It’s a sad day for free speech in Malaysia. The government-run body MCMC has ordered one of the national’s major ISPs, TMnet, to block the alternative news media Malaysia Kini. Malaysians may still access it, though, by following the tips posted at LiewCF.com.

I suppose that since Mahathir is no longer in power, his promise that the government will not censor the Internet is no longer relevant.

The Malaysian Government is turning into a totalitarianist.

Well, I just want to say this: thank you, Pak Lah, for your cowardice. I will be waiting for the day we turn into becoming another Myanmar.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see why people should be excited about Anwar winning.

Here’s my personal take on why I’m not so fond of him in politics. Look, what did he do when he knew he was gonna get caught by the police for his sodomy charges? He hides at one of his international friends’ house. Because of him, people from outside the country want to interfere with our politics. Do you Malaysians really want that to happen? Why not get help from his opposition friends in DAP or PAS? Or is Pakatan just a sham?

People don’t realize what he was planning on doing during the 1998 economic slowdown. He was going to agree with IMF on taking the World Bank’s loan to “improve” our economic well-being. Does taking a loan and getting into debt going to help? LOGIC! I say thank God for Mahathir! And Anwar swears on an economic reform? Is he going to get more of his international friends to help? You really want foreigners to take over the country? What’s the point of “Merdeka” when after 51 years we can’t handle our own economy?

You really think that Anwar, or any other politicians in this country can curb our inflation? Face it, Malaysians, inflation is happening around the globe, not just in Malaysia. Stop being so manja with our gas and rice subsidies, because relying on these will only take our country into the brink of a third world country. If you learn economics, you will know this.

Complaints, complaints, complaints! What we need is a creative and proactive solution to our problems, starting with gas and rice. With gas, we can actually switch to natural liquefied gas (NLG), hybrid cars or even palm oil (really, did you hear any hooplah about NLG increasing in price together with its petroleum conterpart? NO.). With rice, we should be investing in educating the paddy farmers to yield at least 3 to 4 times a year — we have the technology and Thailand’s doing it. Or better yet, look at our economic efficiencies, by increasing export of what we’re good at (currently electronics), and then importing the rice from our neighboring countries Thailand and Indonesia. Why not? We prosper together. Singapore don’t have paddy fields, and yet they have food to eat. Or, people can change their mindsets — eat noodles!

And stop humiliating our politicians and our country by calling them names (Bod-awi… hey, see if you like your father’s name being called like that!) or flying our flags upside down (how idiotic is that? Don’t live in Malaysia lah like that!). This just adds to the proof that Malaysians are a bunch of whiners!

OK, Malaysians? It’s Merdeka month, so let’s free our old mindset and change starting now. Instead of whining, let’s actively and productively discuss and TAKE ACTION on how our lifestyles can fit the conditions we are now in. We are somewhat like how we were during World War II, when everyone had to change their lifestyle, eat tapioca, strapped up their expenses, etc. Granted, we’re not in a war, but nevertheless our economic conditions warrants something serious to be done. Changing politicians may not solve our crisis. Except if our politician is like Lim Guan Eng. Lucky Penangites! He’s the only one making a difference by running its state government lean and mean like a well-oiled business, so if you ever want a Prime Minister, get him to be one!

I so want to vent my anger and rant about this for a long time, but I didn’t want my site ranks to go down in the SERPs for non-IT posts!

I was staring at LornaTimbah.com a few moments ago thinking about which post I wanted to blog first, when I noticed something quite shocking on my Google toolbar — LornaTimbah.com is already ranked 4!

Thinking that there might be a problem with my toolbar, I double-checked with other PR engines as well as Firefox’s SEO plugin. My eyes did not deceive me.

After a while, I figured I know why it gained PR so fast. I hazard a guess that since I parked the domain to point to WebGrrrl.net for awhile, LornaTimbah.com somehow inherited this blog’s PR.

I know, I know, you’re saying that WebGrrrl.net is only PR2. In fact, WebGrrrl.net should rightfully be, and had been, PR4 at some point, but Google penalized my rank for something that I may or may have not been aware of (I’m still waiting on their answer to my reconsideration).

I may never know the real reason for this spike of PR, maybe some of you SEO experts out there could shed some light on this matter. I suspect that this rank may change back to 0 soon, but that’s OK.

That is what I have planned for my namesake domain. I decided to not repeat the same mistake I have made with WebGrrrl.net. Yes, I did a big mistake on WebGrrrl.net, by not sticking to a particular focus earlier on, and instead putting a little too much discussion on general matters.

Initially, I did intend to make WebGrrrl.net a place for my personal rants, but after a while I felt that it didn’t seem productive enough. After discovering and reading many of the problogging sites out there, I finally felt sure that I should put a focus on this blog, and therefore decided to share on matters of blogging, IT, and WordPress. Even then, I tend to stray off from time to time.

