Crimson Crux

Last week, we launched one of our more ambitious blogs / web projects to date — Komiks.ph, a website created to showcase everything related to Filipino-created comics.

The Komiks portal is envisioned to serve as three things:

1. a blog featuring the Pinoy Komiks industry, from news and events to reviews and editorials, with a few foreign comic features thrown in;
2. a directory of Pinoy comic creators, from artists to writers to animators; and
3. a free blog host and subdomain service for comic creators, producers, and historians.

The first item is fully up and running, while the second’s still in the works. The last service is the one we are actively informing people about right now.

If you’re a Filipino comic creator (artist, inker, writer, etc.), an animator, or someone with a strong interest in chronicling Komiks industry news and events, we are offering you a free Komiks.ph blog, along with a matching subdomain (e.g. you.komiks.ph). Newbies and amateurs to the industry are highly encouraged! You can read our FAQ to learn more.

On the other hand, if you’ve already released a comic book/booklet/webcomic, bigtime or indie, we would be happy to feature your talents on Komiks.ph. Feel free to fill up our contact form and we’ll get back at you right away.

That said, we’d be eternally grateful to people who can help us spread the word, either through their blogs, forums, or mailing groups. (Many, many thanks to sir Gerry Alanguilan, who gave us a much-needed and much-treasured shot in the arm!)

One of our goals is to help inject more life and vigor (as well as draw more creators) into the Pinoy Komiks industry, in every little way we can. We’re only three people (yours truly, Ia Lucero, and Garro Garrovillo) running this project, so we’ll need every bit of help!

Visit Komiks.ph, the portal for Pinoy Komiks!

Shortly after accepting the problogging job at Performancing.com, I was approached by Pinoy problogger extraordinaire J Angelo Racoma to write for four more Splashpress Media blogs. To make a long story short, I accepted two and kindly declined the others (too much food to chew on already!).

Hence, I’m announcing on this good ol’ pseudo-tech blog that I’m now writing for Gadzooki, home to all things gadgetry, software, gaming, and cars, and Blog Tutorials, where you’ll get to pick up some tips for creating a successful blog.

I’ll be blogging alongside some real-life friends — Ia, Mia, Ariel, and my older cousin, Anne. To find out which blogs they’re writing for, you’d have to drop by Gadzooki and Blog Tutorials, as well as their sister sites Travelogger and Froodee.

To send you off, here are my first four entries on both blogs:

• Gadzooks! New Writers!
• Three Games to Watch Out For
• New Blog Tutor, Signing On
• Use Image Attributes to Boost Your Blog’s SEO

Using Gmail has been an excruciating experience these past two weeks.

Consider these approximate loading times I’ve observed:

• Loading Gmail itself - 30 seconds
• Sending mail w/o attachment - 1 minute
• Opening a ‘folder’ (Spam, Inbox, Sent Mail, etc.) - 30 seconds
• Opening/archiving/deleting a message - 30 secs

Anybody having a similar experience? I’m using BayanTel DSL’s 768 kbps plan, and more often than not I’m cruising at higher speeds thanks to their free speed-on-demand feature from 10pm to 10am.

As you might imagine, being unable to reply fast to emails is frustrating when you receive scores of them every day. Sometimes, refreshing the page and re-clicking on links do the trick. Sometimes. And when I do get fed up, I close all Firefox tabs and restart the browser…then Gmail becomes faster. A bit.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Gmail. I’d pick it over Yahoo! Mail Beta (another turtle) on any given day. Gmail has become the ‘nerve center’ of my home office communications, and as such, I just want my fast Gmail back!

Friends, I’m now writing at Performancing.com, one of the Net’s best information sites for professional and non-pro bloggers alike.

I started reading Performancing a year ago, and the tips and pieces of advice I found there helped me a lot in my early blogging days. So when I was approached by J Angelo to regularly write for the site, I grabbed the chance without second thought. (Thanks for the trust and vote of confidence, J!) Performancing.com is now my biggest problogging gig, both in terms of reader reach and compensation.

Performancing carries the tagline “Helping Bloggers Succeed”, and I’ll be dishing out writing, problogging, SEO, and website monetization tips. I’m also thinking of sharing tips for niche-blogs (e.g. literary, health, sports) based on experience.

Check out my first two entries: the perfunctory intro post, and Images: Another Problogging Ace Up Your Sleeve.

See you at Performancing.com!

I was supposed to write this post last Sunday, but a bout of asthma (now running at five days) deprived me of the chance to do so. The Philippine Blog Awards Night wrapped up an exhausting week for me, and here’s a brief recap of the event.

