• I have now started to write for the newest Exchange Tech.Exchange. I will write on that every weekday and optionally on weekends.
• I also have enough PRs of gadgets to upload to Tech.Ex's Gadget Gallery so that I'd not run out for a year if I uploaded one a day.
• I have launched a new feature on MomEx called School Reviews. I imported 1,577 records of NCR DECS accredited schools into it, from which visitors to the site can leave comments and rate from 1 to 10 stars. Here's a sample school, where you can see people comment below, consequently leaving info important for other parents.
• I plan to import the rest of the DECS schools nationwide, probably totalling in the 10,000 onwards, including public schools. By June, I hope people will rely on it as a resource for where to enroll their kids.

Not to mention a plan to upgrade Kikay Exchange, and to launch a new company.

At any rate, this, my blog, will always survive as long as I occasionally think of writing stuff that I can't use in any of the other blogs. As it is though, LHL will be a quiet place for the most part, so subscribe to its feed if you wanna keep up with news re me so that you won't have to visit it so often.

Later folks. Wish me luck on the new ventures.

Ok ok, enough nice talk. A site was compromised, and this means war.

Starting with getting rid of the OS that has, I suspect, let me down.

Then there's applying SSL on the server, and applying a few tricks here and there to make sure it doesn't happen again.

On one hand it's a sign that the sites are influential enough so much as to necessitate the surreptitious and nearly unremarkable manner said attack was performed.

On the other it's a violation of something I dearly love and own, and if I catch the motherfucker who did it I'll tear his heart out.

Whatever. Damage done. Lesson learned. Moving on.

Please keep in mind this is not to buy anything, sell you anything, hire you, make you attend a 'seminar' or anything of that sort. I need your opinion in the development of a project.

I only need an hour's worth of your time, and I can meet you at any mall in the Makati or Ortigas area (I am from Cainta). Coffee's on me.

In return for your time, I will help you PROMOTE your business, service or any property you are currently selling. You may contact me at 09214588689 or email ghmercado at gmail dot com.

Friends, if you know of anyone, please ask them to contact me.

x backup momex db
x backup momex files (everything)

x create mom1 (backup of wp)
x make mom1 work

x activate zen / momex
x activate offline mode

x download momdrupal in delayed inserts (works with bigdump)

x delete all modules in stock momdrupal
x copy all modeuls in 192momdrupal
x upload all modules from 192momdrupal to new momdrupal

x edit settings.php

Some terms:

• Mom1: the previous MomEx in WordPress.
• Zen: The amazing Drupal Zen Starter Kit theme that takes the pain (well, not totally but still quite a lot) out of Drupal theming. Love it.
• momdrupal: The 23mb. sql backup.
• 192momdrupal: My test momex installation on my server.
• bigdump: The absolutely essential open source tool that allows you to migrate large sql dbs. Absolutely essential since php only allows uploads of 2mb., so if you've got anything larger than that, you're in a fix. Oh did I say absolute essential? Just in case I forgot to add: Absolute Essential.

The only thing left is a weird clean urls issue that prevents me from using the permalink structure wordpress was using. Losing the permalinks is gonna be a disaster SEO wise, so I gotta try and make that work. Seems like I have hope though, with PathAuto, which seems fit for the job.

I haven't read through it yet since at this point, I've gotten tired. At the moment if you go to MomEx you'll see a 'we are offline' page which is an edited version of Drupals. I added a Feedburner Subscribe form to increase my subscription whilst working on the site. Cheeky, but I think it's useful.

At this rate MomEx will be up either tomorrow or Wed.

I'm not telling outright because I might end up not doing it. However, like the title says, I really really really really really want to.

So I should right?

Hmm.

Drupal would be a great platform, because CCK would allow me the taxonomy to properly arrange all the details and Views can show them off properly as well. It can then help readers easily sort through top to bottom of ranges of data. PLUS, I would be starting from scratch, unlike what I'm doing now - migrating from WP to Drupal with the other sites. Always better that way obviously.

One other thing I need to check with Drupal - if there's a functionality similar to WordPress' fantastic Postie, which as I mentioned before, desperately needs updating to the latest WP versions as it looks like it had been abandoned by the orig developer. Sayang talaga yun. That terrific plugin alone can help zillions of writers either start blogging or convert to WP, imho.