I hope LornaTimbah.com is a step up in terms of quality posts. The topics I covered there are also as dear to my heart as technology and blogging is. In any case, I thank all who’ve given your views concerning how I should use LornaTimbah.com.

Edit: I forgot to add that the theme I used in LornaTimbah.com is one that I built from scratch. Not too shabby, do you think?

This domain name is mine finally. Right now, it’s just a parked domain pointing to this blog, since I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m almost sure I’ll turn it into another blog (original, I know), and I’m definitely sure it won’t be filled with personal rants by yours truly.

What should I do with it? Does anyone has any recommendation?

Update: SOLVED! Dagnabit! Apparently, disabling ONLY my Robots Meta plugin did the trick! Db0 is my lifesaver!

A warning by Google Webmasters alerted me to a problem I didn’t realize until quite recently. I have tried for the past three days to figure out why my monthly Archives link stopped working the way it suppose to. Have a look at my sidebar, scroll down until you see my Archives section, and click on, let’s say, my March 2008 posts archive. You’ll notice that it does a redirect to my main index page, instead of listing out the posts for March 2008. Strangely, my Categories and Tags permalinks are working as normal.

I’ve tried the following fixes that I found when scouring the Web to solve this:

1. Adding “/category” and “/tag” in the Categories and Tag permalink setting. I did that, but the problem didn’t run away.
2. Resetting the Permalinks to default. Nope, that didn’t repair the Archives, either. Again, Categories and Tags, as well as single posts and pages reflected the default setting and worked.
3. Inserting “/index.php” before the custom and default permalink. Didn’t work, either. Besides, I’m using a Linux hosting, and index.php is usually used as a fix for those hosting under Windows.
4. Disabled all my plugins. Every last one of them. That didn’t work.
5. Reset my .htaccess file. I backed up my original .htaccess file, emptied out the one in the server, and got the WordPress Permalinks do a fresh rewrite on the server’s .htaccess.Though the fresh Permalinks setting appeared in the .htaccess files, my Archives links still didn’t work.
6. Overwrite wp-includes/rewrite.php to those in versions WP2.3.3 and WP2.5, fixes and otherwise. That just caused my blog to be ridden with so much call function errors, so obviously that didn’t work, either.

I’m at a loss. I’d like to downgrade to WordPress 2.3.3, but I didn’t have my version 2.3.3 database backup, and I dread what happens if I do downgrade. I expect it will break everything in my blog.

Sheesh. I made it clear here and here how much I disliked these recent “improvements” that were done since WordPress 2.5, and I should have stuck to my guts on staying with WP 2.3.3 if I were not so worried about missing out on all those security patches.

What frustrates me the most is that I tried to recreate the problem in my local sandbox to no avail! Don’t tell me that after all these while I thought I was expert enough in WordPress, my brain has now regressed to a WP level n00b!

HELP!

It’s a miracle that I even got the chance to go to SBG’08 last night, as my better half finally decided that he’ll look after the kids. Since I don’t have a digicam, I had to make do with my humble Nokia N70 camphone. The picture quality leaves much to be desired, so understandably I didn’t take any picture.

Well, maybe just a couple.

The far side where the cool people sat.

My side of the room where the less cool people sat, the exception being Gaman (sabahan.com), my money-making guru.

Or three.

Aleaf and Ricardo shares my sad corner.

Or four.

Boogey on the dance floor with Terry Peter and his posse.

These are just sad, sad photos. I’m just waiting for other bloggers who attended to upload their photos so that I can just leech those from ‘em *sigh*.

One of my main purposes of coming to this gathering is for networking, and I vowed to myself that I would shake hands with every single one of them. Which I didn’t. The large crowd and loud music made it almost impossible. Still, I’d like to believe that I did manage to know a lot of them, compared to last year’s gathering. Nice to see familiar faces, and great to know new ones. We have great sponsors, too!

So, a shout out to the organizers and those I chatted to personally (in no particular order): Elphege and Ben Godomon, Gaman, Joneh, Aleaf, Pai, Ricardo (who happens to be my “uncle” whom I haven’t seen in a long time), Echah and hubby, Eshark, Emelda, Gallivanter, Jacq, Wei Chuen, Fara, Julian, Sumardi, Nur, Robb, “Chegu” Carol, Josie, Margaret, Ratu Syura, Shemah, Clement, Dan, Angriani, Zach, Shueqry, Maya, LadyMariah, … oh I swear I missed around 20 or more people with their cool names! This list will grow I promise.

I hope the socializing will continue through our blogs, and I look forward to another Sabahan Bloggers Gathering next year!

I’ve been meaning to do this ever since I received an encouraging number of participants for this project through SocialSpark. Take a look at the top of this blog’s sidebar, and you will see a link called Take My Challenge. Read through the requirements before you request for one.

