About 6 months ago we got our first official 1 million pageviews/month and today, we are excited to announce yet another big leap and milestone for the blog – 1,000,000 visits/month. According to yesterday’s Google Analytics, Hongkiat.com is serving an average of 1,042,163 visits/month (2,000,037 pageviews/month) and that is an pretty exciting figure.

Thank You

Our gratitude goes to the readers – you who visits the site or read from RSS feeds. This figure wouldn’t be possible without you.

We’d also like to thank Exabytes, for the dedicated server and technical support, allowing us to sail smoothly through traffic spikes.

We’ll work harder to bring you more useful tips and resources, stay tuned and have a nice day ahead. Cheers!

When Digg.com firstly releases their Digg badges, it easily became widely implemented in blogs and websites who wish to promote their articles up to Digg’s front page. This implementation of badges slowly evolves; webmasters and bloggers began to add more badges and mini icons of different bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Design Float, Stumble Upon, Mixx, etc.

Then some blogs (including us) want to make things a little bit nicer. Instead of placing it next to the title, it’s moved down, right below the last paragraph of an article. Together with some design, we thought it’ll be catchy enough to grab visitors’ attentions.

How a ‘Share Box’ helps?

Share box urge readers and visitors to submit articles they think are good to bookmarking sites. The idea of a Share box is simple – fundamentally consists of a simple background and couple of bookmarking sites links (article permalinks embedded). Let’s first take a look at 12 nice designed Share boxes we’ve stumbled upon.

12 Nice Share boxes Design

• Styl.eti.me

  

• Tutorial9

  

• DailyApp

  

• Kreativuse

  

• Noupe

  

• WellMedicated

  

• Photoshop Star

  

• PSDFan

  

• PSDTUTS

  

• CatsWhoCodes

  

• Vandelay Design

  

How to do it

Folks at BlogPerfume wrote a simple and nice article on how you can design a simple and nice Share box box (they call it the Bookmark box) from scratch in Photoshop.

Tools to get you started

• Digg badges – Get the official Digg badges to put on your website or weblog.

  

• Stumble Upon buttons – Choose your fav SU buttons and create your very own scripts for your site.

  

• DesignFloat tools – Make submitting content to DesignFloat easy.
• Reddit buttons – Place these real time vote counting buttons on your site.
• Dzone buttons – Vote on DZone links from your site.
• Delicious tools – Bookmarking buttons and add-ons for your browser or website

I’ve been stacking up emails in my inbox with questions, problems, suggestions, etc regarding articles at hongkiat.com and I’ve been replying on a routine basis, answering with similar answers from time to time. So I thought to make things a little easier for me, I might as well publish a blog post. For those that I’ve missed replying your email, I apologize and if you think I really need to read the email please insert ‘ATTENTION:‘ before your title.

I’ll try to make things as easy to understand as possible in a Q&A format below, if you think I’ve missed something important, please drop a comment.

1. How do you manage to get ideas for your article ?

   Couple of ways actually.

   Individual references – As a web designer come developer, I faced the same problem like any designers and bloggers out there. We ran out of ideas, we need to find stock images, free vectors, always looking out for cool AJAX scripts, Wordpress plugins and fixes, etc. And I though since I’m already out there searching for these, I might as well collect some couple of dozens as alternatives and references, and the best part, I can share with people of the same interest. That’s mostly how blog posts are created.

   Readers feedback – Anytime when blog posts were made, I’ll receive feedback in email or comment box (and I appreciate that) with related suggestions and comments. For that, I’ll usually initiate a blog post because that’s what readers truly want to read.

   Read a lot- I read a lot of feeds on daily basis. If there are some cool ideas and interesting topics, I’ll write. Now that being said, if someone wrote an mashup of 20 cool stuffs, I’ll will not recompile it to 15 cool stuffs or 25 cool stuffs. It doesn’t work like that. You need to ‘enhanced’ the existing by broaden up the perspective, or at least put efforts in researching and put up something 2-3 times more. Proper credit needs to be given if you are inspired by any specific article directly.

   Sequel – Whenever a post is published and if the responses are fairly higher than the normal blog post, I’ll consider a sequel. Sequels will have to be way better than part 1 and they will take more time to compile.

   Left right, up down – Take the 22 Best Photoshop Text Effects blog post for example. When the article was published, I started considering related topics left right up down. Perhaps readers might be interested in Photo effects as well? or how about free alternatives of Photoshops? These are some stuff I’ll start pondering.