On the content side, I'd need to personally talk to each vendor specifically to a.) ask how frequently they can provide me PRs and data, and b.) promote it to them of course. A plus is that the subject matter is international, so the audience would primarily be local, but would also be interesting to most anyone else all over the world. So that's nice right.

But the downside?

Dang, another web project. Patong patong na naman ang mangyayari nyan, and I'm afraid to be running around like a headless chicken again not knowing where to start.

But at the same time, I know better now. I learned my shit from the previous attempts and I can apply myself better imho. Hmm. Hmm talaga.

Now it looks like this:

I have to admit, two recent individual's reaching out to MomEx one after the other to work with us in various ways and help grow the site have inspired me to get a move on in releasing MomEx 2.0.

I've decided to use the extremely powerful Zen theme, which describes itself as the 'ultimate starting theme for Drupal' for good reason. It has ready - made CSS files which act as 'placeholders' for whatever styling rules you wanna use. You just slap in code, refresh your site and voila: results! Provided you understand CSS, which admittedly isn't the easiest of things to grasp, especially absolute and relative values which I remember, when I was starting out, may as well had been written by extra terrestials since I couldn't understand head nor tail.

But again like all coding, it's really a mix of RTFM and experimentation, in my case, 20% of the former and 80% of the latter. Literally I just delete files or comment or uncomment lines in code, refresh, and keep doing so until I get desired results. At that point it becomes easy.

Anyway, I think I'm 10% away from releasing version 2.0. It's gonna have exciting features that will promote self - sustaining content from and by the users, and the value of becoming a member will exponentially increase from the number of things they can do with it. Sorry if I am intentionally indirect but a lot of this is pretty new stuff - much like what MomEx was when it started out - so I wanna keep things in wraps until the release.

I'm flattered so many people find it valuable to their lives, enough to want to invest so much in enhancing it.

However, it's my baby. All my sites are my work and therefore, extensions of me in the sense that they are products of my thoughts on how the Internet should be used by ordinary people. When I started working on the Exchanges all these were just untested thoughts in my head. Now that they've become influential I look at them with pride, as well as serving as validation for my theories.

Drupal now allows me to grow them even further. I have ideas which I think will enhance what we already have and make them even bigger, even more influential. I know I may sound like I'm blowing a lot of hot air right now but whenever people congratulate me about the sites, I feel like saying they haven't seen anything yet. The stuff we're gonna do is gonna be earth shaking. Right now, people see the sites as occasional entertainment - a respite, something to look at when you're bored. By the time I'm finished, they're gonna see them as absolute essentials. Websites that they absolutely positively cannot do without in their lives. Not just something interesting to read, but something they absolutely, without question, need to access in order to, say, buy the right item, or choose the right school, check if a product is safe or outright purchase something for their use.

The proper way to use the Internet isn't just for viewing things passively. That's so TV. The Internet allows for interaction, a two way experience between user and a web based service which serves as a way for them to interact with others still, and others even more.

One person sharing a thought or opinion, either by uploading a video or showing or explaining something on a website doesn't seem to be worth much, but a lot of them, collectively, sharing thoughts, ideas, opinions and using different media, makes that web service far more powerful. THAT is what I wanna do. THAT's what the 'net is all about. THAT is why I called it 'Exchange'.

Which of course, isn't worth crap if I don't finish it. But like I'm said, I'm really close. Baby Steps.

Asides: I wanna show posts (or post titles, or post titles with excerpts) from specific categories on the sidebar. I have done this with limited success on BallEx on a category I called 'PBA Notes' (ftg. news fresh from the PBA), but unfortunately WordPress counting mechanism counts these posts as part of the posts that it should display on the front page, so everytime I post to the PBA Notes category, it removes a post from the index. It's not a terribly difficult issue and is 'resolved' somewhat by merely posting more (which I should be doing anyway), but it's kept me stumped for too long a while already, and prevents me from putting even more categories on the sidebar. At the moment the setting on BallEx for 'Options > Reading > Blog Pages show at most:" is set at 30.

