I am experimenting with new ways of presenting my photos. I think my photos look a lot more professional when they’re elegantly bordered and identified.

Initially I was just going for a watermark, to prevent any possible stealing of photos. (Not that it’s ever happened to me personally, to my knowledge anyways, but it’s a common story in my part of the world.)

But I quite dislike watermarks because they tend to ruin photos. And they give off a negative attitude, like a whiff of “I know you’re gonna steal my photo so I’m going to uglify it so you can’t use it.” I’m not dissing the ones who use it, of course. I know a lot of photobloggers only do the watermarking as a last resort, and even prominent bloggers have had to resort to it just to prevent thieves (and yet oftentimes it still doesn’t work).

So, anyways, I’ve seen this kind of bordering done on a few photo blogs so I decided to do the same. I think my photos look majorly prettified. :D

It’s a photo of a fallen tree along the coast in Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte, Philippines. Mysteriously, the tree is still alive even though it’s been beaten down by wind and sea.

This photo is uncropped and unedited, except for the resizing and the added borders (I used FastStone Photo Resizer because it’s a very small application and it doesn’t eat up a lot of resources).

I’m lucky I have a not-so-common nickname. Flisha, as my father invented it. I get to have a simple username unlike my sister Tricia and Melisse, who often have to use numbers to claim a unique username.

Still, there are a few other people with my name so I’m OC when it comes to signing up for new services. I’ve gotta claim my name first. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this new age disorder, so teh Internet geeks have found a way to help us cope.

UserNameCheck.com checks whether your preferred username is still available or already taken among the many Internet websites they have listed.

I found a lot of new sites I’d never known about and started registering like mad for an hour or so. Haha. Now I have like 20 new accounts that I don’t what I’m going to do with.

The list of services is a bit lacking, though. I would love for this tool to incorporate more searches for social networks. Where’s FaceBook and OpenID? In the Philippines, Friendster trumps all other social networks, although Multiply (listed) is fast gaining ground. Ning is also an emerging player that’s not on the list.

A lot of the included searches are for start-ups like Kwippy and Jaiku, invite-only sites. Flickr and Picasa shouldn’t be part of the search, I think, since these services use e-mail addresses as usernames, so they’d probably be eternally available for the username one prefers.

Still the major sites you’d expect to find are there. The very useful ones are Blogger, Digg, eBay, Gmail, Yahoo, Multiply, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Technorati, Twitter and Plurk.

So if you’re username-obsessed like me, go visit the site. :-)

I blogged about Nuffnang several posts ago. Turns out I won Php500 just by being one of the first 68 bloggers to write a Nuffnang review.

What fun! :-)

Head over on here to check if you’re one of the 67 other winners. ;-P

P.S. For those interested in a contest, read this.

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour and enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

These are the communities and directories I have joined so far.

1. Blogarama.com
2. BlogCatalog.com
3. BlogDirs.com
4. BlogExplosion.com
5. BlogFlux.com
6. Bloggernity.com
7. Bloghub.com
8. Entrecard.com
9. GlobeOfBlogs.com
10. RiceBowlJournals.com
11. Technorati.com

If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment!

Infinity pools. I only see them on MTV Cribs.

But someday, when I am filthy rich, I shall have one too!

Of course, a pool can’t really be infinite by itself (can it?). It needs the help of a larger body of water, like the ocean, so you can pretend your pool extends all the way to the horizon and beyond.

Well I can say I finally have bathed in an infinity pool! Yay me!

After getting all sweaty and smelly (of bat poo) at the Hinagdanan Cave, Gim and I badly needed some refreshment! We had two choices. Bohol Beach Club or Panglao Island Beach Resort. We were only in Bohol for a day, so we couldn’t choose both. Panglao Resort was right beside Hinagdanan, so that made the choice much easier. (I recently saw some pictures of Bohol Beach Club and it’s amazing, so we’re definitely reserving that for next year.)

Panglao Island Beach Resort looks very ordinary from the outside. We weren’t planning to go inside, we just stopped by to take a picture before we headed on to Hinagdanan, so I could post it on my blog and say I’d been there but I really hadn’t.

I know. I am awful blogger. I was gonna lie to you all.

Thankfully, Nards, our guide from the cave, told us Panglao was a very nice resort, with an infinity pool.

I was sold. By these very words. And because it was cheap, too. The entrance cost P350 ($8) per person, very cheap! P200 of that was consumable. So the entrance was really just P150.