   Be alert – Be alert and keep yourself updated with the up-coming trends and news within your niche. Not only I strive to be the first few to blog about it, but also to find related resources and do problem solving. The Wordpress image upload fix here is a good example.

2. How long does it take produce an article ?

   I can’t really give a fair number, neither in unit of hours, nor days because they really varies. Some researching articles take weeks (to months) and some take up couple of 3-4 hours or half a weekend day. This article for example, took me 1 hour before sleep.

3. Can I copy recommend your articles in my blog, to my readers?

   That depends on how you do it. If you:

   • Reproduced head to toe. – It’s a No even if you insert credit link back at the bottom (or top)
   • Take a small portion, and link the rest back to the origin – Yes.
   • Take a small portion, and take the images (images I manually produced) – Normally it’ll be a Yes, but please send me an email first :-)
   • Create a link-mashups -Yes.
   • Images hot-linking – No.
4. Images are loading real slow, can you shorten up the blog post?

   There have been a couple of email feedback from users suggesting that blog post should be shorter as images are taking a hard time to load. I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience caused. The reason why I liked to produce a greater list in mash-ups is because that gives you more alternatives. In terms of images loading problem in feed, I’ve migrated all images to Amazon S3, which in my opinion loads faster and better efficiency. I hope this solves the problem, even though it’s going to cost me money on the bandwidths.

5. Do you take freelance writers?
   

   Not officially but I’m keen in getting co-authors, with a revenue-sharing model. Please contact me if you are interested.

6. Do you write for other blogs?
   

   Not at the moment, but occasionally when I feels like it :-)

So again, if there is anything I’ve missed drop me a message. More articles coming right up but for now it’s time to sleep :-)

BlogDay is a great idea! Created by folks at iamnews, it’s a day where we (blogger) recommend our readers 5 others blogs that we read/like/would recommend. Along with recommendations, we give a little intro about the blog (why choose them, etc) and link to them. BlogDay falls on 31th August each year, 4th times since started, 1st time I’m participating.

My recommendations

Here’s some blogs that I find interesting, apart from my daily RSS, they are those that worth the wait for their next blog post.

Stickgirl – The Bitter Stickgirl

You would write your feelings as blog post but this Singaporean girl has a different way to express things. Rather than doing the typing, she does the drawing. Simple, cute and unique way of blogging.

UsingMac – All About Apple Mac

Authors are Mac fans, you can be sure they are all excited sharing with your all their experiences and Mac tips they’ve discovered.

Kailoon – Loon Design

Passionate designer generously sharing whatever he’s got. A very potential design blog.

Shooperman

Zen Habit of a slightly different niche. Blogs about Law of Attraction, self-motivations, productivity, money etc. This blog has archived a good bunch of contents, just that I hope the author would write more frequent. If you are into Alchemy, you should read this blog.

Smashpop

Another designer that I think handles the dSLR pretty well. You might not be there for the contents, but definitely for the photos

Lastly I’d like to thank LiewCF for recommending, and bringing this to my awareness.

According to yesterday’s Google Analytic report, hongkiat.com has again covered a new milestone in terms of traffics; something I anticipated to happen this end of July happened yesterday – we’ve crossed the 1,000,000 pageviews/month and we still have another week to go before July ends.

I’d like to thank you guys, particularly the regular readers, feed readers, my co-author Kay, because you guys helped make this possible. As you can tell, I’m extremely happy although 1 million pageviews/month don’t seem like a great thing to some big boys but I think that’s a good start to the more exciting blogging journey. Now that being said, it’s also a sign that I should be upgrading the server specs.

Anyway, more great contents ahead. Once again, thanks for staying with the blog. Have a nice day.

We mentioned about this cool tool but it must slipped our mind. If you are unfamiliar with Skribit, it’s a widget that allows readers to suggest what they really want to read from the blog they visit. So now, we are going to implement this on hongkiat.com and it’ll stay as long you keep the suggestions coming in. This widget will be placed on the sidebar (refer to the image above), and if you scroll all the way down on the right sidebar, just after Recent Comments, you should be able to find it.

So it’s simple. We’ll write for the few topics that are voted the most, but no promises they will be up accordingly but you can be self-assured that we will be working on them.

A little suggestion..

This is a technology blog so we prefer to stick with what we are good at. Topics around technology, design and digital inspiration, web tricks/tips, windows/mac, make money online are welcomed. Please do not suggest us to reveal how much we are making from the site, or any topic that’s too far away from tech.