As I mentioned on this post, the best Aside Plugin seems to be Katesgasis' Sideblog, but it has unfortunately not been since 2006.

Limited User Info: A lot of other WP users out there wanna do this as well. I'd like to put more relevant fields for users, such as address, mobile numbers and so on. Drupal users know this is very easy with CCK + Views. I haven't visited this issue for a while though, so there may have been developments.

Postie: Postie is a plugin that allows you to publish posts via email. While WP hanoles that natively using (the very simple) wp-mail, Postie allows great flexibility such as category, author, subject, comments closed or comments open, and even set a delay from 1 day to 1 minute. It's terrific if you are, say, posting from the road, or like me, which needs to publish multiple posts to multiple blogs at any given time. It also allows for an automated system that will allow me to post rss feeds or emails from mailing list subscriptions. In other words, I don't have to login each time. Instead, I just send an email. It's wonderful.

It also has not been updated since 2005. Recent comments on the Postie page are mostly requests for updates and pledges of donations, but no go. I am unsure if Drupal has a direct solution to this problem, but for some reason I am confident I can either find one or hack one in.

EventCalendar RSS: For some reason the RSS feeds for the EventCalendar category (I named rather unimaginatively as 'events') RSS feed does not work, inspite of using the instructions here. Meanwhile, I've managed to get all RSS feeds for all categories (and all my blogs) to work properly, so in other words, I'm stumped yet again. This is frustrating as I really wanna do fancy things with my Events Feed - something that's been on my todo list for.. months I think.

Updating: Finally this is an issue that has to do more with blogging software per se rather than WP itself. I read an interview once of BoingBoing.net's owner saying that we shouldn't be afraid to update specific posts as necessary, even if they've been posted already (as opposed to making a whole new post, especially if the updates are merely incremental). The solution is to edit the post and write 'UPDATE:' or something like that, underneath. This isn't very elegant.

I wanna look for a better solution for situations such as those. The dates and permalinks to posts that have been updated remain same, so on the surface, there is no indication that it has been updated. Once a post has been updated and re-updated, it's RSS feeds, I believe, still shoot off to RSS readers, but they look like the same post (unless the subscriber of course, investigates to check if there's something new). Otherwise if they just look at the title and excerpt, it looks the same. There must be a better way.

Drupal things I can do in addition to resolving above issues:

A much better Shopping Cart: I've been bleeding for a better shopping cart than the handmade one I have. I am currently testing Drupal's Ubercart.

Forum: Drupal's simple forum is way better looking than phpbb. PhpBB, from which I trace my programming roots, is great, no doubt about it. But it also doesn't look very good imho, and aesthetics is important whilst dealing with my target audience (girls and moms). Besides, if I use Drupal's Forum, it can integrate with other services like the blogs, and can be turned into a service that I really wanna try (which shall remain secret because I don't want anyone preempting me).

In summary I basically wanna take my blogs to the next level, and convert them into full fledged, gloves are off, firing on all cylinders, WEBSITES. Featuring community abilities, membership, relevant user info, public and (membership only) private information and so on.

The blog ability will always be its main draw. Great Writing and Content is what makes really good terrific blogs in the first place. People love to read, learn and be entertained, and that's what blogs deliver. But once they're 'there', I wanna make them do other things as well, and WP falls short of that because that's not what it was designed for.

I think I'll do MomEx first. It's gone from being number 1 in its category at PhilTopBLogs to number 8, so it needs more help than the others.

Fans of Neva's famous Leyende Organic Products will be able to chat with her live. They can ask questions, talk about her products, or just say hi. This is a great opportunity for Neva to touch base with the legions of female readers who have always been interested in her products as well as those who are already loyal buyers.

This also serves as a prelude to her launch of Beach Bomb, a his and hers cologne, at Sanfo Treats Alabang Town Center. An all day affair, this is yet another opportunity for Leyende's followers to come and talk to her, live this time. People will get the chance to say hi, buy items at discounted rates, and check out the tasty sweets at Sanfo Treats.