In case you missed my previous post concerning this topic, Take My Challenge is a project I started in SocialSpark as a way to build links to and from WebGrrrl.net. The way this works is that if you blog about and link to a post I made in this blog, I’ll respond in kind. Pretty simple stuff.

In a way, this also prevents me from going through a “writer’s block” — you know, when your brain goes through this weird spasm, and you suddenly don’t have any idea what to blog about? This is a pretty neat way for me to warm up my thoughts and start collecting ideas on topics I’m interested about.

I have tagged my posts as IBlogUBack on those related to this project, so if you’re interested and you like what you see, take my challenge now.

As SunEGrl mentioned in her post and as every EntreCarder knows, EC has partnered with SezWho, thus enabling you to earn EC credits every time you comment on other EC members’ blogs and vice versa. This partnership is a step up from just dropping your EC cards, and would require ECers be more proactive participants in each others’ blogs.

I first saw SezWho implemented on Andy Beard’s web site, and contrary to what SunEGrl claims, the SezWho plugin didn’t slow down Andy’s blog noticably as far as I know.

If you’re looking to increase your traffic and visitor participation, you should definitely try EntreCard and signing up for SezWho.

As for WebGrrrl.net, I don’t plan on installing SezWho any time soon, as my current mission is to increase traffic from search engines instead of just relying on social bookmarks. I’m already using 13 WordPress plugins in this blog, and I don’t plan on bombarding my site with anymore plugins unnecessarily.

I do foresee myself using SezWho on this blog in the future, mainly because it can be a wonderful boost of exposure for commentators on this site, as SezWho not only shows you the comments you made on this blog, but other blogs that have SezWho installed. Makes bloghopping more fun, too.

As I read through what’s “hawt” in WordPress 2.6, I saw three things that got me excited: Post Revisions, Press This, and Word count. Especially Word Count (those with PayPerPost — admit it, you are, too).

My excitement dampened somewhat. Let me start with Word Count. See, I used to have this plugin called Leprakhauns Word Count which counts the words on my post as soon as I click the Count It button in the Admin post form, so I was hoping the built-in Word count would work the same way. It didn’t. I have to save the post first, and only then will I see the number of words I have under the Save button of the post form. No big deal, you say? Then try saving your work on a crappy Internet connection. Saving my work just so I can see how many words I have in my post? I’d rather cut and paste them in MS Word and do the counting from there. Firefox’s ScribeFire add-on can do a better job of it as well; all I needed to do was to highlight my post, right click on it, select Count and countamagically does it for me.

Press This is a cool tool to have, although I do have a “but” for this (pun intended). You’ll need to add the Press This link from your Admin post form to your browser’s favourite links section, and when you see a web page you want to blog about, you just click on that browser link and it’ll bring you straight to your post form and automagically inserts a reference link to that page you just saw. BUT… now that I use ScribeFire, it practically does the same thing as Press This. Also, imagine if you own TEN blogs, which means you have to have TEN Press This buttons strewn all over your browser links bar — how confusing is that? And what if some of those blogs aren’t WordPress-powered? With ScribeFire, even if your blog’s on Drupal, MT, heck even Blogger, you’d accomplish the same result, and easier since all I have to do is to right-click and Blog It, then select which blog I want to publish to from the radio buttons of my ScribeFire form. (I told you I love ScribeFire)

I haven’t tried Post Revisions yet, but I see that this feature might be pretty useful for my Top Commentators Widget post.

With what excitement left in me, I still decided to upgrade WebGrrrl.net to 2.6 due to almost 200 bugs squished since the last version.

One thing that took me aback was the automatic insertion of NoFollow on my posts in the main page. Yes, Main Index Page, not single post. And, yes, posts, not comments. If you’re using Firefox and has either Greasemonkey or SEO plugin turned on, then you’d noticed those pink/red highlighted links all over my main page which means that those links have NoFollow in them. This means that link juice to those sites will only flow through single post pages. Is there any SEO advantage to having this by default, can anyone explain to me? And where in the Admin area can I switch it off if I don’t like it?

I’m still bummed that the Category option is still situated under the posting form in the Admin, instead of on the side as pre-WP 2.5 had. Am not crazy about the image uploading feature, either — still as confusing and less user-friendly as ever, but at least now there’s an option to go from Flash uploading to classic uploading, which doesn’t look classic at the least, just un-Flashed. And when can we expect to have the one-click WordPress upgrade function being built into WP? Not everyone is lucky to have Fantastico in their web hosting account.

I got to say, I’m getting more and more disillusioned with WordPress, which is not to say that I think it’s not the most powerful blogging and CMS tool in the world, ever. It’s just that the functions that have been built into each WP version, although useful functions at that, aren’t up to par with the its plugins counterpart. I started to notice this when WP introduced native tagging in 2.3, and I can’t help but compare it with Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Nothing’s perfect. I still love WordPress, in any case, just not in a ga-ga sort of way.