Wishing You A Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
December 20, 2007 by Gaman · 31 Comments
December is the time of the year when I usually take a break from working. While I am not totally away from the computer most of the time, it’s hard to get into my normal working routine when my mood dictates that I should be doing something else!
December is the time for shopping, getting ready for Christmas, balik kampung, barbeque and Aramai Tii! The last phrase is a typical expression used by Sabahan when they are having a jolly good time.
You just can’t blame someone who has been working till the early hours of the morning, 7 days a week for the past 11 months (ok I’m not that industrious LOL but you know what I mean) I think everyone deserves a break once in a while.
An Early Review of My 2007 New Year Resolutions
December 6, 2007 by Gaman · 17 Comments
Some of you may recall that in January this year I’ve shared my top ten new year’s business resolutions in this blog. I think it’s a good time to review whether I’ve achieved any of the resolutions or on track of achieving them.
Telling everyone about my goals reminds me that there’ll be more people to prod me along if I fall behind. Therefore I’ll be more likely to stick with them. Ok lets review them one by one.
1. Managing my affiliate programs more effectively
My goal was to improve my relationships with my affiliates. I planned to offer more creatives for them to use in their promotion effort. Sadly I didn’t spend much time on this one. I realised that in order to manage my affiliate programs better, I need to improve my products first. Not that they are bad since I have actually sold over RM1 million worth of my own products since I got started in 2003. The net profit would be lower of course.
Did You Encounter Any Problem When Trying to Leave A Comment Here?
November 12, 2007 by Gaman · 17 Comments
Technical problem that is… I suspect this happens to everyone who’s trying to leave a comment here. When you tried to leave a comment, did you experience longer than normal delay before your comment appeared?
Or perhaps the post didn’t load properly after posting your comment and you had to manually refresh it.
This question is for those commentators who are pre-approved, and don’t go into moderation process.
Please leave your comment below and tell me if you encounter any problem. I suspect this might have to do with my server security setting which checks for any attempt to compromise the server security.
Note that if this is your first time leaving a comment here, it will be automatically go into moderation.
How Long Does It Take You To Write a Blog Post?
October 31, 2007 by Gaman · 34 Comments
Some bloggers may have the natural ability to write posts faster than their readers could read them. I guess I am somewhere in the middle, I might be able type a tad faster than the average person but when it comes to completing a post, I usually need a few hours to do so.
Short posts that require no research usually take me less than 15 minutes. But I prefer to take my time when writing long posts that require a good deal of research. My problem is I often know what to write but deciding how to write it can consume most of my time.
So I spend more time thinking then actually writing down my thoughts. English being my second language (well technically it’s the third) doesn’t help either.
Show Me Your Desktop
October 15, 2007 by Gaman · 21 Comments
I’ve seen bloggers showing off their desktop so I thought it would be fun to show mine here 
. I am a multi-monitor user and wouldn’t have it any other way. With such setup, I have more screen estate to work with.
My two 17 inch LCD screens provide me with 2560 x 1024 resolutions which is plenty of space for multitasking. It eliminates the intermediate click when switching between two windows because I can have them opened simultaneously side by side.
While the dual 17 inch setup does meet my current needs, I am planning to upgrade to dual 21 inch sometime soon. This will definitely improve my productivity further by reducing scrolling and windows resizing, which I often do repeatedly when designing a webpage or programming.
Here’s a screenshot of my desktop. Click the image to view the actual size.
Obviously nothing too exciting to see here LOL.
My Top 10 Most Read Blogs
October 10, 2007 by Gaman · 15 Comments
Yesterday I noticed a trackback from Raymond.cc, one of the most popular Tech Blogs in Malaysia . Curious to know what he had written about Sabahan.com, I clicked the link to find a post where Raymond lists 10 of his most read blogs.
Apparently, Sabahan.com is one of the blogs that he read daily. I am honored to be on the list and am glad to know he finds Sabahan.com useful
While I don’t usually participate in a tagging meme I thought this one is worth tagging along with. In addition to helping us discover interesting blogs from other people, I would also like to return the favour and thank Raymond for including Sabahan.com on his list.
The meme was started by Martin of gHacks.net where he invited the bloggers from his ten most read blogs to take part. The goal is to create a blog feed dependency list which shows the top ten most read blogs of all participating blogs.
Should Bloggers Reveal Their Income?
September 6, 2007 by Gaman · 36 Comments
Revealing your income can be a good way to generate buzz to your blog if you are making good money from it.
After revealing my income the other day, the post was mentioned in several blogs, many of which were new to me. It’s a good way to attract other bloggers to link to you.
As I wrote earlier some bloggers may prefer to keep quiet about their income for fear of being copied by others, or they don’t want to be perceived as bragging.
On the other hand, sharing the details of your blog’s income (or Internet income) offers a powerful way to generate interest and it helps to keep the buzz going.
I see this method used effectively by John Chow Dot Com. By revealing his income, he had attracted the attention of many people including several TV stations that had invited him as a guess to talk about his money making blog.
Why You Should Diversify Your Income Stream
August 16, 2007 by Gaman · 23 Comments
Since a couple of days ago, I’ve noticed several of my websites have been experiencing a massive drop in traffic, some as much as half of their normal level.
As a result, any income source that depends on free traffic from Google suffers. This includes AdSense and some affiliate programs.
Sabahan.com isn’t spared as some of you may have noticed after checking my Alexa traffic ranking. In addition, it has dropped from number one to number four for the keyword “sabahan” in Google.
Other important keywords Sabahan.com can be found for are now mostly missing from the Google first page results.
The first thing I did when I noticed this was login into my Google Webmaster Central account to find out what’s going on. Sure enough, Googlebot has marked several thousands URLs from those sites as unreachable.
My Internet Income Report for July 2007
August 2, 2007 by Gaman · 58 Comments
Everyone (well more and more bloggers anyway) seems to be revealing their blogs’ income nowadays, following a trend started by John Chow Dot Com. If there were others who had chosen to reveal their blogs income before John Chow, I am not aware of them. Those that I know of didn’t go into as much details as what John Chow is doing.
I know how much you make is your own business so many bloggers prefer not to reveal their earnings.
They prefer to keep quiet about it for several reasons including the fear of being copied by others, or they don’t want to be perceived as bragging, or they don’t want to attract competitors which will affect their own income in the future.
Sometimes being discreet can be more intriguing as people are drawn to you, waiting for you to spill the beans.
Submitted My 2006 Income Tax Form Via e-Filing
June 29, 2007 by Gaman · 9 Comments
I’ve told myself not to wait until the very last minute before I file my B income tax form. Unfortunately that’s exactly what had happened. Well, I did the accounting stuff a week earlier but only submitted my income tax form today. Lucky for me, we have e-Filing to help me do this quickly over the Internet. This was my second time using this service.
While I’ve noticed some marked improvements in the service (it’s working for a start), there are a few things that they could have done to improve the service further.
Since e-Filing is only compatible with Internet Explorer 5.0 (IE) and above, I had to switch to IE for that purpose. By default, IE 7.0 that comes with Vista is actually more much secure than Firefox when it’s run on Vista because it’s running on a Protected Mode.