Finally, this is also the first ever LiveBlogging event of its kind in the country. Kikay Exchange is harnessing new technology to reach out to loyal readers of the site via a new, exciting method - LiveBlogging. Using this, readers will be able to interact in real time with a guest and the website admin in a moderated environment. This is a promotion method never before used or even introduced in the Philippine market, and Kikay Exchange is at the forefront once again.

About Kikay Exchange: Place text about Kikay Exchange here.

About Leyende Organics: Place text about Leyende Organics here.

About Sanfo Treats: Place text about Sanfo Treats here.

Editor's Note: The URL for Kikay Exchange is http://kikay.exchange.ph. You may contact us at ghmercado(at)gmail(dot)com.

(Above is my press release for our event. Booyaaaashaka!!)

Well, here's what happened.

About 3 weeks ago Jill and I were interviewed by QTV's Fit and Fab, a beauty - wellness - fashion tv magazine type show hosted by Theresa Licaros and Maggie Wilson (no they didn't do the interviewing). Topic was primarily the Kikay Shop for an online shopping segment.

At any rate, it took a half day off of a workday (and a very hot one at that) at Jill's house. I shared my supplier's contacts as well, all of whom were Multipliers and engaged in selling on their own.

Wednesday came along (the 14th) and with bated breath we waited. Finally the show started (10PM), and we watched, waited, watched and waited some more. Finally the segment re online shopping came. I watched one, two, three of my recommended suppliers' interviews! They looked great and I felt happy for them (because they really are great). We waited, watched and waited .. and waited.

Until finally the segment was over, and they moved on to commercial and another topic. Could it be our own interview was scrapped? We waited even more until finally, the show was over, and there it was, our names on the credits. But unfortunately, no interview.

I couldn't stop thinking about it that night, but when my head cleared the day after I realized what happened was, basically, we just wasted our time. I could've just shared my supplier's contacts even before we met, and not have to do that interview. It'd have spared all of us so much time and effort. Not to mention Jill's time and effort as well, and also her sister Krissy's.

In other words it was a whole lot of effort, excitement and waiting for zero result. For nothing. And afterwards I wished they just didn't contact us at all. I know it sounds vain to want to see ourselves on TV, but truth is, I felt used. Like a dunce. A loser.

Of course, how they write their show is none of my business, but remembering all those years writing for publications I don't think I've ever inconvenienced people so much to come up with nothing. We didn't even get an explanation - although looking back maybe it's better that way, since the time's been wasted already and there's no way to get it back anyway.

Looking back, the only thing I think I'm taking away from that is that I should be more careful with future interviews, and also, that I don't think it's a good idea to disappoint the people behind Kikay Exchange. Of course, we're not going to 'retaliate' or do anything stupid like that. It just feels like a really bad move to get on our wrong side, you know? Not a smart move at all.

Thank God Cuz's wedding yesterday was terrific. Happy Pics to follow.

We’re hoping that you could do a 30-minute to an hour talk about blogging as a business venture. I would have chosen from our blogger-attendees during the 88DB Bloggers Night last month but I deemed that your Exchange sites are more successful than other blog sites. Since it is a short talk, I think you would be able to come up with a minimal presentation. A projector will be provided.

Man they sure know how to get a guy's attention. But then they said this:

I will give you two choices for the schedule. It’s either May 21 (Wednesday), 5-6 PM or May 22 (Thursday), 4-5 PM. You don’t have to worry about the audience, Sir; they told me that the number of people / jobseekers tend to increase in the afternoon.

The bold parts probably hinting that there might not be too many people.

But then I decided why the heck not. It's time I share some of the stuff I know, and if it helps even just one dude make a good blog why not right?

So yeah, I'll be there on the 21st, 5-6 PM, World Trade Center. I promise to teach anyone who's interested everything I know that could be the reason behind Basketball Exchange, Kikay Exchange and Mom Exchange's relative popularity, plus my views on how to make a relevant blog that's worth visiting often.

Or, at least everything I'm comfortable sharing. I will try my best to make it worthwhile.

EDIT: Moved to 4-5 PM, still on the 21st.

I unfortunately wasn't able to ask for a calling card, so I forgot her name in the mayhem that is a Press event that included the usual big announcements, a displaying of new prods plus of course feeding us and raffling off prizes. At any rate we fortunately found time to small talk about a topic close to my heart, the dwindling number of readers and quality of written and spoken English in the Philippines, something she knew well about, coincidentally being a CEU Journalism Professor as well.