Veustar apparently has been awarded this patent in few other countries like United States, New Zealand and Australia, and the company plans to exercise this on Internet giants like Google and Microsoft. Invoices has been sent out to local Singaporean companies and, the giants will expect theirs as well as soon as the patent is enforced internationally.

Technology and intellectual property lawyer Bryan Tan of Keystone Law Corporation said even if Veustar has been granted the patent, but its a rather wide one. Bryan added ” if the patent is allowed to stand, it will probably bring the Internet industry to its knees”. This issue is also currently being discussed over at HardwareZone forum. I don’t know about you, but to file someone a lawsuit for hyperlinking images to webpage is way insane. I just noticed Veustar’s tagline on the website says ‘Good ideas with vision’, now that’s really a good idea.

Your opinion?

Hitting blogging block is really nothing new for bloggers, instead of cracking your brains and make assumption what you readers will like, how about asking them? Skribit is a blog topic suggestion application, comes in the format of widget that sticks on the sidebar of your blog. Ask your readers what they really want to read, and those that accumulated the most vote, you know you’ll really want to talk about it.

On the other side, it somehow makes reader feels good and respected. They get to suggest what they really want to read. So if you often hit a bloggers block, consider getting on of this.

via thedaneshproject

ClickBank, one of the biggest retailer in Internet goods has now accept registration from Malaysian and a couple of countries they once did not allowed. Fraudulence was the reason that kept Malaysia and few other countries outside the ClickBank door, and results of that, some of us tried getting in by faking the registration information. It is not necessary now, as ‘Malaysia’ is part of the option under the registration form.

Hat tip from Adi Wong.

Author of noktahhitam purchased an e-book from online Internet Marketer ‘AdSense Taiko‘, a book that promises various tips and tricks you can earn money from AdSense. He soon realized the content was inappropriate, couldn’t agree with the techniques and he demands refund but was rejected. The blogger then started revenging against this Internet marketer by distributing the book for free.

The refunding issue

AdSense Taiko ebook cost RM80 or USD $25 and the typical Internet marketer long-page guarantees a refund if you are anyway unsatisfied with what you’ve purchased. Here’s what the website says (no link love from us):

Even promises are made, blogger still failed to get the refund he demanded and that leads him into distributing the AdSense Taiko book for free, to express his unsatisfactory of the product purchased.

The contents, a total scam!

Thanks to the free distribution, it revealed yet another scam of some Internet marketers attempting to make some quick bucks out of Internet newbies. Author of noktahhitam went through the ebooks (4 of them) and summarized what he had purchased as following:

I’ve personally went through the ebook by brief and find the contents inaccurate and unprofessional. First of all these methods will not make you money with Google AdSense; secondly the followers of these methods are dumping garbage into the Internet, and worst of all, you are putting your AdSense account at risk. Here’s the so call techniques you’ll get with this ebook:

But if curious what’s the extra stuff they have in the ebook, download a copy at noktahhitam.

In conjunction with WCIT 2008 Malaysia, NEF (New Entrepreneur Forum) together with the help of Youth Malaysia, Ideapreneur.net, etc are organizing an event call Netbash. Netbash is an event where you get to meet few notable speakers and hear what they got to say about Changing the world with creative contents and Web 2.0.

The Speakers

• Guy Kawasaki of Garage.com.
• Terry Thoren of Rocket Fish Studio.
• Mahmoud Bouneb of Al Jazeera.
• Colin Wong of Prosperati.

The Price

If you think spending USD 1000+ for WCIT is totally out of your budget, Netbash on the otherside, looks like a better alternative. You’ll pay RM350 (USD 106) for Netbash if you show up on the event day. However if you decides now and pay online before 12th May, it only cost RM200 per person.

The Program

1.45pm – 2.00pm Registration

2.00pm – 2.10pm Opening Remarks by NEF President

2.10pm – 3.25pm How To Change the World with Creative Content

3.30pm – 4.45pm How To Change the World with Web 2.0

4.45pm – 5.30pm Tea Break

5.30pm – 6.30pm How To Change the World – An evening with Guy Kawasaki

6.30pm – 7.30pm Networking Session

The Venue

Nikko Hotel, 19th May 2008. 1:45pm – 7.30pm

Click here to register for Netbash.

Advertlets, a Malaysia ad network will be first among their local competitors to announce text ads, in fact it’s something more interesting; text + image ads. I’ll be showing you some screen shots in a while (which you’ll only get to see it here in hongkiat.com). These text ads will run on a geo-location Cost Per Click (CPC), that means publishers get paid when visitors click on the ads.