Ia and I left the blog awards pretty much satisfied with the results (but not with the programme — more on that later). The complete list of winners can be found at the 2007 PBA site, but here I’m giving extra recognition to three of my blogger friends who bagged the big prizes:

• Best Socio-Political Blog: Dean Jorge Bocobo’s Philippine Commentary
• Best Blog Design: Jorge Cosgayon’s Far from Neutral Notions
• PhotoBlog of the Year: Eric Isaac’s Señor Enrique: Wish You Were Here

Ia didn’t win the Best Tech Blog plum, but she took home something…big. Really big, as in worth thousands upon thousands of pesos. Read her latest blog entry to know more. Hint: it’s from the Adobe User Group Philippines.

Now, some thoughts on how the event was held:

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I’ll be at the Philippine Blog Awards Night tomorrow to support and accompany Ia, whose Stellify.net is a finalist in the technology category. It came as quite a surprise for both of us, as she’d be the first one to tell you that Stellify wasn’t meant to be a tech blog. You can say that we’re not expecting Stellify to win the best tech blog award, especially since it’s going up against established tech bloggers.

Both of us have a “you win, I also win” mentality, and I’m happy that her efforts with Stellify (which is less than seven months old) have already been recognized. This kind of nullifies my disappointment at not winning a recently-concluded prestigious Tagalog poetry contest (too bad I couldn’t follow up my being published on the newspaper — that would’ve been a great birthday treat this coming May!).

Aside from Ia, a number of my blogosphere friends got the nods of the judges, namely Eric (aka Senor Enrique), Jorge Cosgayon, Gibbs Cadiz, and Dean Jorge Bocobo. I’m hoping these guys will win their respective categories, especially sir Eric — I was the one who nominated his photo blog, hehe.

Wish Ia and my friends the best of luck!

Article Crux, our “free high-quality article directory” has been around for more than a month already, but I’ve been too busy with the site that I forgot to ‘formally launch’ it here on my blog!

Borrowing from the directory’s About page:

Article Crux is a free online article directory where writers can share their knowledge and publishers can obtain free web content. With ArticleCrux.com, authors can easily post their articles and ezine publishers or webmasters can effortlessly search through the collection of knowledge either through our search engine or by browsing through the many categories.

The directory’s elegant design is the work of Ia (read her design anecdotes on her portfolio). Together, we maintain the site, and are planning to open another one in the near future (this time niche-oriented).

Article Directories: A Primer

Article directories have always been popular with internet marketers, writers, and search engine optimizers. The basic reason: free links. Not just any ordinary free links, but free links from sites trusted by search engines (in this case, article directories). And you know what’s next when you’ve got good, free links — free traffic, TrustRank, and PageRank.

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For the better part (if not all) of my youth, I’ve been a poor suitor of girls. As some of my friends told me, “you’ve got the looks but not the moves”, which is unfortunate.

But thanks to Google, I can indulge in the illusion that I’m improving in the wooing department. Last month’s check of my Google Sitemaps account (just before Valentine’s) revealed that Slip of the Pen, more specifically this old essay of mine was number 1 for the search phrase “steps in courting a girl” (without the quotation marks).

Pretty neat, and pretty nonsensical, too! It’s certainly one of my most amusing “accidental SEO results”. For some reason, this blog gets “tame” search engine referrals (laptops, iPod, etc.) while my lit/writing blog gets the absurd (many of which are even downright pornographic!).

After several months with Google Adsense, I finally received my first cheque yesterday, straight from Dublin, Ireland (Google’s European HQ). Nothing spectacular with the amount, but the first time is always sweet, hehe.

While not enough to buy certain gadgets and gizmos I’m eyeing right now (read: Nintendo Wii), the Adsense funds will at least cover my domain and webhosting expenses for the year. I’m hoping Text Link Ads will deliver even a little bit of goodness next month!

If you haven’t tried out iJigg yet, do so now. As you might readily deduce from the name, it’s like Digg for music (but sleeker and much more worth the time, IMHO).

Ripping off the site’s description:

What’s iJigg?
Artists from around the world can post their music on iJigg. As listeners, you can vote or “Jigg” music that you like and directly influence the music that becomes popular!

What I find great about iJigg is 1) the quality of music just waiting to be discovered, and 2) the uncluttered, easy-on-the-eyes manner in which these music files are presented to the user. A cool name that sticks like gum to your mind doesn’t hurt, too. (Maybe Ia of Qwerky can write a longer post on iJigg’s Web 2.0 qualities, hehe!)

Before you go and open an account with iJigg, let me share with you a trifecta of newfound ear-pleasers (including a Dragon Ball Z rap!):

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