So here're I'll share a few things I've learned to believe.

One, is that I don't think 'Learn To Read campaigns' are very effective. I've seen the ones Inquirer tried to do plus maybe a few others, and they've tried going the celebrity route (celebs explaining what reading has done for them etc.) but for the most part, that turns me off more than interests me. Of course, I've never been interested in celebs in the first place, so I'm probably an exception.

Two, part of the reason Learn To Read campaigns frustrate me is probably because for the life of me I do not know how to make people read. I know me and my siblings were surrounded by books when we were kids, and so I gravitated towards them during those long stretches of time when we didn't have anything else to do. Everything came pretty naturally. For example I didn't think anything of it other than something to do when bored. So naturally later on I began to seek stories that'd interest me more, and after that, I naturally learned to become more discerning and grow the ability to know how to choose really good stuff because I didn't wanna waste my time and money on a book that turns out to be boring.

Three, I believe the generation of my grandmother, the ones trained by American missionaries(?) after the war, were the best English writers and speakers of our time. The best example to me is Mrs. Gil, whose family owns (owned?) St. John's Academy of San Juan where I studied and grew up in. I hold her, Mrs. Zorilla our principal and Mrs. Fernandez (not sure anymore if that's right, but she used to also teach at Lourdes School Mandaluyong), in the highest esteem, as well as the elder of the Pacheco sisters Mayleen (?), who would probably kill me because I think I'm spelling her name wrong or got it wrong altogether. Anyway, to me they spoke and wrote straight, unaccented English, took no prisoners when checking ours, and more importantly, communicated well, which is essentially what you're really trying to do when you study English. I even had the hugest crush on Mayleen. Imagine that, crushing on your English high school teacher. How typical high school behaviour can you get?

So anyway, the nice lady from Mod explained to me that at some point in the 60's and '70s, Tagalog became the medium of expression in schools, causing English to suffer. Which is alright in my book really, so long as it produced great Tagalog communicators, to which the guys from Tribune said (and I agree) didn't happen - a great pity because Tagalog is a beautiful, intricate language.

That leaves us with - what? Probably up to three generations of Filipinos who neither speak English nor Tagalog well, and because distractions have increased since the times of my grandmother (the Internet, text - speak, cable, etc.), would rather watch things and abbreviate their communication rather than speak good, fluent, unaccentuated, unmodified, straight English. The type where you get your wrist slapped if you abbreviate, or put a comma in the wrong place. The kind where you don't force yourself to learn a hopelessly contrived American accent because the callcenters pay you more if you do.

Sigh. Ok anywyay, I think this is getting too long, and this is a workday, so I should get back to work.

It just occurred to me to write about this not only because of having met like - minded folks at the Press event yesterday, but also because a few minutes ago, someone made a comment at Kikay, asking information about a product which is already plainly seen on the article itself had she taken the time to read.

See, one of the topics Jill and I often discuss is the length of her articles. Like most readers and writers, she tends to write and think in complete sentences, as her education and preference forces you to do so. However, I've met quite a few younger girls who have told me they like far less words, and far more images. An example is publications like Cosmo or Vogue, with only the most basic text but surrounded by large, colorful pictures, almost like comics.

And so, I've told Jill (to her disagreement) that I wished her articles were less wordy. That she'd instead go the heavy on images route, so as to relate to today's audience more. Incidentally, Jill's preferred reading material, Marie Claire, suites her writing style as well.

But today, after seeing a comment like that, I think we'll stick to our guns and not respond to it, hopefully sending out a message to the next generation, incidentally many of whom read Kikay Exchange. Learn to read. We'll just let it stay there, an example of a question that could well have been answered if she just took the time, as well as a reminder to let people know what happens when you don't.

No it's not Google or anything even close, but to me its a big step forward. I'm really sorry for not being able to talk about it directly, but I figure its good logic and business sense to keep my mouth shut, at least till things are on black and white.