Josh, founder of Advertlets has also made it clear that there will be standards in determining CPC and CPM in Advertlets; that is:

• CPM – Banner Ads
• CPC – Text Ads

Is this a good news?

I think yes. As a publisher, you are able to tweak the ad style so it looks blended with your blog. Blended ad create higher click through rates and thus it could potentially create better earnings comparing to image CPC ad. If you think your current CPM ads are doing just fine, at least you’ve got another option now. Here’s some screenshots of Advertlets text ads, in 2 different formats.

Let’s now see from a advertiser standpoint, which is what I’ll most definitely interested in. The minimum budget to become an advertiser will be reduced, with RM100 you can become an advertiser yourself. With the budget greatly reduced, I believe there’ll be lots of advertisers rushing in. And when that happens, it guarantees more variety for the text ads. You don’t want to see the same ad on your site, don’t you?

Conflicts with Google AdSense?

I don’t think so. Gokita (Nufflets)’s text ad has the same problem during their launch where bloggers were worried that it might violate Google AdSense’s TOS but Nabil of Gokita has confirmed with Google that as long as visitors are able to differentiate between these 2 ad networks, it’s fine. So same case applies here, there’s really nothing to be worry about.

Advertlets will likely launch this anywhere in April, so if you are looking of a chance, be sure to keep an eye on the announcement. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Are you a Malaysian? Are you a technology blogger? If it’s a ‘yes’ to both, well then you just got yourself qualified in winning attractive prizes like LG Portable DVD Player, Microsoft Lifecam, Life Chat, Optical Mouses, Keyboards and t-shirts.

Microsoft Malaysia’s ‘Blog all about Tech ·Ed‘ contest is calling out for all technology bloggers to write about the event. Just by doing that, you’ve got yourself a limited edition T-shirt and if your entry is creative enough, then you might just win more.

Here’s what these folks have to say:

If your blog is found to be the most creative, outstanding and mind-blowing, you will be rewarded with wholesome prizes for your great effort. That’s not all, if you blog creatively and consistently, cool prizes are reserved for the best blogger of the month. One (1) of the five (5) monthly winners will stand a chance to be the ‘Super Tech ·Ed Blogger’!!!

More information at Tech.Ed SEA 2008 contest page.

PS: Speaking of prizes, watch out for later entries in Hongkiat.com as I’ve some cool stuff to give away for the readers as well. Till then, have a good weekend ahead.

Hat tip from iCalvyn

Blog It is a free Facebook application that allows you to post to any of your blogs within Facebook; and when you do that it also automatically update your Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook status. Think of it as a ‘post once, update all‘ blogging methodology with the use of a single Facebook application.

Blog It developed by folks at TypePad. If you are wondering what TypePad is, it’s just another blogging platform similar to Wordpress. Check out the Blog It video to understand better what these Facebook app is capable of.

Earlier this month New York Times written an entry about how blogging are seriously affecting the health of bloggers, especially technology bloggers. And this week, the article was discussed again by the media and an underground blogging community were exposed. So can bloggers really make money out of blogging? Do they really do it for the passion? The video tells you everything. Video after jump.

And of course, that video is just for entertainment sake. It’s not true. Happy blogging.

Thanks Earl

Welcome to the brand new Hongkiat.com, guess it’s about time. I’m not sure when was the last time it was revamped but somewhere in February I’ve come to think that the site looks old and it desperately needs a new look; so here we, are after about one month of planning, research, design and coding, I present you Hongkiat.com v3.

The 3-Column Stays

In the process of determining what stays and what goes, here’s what I’ve done.

• Observe the before-and-after of some blogs after they’ve done their revamp.
• Played with few premium wordpress themes
• Visited few nicely design blogs
• Flipping through "Don’t Make Me Think" (one of my fav book) again and again

The final decision – 3 column stays, revamps will be work on top of current layout instead of restructuring it (which might potentially confuse existing users)

Helping old contents get attention

Here’s a problem I see with blogging. Old contents tend to hide into archives as new contents flows in. Yes, we have ‘Related Content‘ plugin, or we can even create a link-back to them but still, I think there’s more we can do. In this new theme, I’m experimenting few ways to help old contents getting some focus.

Category/archive page

Both category and archive can come with or without thumbnails. With thumbnails, it should be able to attract some attention. Column/row-view is an idea I kinda rip from YouTube, also beautifully implemented in Smashing Magazine. I thought they fit in nicely on category page.

