I’m the featured blog in SocialSpark today! Haha! I’m so psyched!

Here’s a screen shot for posterity! Thank you SocialSpark! :-)

If you are using a basic Blogger template without customizations, all you have to do is enable Blogger in Draft. Go to Layout -> Page Elements then edit your Blog Posts widget.

Then mark the checkbox for “Show Star Ratings” and you can arrange where you want to place it relative to your other blog post elements.

However, if you downloaded a customized Blogger template from another site or made your own changes to the template, doing this won’t work. You’ll have to get down and dirty with HTML.

Fortunately it’s not that torturous.

You need this code:

And this code:

Then go to Layout -> Edit HTML and mark the box Expand Widget Templates. Look for this line:

And place the first piece of code after it to put it at the bottom of each of your posts. If you are comfortable with HTML, you might try other placements as well. Just don’t forget to backup your template first.

Anyway, it should look something like this:

The second piece of code, you should place between <b:include name=’feedLinks’/> and </b:includable> like this:

And you’re set. Hope it works for you! :-)

(Sorry for mess. My code is often as unkempt as me.)

I am currently in the middle of revamping my blog. I decided it on a whim around 2am last night and haven’t slept since. If you’re visiting and some things are off, just come back in a bit, there are still a lotta kinks I’m fixing up (oh you know what I mean).

But I couldn’t wait to show you my snazzy new look! :-) The header I used is actually one of the pictures I took of my hometown, and then I processed it in Picnik (because my Photoshop somehow got corrupted and I’m hating Gimp). Tell me how you like it! :-)

I’m saving up a snapshot of my old design for sentimentality’s sake. I realize that this is my fourth major redesign and yet I was not able to save my old themes. The first design was a basic Blogger template, the second design was of yellow flowers (the sweet-smelling ilang-ilang) and the third design was flowery pink (Self Absorbed Female theme).

I’m now onto my fifth design, which you will all see very very soon. :-)

Update: Yay it’s up! Tell me if you run into any problems! And tell me what you think of the new design! :-) Do you love it or hate it? How can I better it??

Update: Hey, it seems SocialSpark is working again. Yay!

I was notified that I got two opportunity reservations at lunch time today. I ate and took a nap, thinking I still had 12 hours to complete the opp anyways. But when I woke up a couple of hours later I couldn’t load SocialSpark.

My first thought was perhaps my IP had been banned for autoreloading the page every minute (opps at SocialSpark are first come first serve, you see). So I visited a proxy site and entered SocialSpark.com. The proxy could not load it either. I asked a friend of mine across the country to load SocialSpark, and he couldn’t either. I also checked if SocialSpark is online through DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com and it returned a 502 Server Error. So my best guess is SocialSpark is down again.

SocialSpark went down a few days ago, along with IZEA and PayPerPost. This time though, IZEA and PayPerPost are working. Searching through Google, I can’t find anyone having the same problem, all searches lead back to the first downtime.

IZEA gives this explanation for the first downtime that happened on June 25:

In a nutshell, the data center we used screwed up. I honestly still don’t know precisely what happened other than something happened within the data center that knocked everyone there completely off the grid. The servers themselves were never harmed or put in jeopardy and ran along quite happily, just without any traffic. The main Internet feeds in and out of the data center were also fine. Something internally at the data center screwed up and it took them a stunning 10 or so hours to figure it out.

We will absolutely be moving to a distributed architecture as a result of this as soon as possible.

They also posted this message yesterday:

Following the Data Center debacle earlier this week, we are deploying some changes to the site at 22:15 Eastern. We will need to take the site down for about 2 minutes to accomplish this.

Sorry for the inconvenience. 

So I’m not sure if the outage today means they’re doing maintenance. Darn am I gonna lose my opps in a few hours?! :-( Anybody having the same problem?

Hi, you might want to know a bit more about me (same as I kinda want to know a bit more about you and you about me, heh) so I placed a new tab above my header. If you click on “About Me”, you’ll be able to read my brief autobiography. :-) Feel free to make comments.

Also, a blogger was trying to contact me a few days ago but could not find a way (I had recently removed my email link) so she dropped a comment instead. So I also added a link to a contact form (thank you Contactify.com) if ever you need to reach me. :-)

*Normal blogging tasks will resume shortly.*

I am astounded at how many Filipinos are active in the blogging community. I was browsing BlogCatalag a few days ago, and I found there were 3272 Filipino blogs registered, placing the country at the #4 spot of all the countries with most blogs (registered with BlogCatalog)! India is at #3 with 4786, Canada is at #2 with 4814, while the UK reigns at #1 with 7257 blogs total.

Wow. Even online I’m surrounded by my kababayan (countrymen)! Hehehe.

I suppose the reason that Filipinos love blogging is because we’re very socially-oriented as a people (and blogging is a social pursuit, wouldn’t you say?).

I mean, there’s no concept of a “nuclear family” here because under one roof, you often have the mama, the papa, the children, the lola (grandmother), the lolo (grandfather), even yayas (nannies) and helpers, and sometimes other relatives, all living together as one family.

We are not comfortable being alone. Take for example eating. I often see American shows where people enjoy eating alone in a restaurant. In the Philippines, that would feel extremely uncomfortable. Eating is often a social event. When someone is eating (or is about to eat) and sees someone without food, it is customary to say “Kain tayo!” or “Let’s eat!”, an invitation. (If you don’t say it, you will look rude.)

Filipinos always actively seek company, and love to share stories and chika (gossip). Thus the concept of a barkada, or a circle of best friends.

So the social nature of Filipinos complements the social nature of blogging. Plus, English being one of the Philippines’ two official languages, I guess it’s no wonder why Filipinos love to blog. It’s easy, it’s natural and it’s what we’ve always been used to, just on a different platform.

Are you a Pinoy blogger? Do you think we’re taking over?