And so I'm fantastically happy, yet strangely calm, probably because of the enormity of the work involved in making it happen. I actually think I'm gonna regret this post because it's really way too early to say yay or anything yay-ish yet, so I think I'll just get to the point:

And that is to say, Thank You, from the deepest part of my heart, Thank You Lord, for helping me. I know that I pursue dreams that are essentially attempts to fill holes left unfilled in my soul. I am deeply flawed, and am aware that in the pursuit of my dreams I am occasionally a selfish man. But I believe You have given me what I have for a reason, and to Your end I use them, for Your purpose.

I waver often and I lose Faith, but in the end still it is You. I said this before and will forever say it again. You have a plan for me and I trust in You completely. Thank You.

Now for Momex.

Tri-Isys via its hosting arm b2b.com.ph is (as far as we know) the first to offer commercial VPS hosting in the Philippines, offering terrific peerage to all domestic telcos Globe, Bayantel, Smart, etc., and especially PLDT. Their VPS is physically located at PLDT exchanges (either in Binondo or C5 - not sure) which guarantee almost LAN like data transfer for local viewers.

We are expecting faster access times for the greater part of Exchange.ph subscribers, which are approximately 88% local as shown in this graph from Google Analytics:

Can't wait till the weekdays, when traffic is strongest, to check performance!

* - I'd want to put in a good word to Rimuhosting.com, which offered excellent service and helped us out way above and beyond their service commitments to us. It just so happened that they're located in the wrong place in the world (Dallas, London, Australia, NZ, etc.), to service our target community (Philippines). I highly recommend Rimuhosting for VPS or Dedicated hosting requirements. Thanks very much Peter! (don't delete my VPS just yet I've still got stuff in there :)

** - double mega super thanks to Eric (aka neuroticimbecile), Scott G., and Roland for helping me out during the migration. Eric was up with me most of the night hacking away and taught me how to tarball midway so that we didn't have to wait too long to SCP the whole 600+ mb. file by file.

So let me just say it: Our little baby is now a lady :). Urk.

Anyway, the most number of visitors was recorded at 58 concurrent at 10:00 in the morning, with the least at 6 people at 5AM. That's an average of 25.7 visitors per hour.

I told myself not to talk about the sites too much anymore here, but I just wanted to say that out loud. I had been waiting for 600+ hits for awhile now, only getting close a number of times at 590+, so much so I was starting to wonder if the server could only handle that much after it'd fold or something.

So, hooray!! Hooray hooray hooray to us. What a wonderful feeling.

Now back to work.

And lo and behold, I chanced upon the results of our contest with her - an online contest where she asks schu owners to send in pictures with the theme 'Are you wearing your today',(ongoing with still a month to go) and I was absolutely floored with the results so far. In particular, this one:

by Aggie, taken at the very recognizable Bulwagang Pilipino steps, and this one:

by Leah, showing how she uses her shoes for work.

I gotta tell ya, I am just absolutely ecstatic about the results of Ruby's contest. It's not that I doubt her ideas, but, ok yeah, I wasn't really into it because I didn't think it through too much (I was pretty busy with other things). So to see it work out like this, with entries of people who obviously put up a lot of time and effort into making them, is really terrific and goes far beyond anything I'd have dreamed of.

Ruby and I are into another project, and albeit I dislike the habit of making promises that it's coming soon (mainly because, well, let's face it with my workload and everything, it might very well not), I'm gonna put in a little more effort in making this one come true, more so in the light of, heck, her ideas really do click and we've got a winner here obviously.

Anyway, here's the 250x250 image I made for the contest that's on KikayEx's sidebar. Click it to check the contest out - I don't think you can enter pics anymore but at least you can vote for your fave entry:

The MomEx Garage Sale was created to address two nagging questions every parent eventually realizes: The first being: "What am I going to do with my baby's old stuff?", and the second: "Where can I buy a pre-owned but functional baby car seat, toys or educational material?". Enter MomEx's Garage Sale, which allows parents to get rid of old toys cluttering up their garage while at the same time, helping those who need them save money.

How Does It Work?