There was a shoot going on when we got there. There was this very pretty girl with a skimpy two-piece bikini on, lying on the edge of the pool against a backdrop of infinite water and she was oiled and slutting it up for the camera. And NO, I did NOT take a picture of her.

There was a large tripod and a huge camera pointed at her, and a director barking orders at the crew. At the same time placating the star.

I was quite disappointed they were there, because I didn’t want to ruin the shoot by jumping into the pool or anything. *Heh* It was tempting. Very very tempting. So Gim and I just sat on the bamboo benches and laid out our stuff.

Then we changed into our swimwear… Hee. It was my first time to wear swimwear. And even then, well, it wasn’t exactly swimwear. I wore shorts and a sports top. Heh. (Trust me, you don’t want to see me reveal anything!!!)

Thank you, water, for enveloping me very nicely. Anyways by the time we’d finished changing, the shoot had wrapped up so we were free to splash and play and jump into the pool! But shower first, of course! And then — yipee!!! Splash, splash, splash!

Here’s the breathtaking view. Click the pics for bigger resolutions!

Beautiful, huh? And the great thing was that we had the place ALL to ourselves! Nobody was there but us! (Since the shoot people were done.) It was so much fun just lying around and playing in the pool! There were these little jets of water that shot from holes on the pool wall, they were soooo much fun…. And NO it was not THAT strong.

Then I asked Gim to pose like that girl in the shoot. Hee hee hee hee!!!! So he did.

Isn’t he the cutest???? LOL!!!

He’s gonna kill me for posting these. Hehehe!! So I’ll pose one he likes. He thinks he looks very sexy and “manly” here. Hee hee hee!!

Some more pics of him trying to look “manly”.

Hehehehe!!! And then we have the “clambering-up-over-pools” pics. Just because. Haha.

Oh and the pool is made up of smaller pools but they all share the same water. I like the parts that are right beside the plants, like these:

Oh and now it’s my turn for picture-taking! Humor me while I hide underneath the water.

And since I duly embarassed Gim in the pictures above, I will allow a bit of embarrassment for myself. Hee. (Gim made me do it!!!!)

And since I cannot swim, nor float in freshwater, well, er… this is the way I enjoyed myself.

Whee! Hahahaha.

Oh and another thing that’s cute about the resort is that it has a snack bar right at the edge of the pool, where the bar stools are cemented right inside the pool! How fun! Loved the concept! :-)

Unfortunately forgot to take a picture of the seats. But we did get the snack bar girl to take a pic of us! Don’t we look cute? Hahahaha!

More?

Hehehehe. We wanted to have lunch at the snack bar but we couldn’t. It was only for snacks daw. Hmph. We had to go to the second floor to eat lunch. But we were so hungry we didn’t mind.

Here’s what we ordered.

Fried chicken! Mmm!

Mmm, pasta with clams and garlic, and garlic bread! And mango shakes! It was a great meal!

Here’s my Gim!

And then there’s me!

Then afterwards we went right back to the pool again!

And I’ll not say the part where I wanted to pee so much I almost ran towards the toilet which I thought was a shower but it wasn’t, it was just a toilet, and there wasn’t any place to put my clean clothes anywhere and I was soooo in need I peed all over myself but there was no water (which is so kainis, hello it was a toilet!) so I gingerly sneaked out, made sure nobody was looking, carefully closed the door behind me so no one would smell anything and then, head help up unnaturally high, walked steadily to the shower room.

The end.

Read the other Bohol posts…
Bohol Tour Part IV: Hinagdanan Cave
Bohol Tour Part VI: Philippine Tarsiers
Bohol Tour Part VII: Statues and Churches
Bohol Tour Part VIII: Snakes and Flying Lemurs

BloggingFromScratch.com is a refreshingly well-designed site that focuses on helping bloggers optimize their sites and realize profits by doing what they do best – blog!

BloggingFromScratch is the creation of Riyanne, a Filipina and proud of it. She began the site in June 2008 and already it averages more than a hundred visitors a day. Her RSS feed has picked up more than 60 subscribers in only four months! (Hey, I can learn a few things from this girl!)

Riyanne writes about blogging, making money and blog contests. If you’re a newbie blogger, her blog’s a nice spot to perch for a time.

P.S. How fun! She is holding her own contest on her blog, and she’s giving away $50 and 2000 ECs for the first prize.

So far, there is Asia Century Multi-Advertising (terrible interface, incessant login problems) and AuctionPH (terribly low commission fees – P6 for an actual purchase!).