After Content

The column next to Related Entries is not a permanent ad column. With help of some php logics and Wordpress tags, it’ll also help push some older content using images.

Few more methods are still undergoing experiments, but for now I’ll have to launch without them.

The Progress

By comparing the items in my to-do list, I’d say the theme is about 65% complete but it has to be live else I’ll spend most of the time doing unnecessary refinement and experimenting new functions, end up procrastinate the launch. The last part of the plan is to release this as a free theme.

What do you think?

Last but not least, your comments/suggestions on this new theme is absolutely welcome. It’ll help me better refine it. Thanks in advance.

There have been some slight updates on the theme, particularly on the sidebar. If you seen weird alignment or images, it’s probably the cache. Try clear cache and reload.

The fact is that tech bloggers, particularly the probloggers live a different life than the rest. Lifestyle bloggers for instance, write whenever they feels like to, no pressure. In the technology blogosphere, being amongst the first to cover tech news is considered highly important. But perhaps we overlooked something more important – our health ?

A lot of bloggers aim to convert themselves full time, a problogger. One often sees lots of advantages being full time blogger and often, missed to see there’s also the negative side. Yes, there’s maximum time flexibility but that also means you could be blogging at any hours and resulted your body to missed the regular sleeping hours. I noticed myself consumed more caffeines and nicotines after going full time. LiewCF put on weight, waking up when most people are sleeping. And because you need to do more blogging after converted to full time, some bloggers even start to lose passion and slack off.

It takes a little bit of self discipline to overcome these. Well yeah, it’s easy to say but from my point of view, it’s hard to implement.

Read more at NY Times.

Blog2u, Singapore

A Singapore ad network startup by Paddy Tan, the founder of Bak2u. Blog2u made public on the 2nd of April, 2008. Here’s how Blog2u works. You install the script, and get paid when advertisers decides to place ads on your site. The more interesting part you should probably know is, Blog2u pays before (or the first day) ads are served, instead of paying when campaign is over. Read more on Blog2u.

KlikSaya, Indonesia

KlikSaya, or in English "Click Me" is ad network startup from Indonesia by David Ciang. KlikSaya’s model is simple, it’s contextual. Think of it as Google AdSense for the Indonesians. I don’t think it’s a ads network you will want to sign up with if you are not Indonesia, as it only pays out to Indon banks.

2nd Level Domain (2LD) are domains without .com/.net/.org/.gov etc involved. For example – www.domain.my. MYNIC – Malaysian registrar of .my domains will release 2LD (.my) domains to public starting on 9:00 am 25 March 2008. That means any Malaysian registered company or individuals will be able to register, as long as the domain name is still available (first come first serve basis). That’s also moments domain squatters are waiting for.

If you currently have a .com.my or .net.my I suggest you act fast to secure your 2LD .my. Registering a .my 2LD domain starts from RM99. Let’s take a look at some interesting domains in the blogosphere that have been secured by various individuals and companies:

Claimed

• advertlets.my – Advertlets. Looks like they are fast this time.
• blog.my – Netizen Ad Network
• blogs.my – Business.com.my
• blogger.my – Jerry Chong
• google.my – digiattack.com

Here are few of the domains that have yet to be claimed:

Yet To Be Claimed

• nuffnang.my – Folks at Nuffnang might wanna act fast on this.
• bloggers.my
• blogosphere.my
• problogger.my
• problogging.my
• blogtips.my
• blogging.my

I’ve yet to buy hongkiat.my, maybe I’ll skip it. However .my is nice if your name is or happen to know someone by the name of:

• sammy – sam.my
• tammy – tam.my
• jamy – ja.my
• tommy – tom.my
• amy – a.my (can MYNIC accept 1 character domain?)

Often friends and readers asked me how I keep myself updated with the technology news that is happening so fast. Well, there’s couple of methods I’m frequently using. Speed reading RSS feed is one of them, but few months ago I’ve discovered a more efficient method – Google Alert.

Google Alert service fetch the news you want to read right into your mailbox. Insert relevant search terms, select how frequent you want Google to send and where to send them. And voila, you’ll be reading almost first hand news in your mailbox everyday.

Tip: Use your name or domain name as search item to find out who’s talking about you on the internet,or blogosphere.

Getting new from the blogosphere

If you are looking for blog posts instead of news, you can apply the Google alerting service within blogsearch.google.com. Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to blogsearch.google.com
2. Insert keywords, click Search.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page, you can create email alert, add to Google homepage or even subscribe to a feed based on your search string.