First, you signup, and make sure you enter the Location (City or Municipality) where you live. Second, click the category where your item falls under, and enter as much details as possible re your item. Items are segregated into Toys, Clothes, Books, Shoes, Strollers, Car Seats, etc. (we will add new categories as needed). You can also post pictures by uploading them in photo sharing sites such as Flickr or Photobucket, and just paste them onto your post. If you are selling numerous items, click the "By Lot" category, and enumerate the items you are selling. We also have a special "We are having a garage sale" category, where you can post the dates and times of your garage sale. We also have a "Looking To Buy" forum for those who are doing the the reverse of this process.

Please place specific details to help potential buyers. For example:

1. Where and when it was bought.
2. Its current condition.
3. How many owners it has previously had if any.
4. The right age it is for if applicable.
5. Delivery information (if necessary).
6. Asking Price, or if you are willing to trade, what you will trade for.
7. Any other information you feel relevant to help people make a buying decision.

A Few Ground Rules

Always have your security in mind.

As with all things on the Internet, we encourage you not to place your complete address, telephone or cellphone number unless you know what you are doing. By placing your contact information on the Internet you are helping increase the chances of selling your items quicker. However, you are also opening yourself up to malicious attacks, which can range from harmless prank texts / calls to stalking.

If you are fairly aware that you are safe from such things or can handle such situations, and are willing to forego these to help potential buyers or sellers contact you easier, then proceed with our blessing. If however, you are unwilling to take this risk, then consider using an alternative method of communicating, such as a Free Email (ie. Yahoo or Gmail) address, Chat (Yahoo, or Gtalk), or using the Private Messaging function of the Momex Garage Sale.

So are you ready?

Here are the links to get you started! Click here (will open another browser window) to view the forum. Click here to signup.

In a nutshell, a Basketball Sim (simulation) league allows you the chance to run an NBA team as its General Manager (GM). As such, you are in control of your team's destiny for a period of months similar to the NBA's. You can make player trades with other virtual GMs like yourself, adjust your player rotations, and even do such things as increase and decrease specific skillsets for your player(s). Factors such as salaries, salary caps, team schedules and a player's 'greed' (or his desire to play for money / loyalty) are additional things to think about which add to it's realism.

There are two areas a virtual GM need to keep track of, namely the page where the game results are shown here, and the forum above. After you make adjustments to your team and perform trade after trade at the forum, you observe the game results to see how things go and make further adjustments / trades as needed. A virtual Commissioner, in the person of Gil Moreno (forum id: Cola), runs the simulations via a software he runs on his computer, uploads these results, and confirms / allows / supervises over all aspects of trading and adjustments on the virtual league - just like a real commissioner.

And as such, I think I can allow myself a sigh of relief somewhat, knowing that I have Gil and John Dacanay plus good friend John Knight (whose real identity he thinks he can hide), forming a Dream Team of sorts, to provide content for Basketball Exchange. John has long proven an incredible detailed knowledge of the PBA and Fil-Am news, and is in the process of finishing a coffee table book about it (watch out for that!). Gil on the other hand is yet another walking encyclopedia of basketball - mainly NBA and FIBA - knowledge. He has a skilled eye in checking out new talent and keeping tabs on them plus loads of experience in running and / or joining virtual leagues.

John Knight in the meantime, has ideas about how the RP Team should be formed (who doesn't?!), and is credited for turning me on to the idea of Sim Leagues (which I'd not have learned of otherwise), while I will of course continue to provide my own views from time to time - most of which are wrong but its ok since I'll delete anyone who leaves a comment that disagrees with me. I mean, that's freedom of speech according to Gloria, right? I have the freedom to say anything I want, and make anyone else who disagrees disappear! Viva democracy!

Ok anyway, I'm veering off. There are still 10 or so slots left in the 29 team rotation needed for the Sim League, and the forum has, in the span of two weeks, gained a whopping 46 member roster! I think the league will start with only twenty teams for the moment, but more leagues are slated to start (yes we can have more than one running at the same time) if and when members indicate interest. Naturally, this service is completely FREE OF CHARGE, and is just part of our effort to make Ballex a more complete basketball resource.

Sample jobs are: update wordpress, re-activate some domains, update some plugins, check consistency with Internet Explorer, deal with my host re some mod_rewrite issues, and so on. If you, or someone you know, is knowledgable in WordPress, PHP, MySQL, or any combination of the three, please email me at ghmercado@gmail.com . I will prefer that you live in Manila, and can be paid via g-cash.

