a bit wonky to the average visitor, but hopefully the term ‘Singapore Rainbow‘ will be useful.

Rainbow Over Singapore 25 Feb 2009

Well, had a bit of fun with photoshop yesterday evening. Thought i’d rush a couple of decent, though by no means pretty, blog headers in. Came out with these three (none of them are in the least bit fanstic):

1) The title’s meant to be camouflaged amongst weird flowery undergrowth. That’s something got to do with the cat.

Blog Logo 1

2) Awfully simple, and am already think twice about the font.

Blog Logo 2

3) A shot at making something nice, but it was already close to eleven so i made a hash out of it. It needs more elegance and yet with added boldness – for example the site title should be noticeably larger in my opinion. And the site name on the left just doesn’t make it. Was trying to create, from the words, titles and whatnot, tiny little multicoloured caterpillars that crept on the vector leaves.

Blog Logo 3

Valentine’s day is always beautiful. And I thought it appropriate, well really, to do a soft launch for my blog.

All my redirects now point to this subdomain. Everything should be in order after the short trial. It has even begun attracting visitors from around the world.

All I have to do now is add a proper logo, but that’ll have to wait till I’m back in Singapore.

Cheers

Blogged from my iPhone

EDIT: here’s one of my logos,

Blog Logo 1

Dear readers,

Just to give you a heads up: I’m currently dabbling with SEO or search engine optimisation for this blog.

That has resulted in marked differences in comparison with posts from previous blogs:

• Titles are KEYWORD RICH. I.e. more direct, and to the point.
• The first paragraph will follow the format above, with multiple keywords, giving a clear, concise introduction or lead-in to the post. Search engines read this more clearly.
• Bolding and italicisation of keywords, in order to make them more prominent to search engines.
• (**Sincerest apologies if the preceding point is seemingly random).

One big, and very significant, obstacle, is that my blog needs focus, if not there will never ever be any traffic. But my aim here isn’t to attract visitors, it’s just to test the viability of SEO for future sites. Therefore, all i need is a relative increase in search engine links and trackbacks from other blogs.

Will post my SEO experiences with the WordPress Blogging Platform and ways to optimise your site for the web, in the near future.

wordpresslogo

Hello, i’ve tentatively migrated to wordpress, so i get a much more professional layout (hope you’ve noticed) and a generally more convenient blogging process.

What’s more, i can now post from my iPhone.

I’ll still leave my old posts on words.faii.net, but that’s partially because i’ve no idea how to migrate from joomla to wordpress :(

Let’s see how things go on this new platform :D