Now comes Nuffnang Philippines, created by Timothy Tiah and Cheo Ming Shen. Judging from interface and features alone, I think this ad network will blow away the other two to smithereens.

Nuffnang bills itself as Asia’s First Blog Advertising Community and started serving ads in Malaysia and Singapore early 2007. Its advertiser list is impressive, including big names like Nike, Honda, Nokia and Nescafe. This year it planted roots in the Philippines and started the call for interested bloggers.

I like that Nuffnang has its own stats analysis without having to ask the blogger to install any additional code other than an ad unit. It is for this reason that if you’re a Nuffnang blogger but aren’t serving ads, you won’t see any data in your Nuffnang Analytics page. The data comes from the number of times your ad units were displayed. Sure enough, not 15 minutes after I had uploaded the Nuffnang ad unit to my blog, I started seeing some Referral data on my Nuffnang page (Analytics data is delayed by an hour, though).

Ad units come in three forms, leaderboard (728 x 90), skyscraper (160 x 300) and large rectangle (336 x 280). My ad unit is in the form of skyscraper, but so far it doesn’t seem to serving anything other than Nuffnang ads. Hmm. Looking forward to seeing a big name ad on my site soon. Wouldn’t it be cool advertising Nokia? Hehehe! Whoops I forgot I just blogged about Sony Ericsson a few posts ago, hahaha. Guess I won’t see Nokia on my sidebar anytime soon, aww, hahaha.

Exlusive Nuffnang bloggers (defined as bloggers not serving any other Southeast Asian ads apart from Nuffnang) get to be part of the Glitterati club (how posh!) and get higher earnings than non-exclusive members. They are also paid earlier (a month verses two for ordinary members, but I think a month is still too long!!), they get more prizes in contests and they get to bring their boyfriends to community events. Hahaha, I think it definitely pays to be loyal to Nuffnang.

Except that it currently says on my profile I’m not exclusive to Nuffnang. No, Nuffnang, don’t say that! I am! Well, we’ll see, maybe it will change within the week. It does say 48 hours to get the Nuffnang crawl update.

Oh, and they’re giving away P500 to the first 68 Nuffnang-exclusive bloggers to share the good news. Go on, sign up now at Nuffnang.

Had a bit of trouble setting up the domain I impulsively bought last night so I decided to create a tutorial for all of you who might be thinking of setting up a GoDaddy domain with Blogger.

First, log in your GoDaddy account. Then, hover your mouse over the Domains tab and click on My Domains.

That will bring you to the Domains page. Click on your domain name. That will bring you to the page below. Click on Total DNS Control and MX Records.

You should now be inside the Domain Manager. You will be modifying one and adding another CNAME here. Do not delete or alter your A Record (Host). (Some tutorials will tell you to do that, but it will only cause trouble later on.)

Modify the CNAME for the host (alias) named www and point it to ghs.google.com. This means that if a user types in www.yourdomain.com, Google will dynamically point the user to any Google server that’s available and loads your page fastest.

So now your www.yourdomain.com should work fine upon publishing in Google (it won’t yet, you haven’t set up Blogger yet). But what if a user decides to just type yourdomain.com, without the www prefix? It will probably load up the GoDaddy parked website. So you have to add another CNAME with the host as yourdomain.com and point it also to ghs.google.com.

And that is all we have to do on the GoDaddy front. Let’s now move on to your Blogger account. Login to your Blogger account, select your blog, and go to the Settings tab and then click on the Publishing subtab.

Right now you’re publishing on Blogger, but we want to use your new domain name so go ahead and click on Custom Domain.

 

Okay, that will bring you to the page below.

On the same page, click on Switch to Advanced Settings, like in the screenshot below.

On the Advanced Settings page, type your domain name in the box. Don’t forget the www prefix. Then press the Save Settings button.

  

Now your domain which is www.yourdomain.com should be working. However the URL yourdomain.com is probably still parked at GoDaddy. Let’s remedy that, shall we? Check the checkbox that will allow Google to redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com, like in the screenshot. Then Save Settings again.

 

Voila! Now both ways of typing in your URL are working! Yay!

Okay no. It might not work RIGHT away. Or maybe it will. This one: www.yourdomain.com will probably work right away. But this one: yourdomain.com might take a few minutes to an hour or maybe more, not sure. So if it’s not working, give it a couple of hours.

