Zit Seng's Superwall

I was somewhat surprised to learn that WordPress won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in Packt Publishing’s 2009  Open Source CMS Awards. It’s because I’ve never thought of WordPress as a CMS. It is a blog software, and certainly a very good one at that. It’s hardly what I would call a CMS. So when news of the award broke, I thought I was reading something wrongly, or that there was a catch somewhere that I misunderstood. But no. WordPress really came in number one as the overall best open source CMS.

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I’ve been earning a small little sum of pocket money through Google Adsense on my blog. It’s a relatively steady flow, although also relatively small. The amount of work I put into my blog is also relatively little, of course, compared to my full time day job. I was just thinking about it, it I make blogging my full time job, would I earn enough from Google Adsense to pay me comparably to what I earn now from my day job?

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WordPress version 2.8 has been released. I decided to revisit the issue of automatic core updates which had not been working for me previously. The automatic update simply means that you can upgrade the core WordPress software through the admin interface (i.e. through the web browser), without having to manually download the archive file, upload to the WordPress hosting server, etc.

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I promised many moons ago to write something about Drupal. I’ve been doing a lot of things with Drupal lately, and perhaps now is as good a time as any others to start sharing some experiences working with Drupal. For those who have not heard about Drupal, it’s a content management system that is supported by a larger number of community contributed add-ons, giving it a plethora of features for just about everything you want (and yet not quite, which is why development still goes on…).

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This blog is two years old today. It’s the same age as Vanessa. In fact, the first post on this blog was actually about her birth at TMC. Two years is not short in terms of “Internet time”. I’m not the kind to celebrate birthdays of websites, not even to remember them. But I suppose this one is different because it coincides with Vanessa’s birthday. It reminds me also to take a step back to take stock of what’s happening here.

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Firstly, I’ve just updated my Simplicity theme for WordPress. I’m quite encouraged by all the feedback, particularly now that there are also plenty of suggestions for improvement. Head over to the WordPress Theme Directory to download a copy to try it out. The latest update fixes two things: centered page when configured with a fixed page width smaller than the browser window, and page tab effect to mark a tab that is the currently viewed page. Simple tweaks.

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After reading about the en mass resignations of about half the pro tem committee of the Association of Bloggers (Singapore), I couldn’t help but say a few more things about associations. Particularly that you don’t always have to form one. I went through that path myself. It can be a better way to get things done.

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Okay, by now everyone all over the blogosphere in Singapore has heard of the spanking new Association of Bloggers (Singapore), and many more so because of an article carried in TODAY. The reaction of most people seem to be one of shock, and an immediate denouncement of the very idea that bloggers need an association. All things considered, I too wonder about the usefulness of such an association. What possible benefit can such an association bring to its members?

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I wonder if Google has become more generous with their PageRank scoring? I just noticed my homepage cum blog site upgraded to PageRank 5, with at least one other internal page even scoring PageRank 6. Is this little site becoming a small-time hit? What is even more interesting is that the website of my work organization scores PageRank 9! (They are surely getting somewhere with their goal to become “world class”!)

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You have State of the Union Address, State of the University Address, and I will have my very own State of my Blog essay. This blog site is now coming to about 20 months old. It has grown tremendously over the months. While in January 2008 we served 10343 page views to 2502 visitors a month, for the month of November 2008 we are now serving 36362 page views to 9735 visitors. That’s over triple the traffic in less than a year. Bandwidth growth is even more exponential: 281MB in January 2008, 3.7GB in November 2008.

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