Don’t go tweaking all your other settings in vain. Don’t listen to people telling you to delete your A record, forward this, redirect that… Because I did and it caused me a lot of headache last night! Until I figured out the meaning of patience. Hahaha.

Good luck!

Well, I up and did it. ;) I’ve been stalling for the longest time, ‘coz I’m quite comfy here in Blogger. I’ve been here, what, 3 years now? I’m not sure… I don’t celebrate anniversaries (…should I?). Anyways, it’s been a fun free ride.

But having your own domain just looks so cool. A few years ago you’d have to pay $35 a year and that was just registration. Now registration only costs $6 a year while hosting costs as little as $3 a month… or less!

Anyways I decided on getting the domain name BodySoulDetox.com. I didn’t get RandomDetox.com, but maybe I should too. I just feel that the word “Random” is used far too much among blog names, so I thought maybe I’d try something new. (I’m so not good at making up blog titles! My last title was Self Absorbed Female, hehe.)

I’m still testing the domain thing so I’m not gonna be moving yet. Or maybe I won’t move at all, I’ll just use my domain with Blogger. We’ll see.

I feel like a child — no, no… I feel like myself — in a grocery store. Hehe. Excited.

I’m not a big participant of link exchanges, particularly because I find it so time-consuming. But I do need some link love, so I’m beginning with the Link Back Project.

It’s in its early stages, so there’s a lot of chance for future signers-up to gift me with linkies, and so I’m jumping on board. The idea is that instead of having one master list, we will have multiple lists of a certain number, hopefully reducing penalties from too many outlinks on a single page.

Linkies:

1. The Linkback Project
2. All About Crime
3. Foolsville
4. Guy Vestal
5. SunEGrl Loves To Shop
6. Great Ways to Make Money Online
7. Shabam Development
8. CoffeeCoffeeCoffee~the blog
9. Kinky Personification
10. Da Kinky Kid Speaks
11. Josh Ottley Dot Com
12. Cebu Entrepreneur
13. Random Detoxification
14. PoeARTica
15. CoolAdzine for Marketers
16. Best Blog in the Universe
17. Ctrl + Alt + Delete : Personal random journal and reviews
18. the blog lab
19. Bradley Hankins
20. The Radical Blog
21. Get Rich Quick !? Really ??
22. Musikalye – Music is a two-way street
23. Planeta Turismo Activo
24. Swollen Pickles
25. EZ RICH PROJECT
26. ULUPONGDOTCOM
27. Picture to People
28. Your Fun Family
29. Mob Me
30. Healthy Moola
31. Champagne Dreams
32. David Rader
33. Gossip Girls
34. Before I am Famous
35. SUPLADO Online Reviews
36. Salsa Faith
37. BigMoneyList
38. Emmsy’s Stuff
39. That Blog 4 Me
40. Hey Just Blog
41. A little bit of THIS & THAT
42. Poker Forums
44. Journal of Journey
45. Hypn.za.net
46. Download Applications, Themes for Smart Phones
47. Memory This
49. Dare to be Rare
50. Your One Stop Information Center
52. Nita’s Random Thoughts
53. Nita’s Corner
54. Great Finds and Deals
55. Thomas Travel Tales
56. Filipino Online Community
57. Batuananons
59. Erlinda’s Wandering Thoughts
60 Thomas Web Links
62. Nita’s Ramblings
64. Internet Marketing Expose
65. Hasbullah Pit
66. Tangan Yang Menghayun Buaian
67. Jejak Sahabat SMSP
68. Blog Sempoi
69. More Cowbell!
70. Blog Anak Raja
71. Malaysian Digest
73. Ariyako `news of software, hardware, technology, tips and tricks”
74. Techno Zone
75. Hidup Biar Sedap
76. Inside Of Nasz
78. Mezain
79. Simply ONE Saffawati
81. 24 Patrol
82. ketuk_angel
83. Koogita
84. Artikel Komputer & Internet
85. Sagittarius Wifey
86. Aeirin’s Collections
87. MerapuLand
88. Ima Blogger
89. Morphed
90. The Techsta Blog
91. Mother’s Got a Dot Com
92. Mutiara Hati
93. The Unemployed Dad
95. Life From A Cat’s Perspective
96. Comedy Plus
97. Daytona Beach Real Estate
98. laketrees
99. EconoIndicators
100. BlogKnowtes.blogspot.com
101. Everything WordPress : Blog Installation Service
102. mar1masri
103. Reflections by Mariz

If you want to join in, copy the list from the Link Back Project. Happy linking!