I will hire you or this person just to execute this list, and for occasional jobs in the future.

what used to be

http://kikay.exchange.ph/2006/10/30/kikay-cams/

became:

http://kikay.exchange.ph/index.php/2006/10/30/kikay-cams/

The problem was that I was using a wp-plugin called ClickCounter which is attractive because if you mouse over a link, a little message will popup showing how many times it's been clicked, like this:

It's not completely reliable (it doesn't count right-click 'open in a new window', for example), but it at least gives a fairly good representation of how popular a link is. A good guess, I suppose, is that it misses approximately 20% more clicks.

At any rate, another thing that plugin can do is come up with a 'Most Clicked Links' list. It saves it all in MySQL making it a terrific database hog, but hey I don't care, that's what I pay my host for. So anyway, ever since the permalinks issue, it obviously completely screwed up the internal links count (it didn't affect external links), and aside from that, 'Most Clicked Links', which I display on the sidebar, was showing off internal links that lead to 404 pages!

The obvious response was to reset Permalinks which I tried over and over, to no avail. I kept trying to remove 'index.php' and revert it back to before, but it wouldn't go. And in the meantime, precious links were getting counted in the new Permalink structure, so if I reset it, I was gonna lose those.

In other words - I had a disaster.

So today, I decided I wouldn't quit until I licked it. I installed the plugin last year so it took me awhile, but after reading the HowTo I realized it relied on a MySQL table called wp_linkclicks. After I downloaded it in sql format, I saw the culprits right here:

There it was. Internal URLs without the index.php appended to them. I was actually thinking of just changing the URLs of the popular links, like the 'kikay cams' link above and some others, but I realized what the heck, let's change all the internal links. So I replaced all the 2006 posts here:

and all the 2007 posts here:

I then dropped (deleted) the wp-linkclicks table (making sure to save a fresh backup of course. Kids don't try this at home unless you know what you're doing), and then uploaded my new, appended one with the 'index.php':

and VOILA! My Most Clicked Links is counting again, starting where it left off so that I wouldn't have to reset the damn thing and lose all of those precious 'This post has been viewed xxx times' stats, some of which are almost in the thousands by now.

Whew. Now there is another issue about fixing it so that old links that have been posted outside of Kikay, when clicked, need to go to the proper page. I'm sure htaccess will be the one to address this, and I'll try to post here the results of that.

Anyway, I think I wasted a few braincells fixing that up, so I'll go eat something now.

Which is why, you see now, I am in that 'what if it was just one site' mode of thinking at the moment, because if it was just one, then everything that I'd want done would be (in theory) done, and I'd be concentrating on just marketing right about now.

At any rate, today I killed of Mobile.exchange.ph, because of 3 things: 1.) I just can't handle the workload in maintaining that, 2.) I'm seriously starting to wonder about the feasibility of websites that feature gadgets these days. I'm just not sure that people are all that interested anymore. And finally 3.), it's taking up valuable server space and resources.

So that's it. I'm sad I had to do it. Again, I had SOOOO MUCH I wanted to do with that, but hey there's only one me, and i'm a very stretched me as it is.

However (and a big however here), everything is saved and tucked away in .tar format, so maybe, you know, maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel after this, and one day I'll be able to revive it again, who knows.

I dunno. Maybe yeah, maybe no. It's just that at this very moment, I am more than ever determined to make all my plans, all those things I've been thinking about AND especially marketing, to work. And via removal of Mobile, I'm sure I can focus even more now. Yeah. I'll think about it that way. It's easier to swallow that way.

I didn't want to write the usual "Best Viewed by using Firefox", because I didn't want there to be any mistake. The sites still work alright on Internet Explorer (well at least I think so), but the term "Best Viewed.." might mean that I have only made them work on Firefox, which isn't true.

I also didn't want to use the standard 'Get Firefox' buttons over here, because those tend, I think, to be ignored, or mistaken to be paid promo ads. I always design my sites not for techies, but for the ordinary, non - Internet users out there. I don't have to worry about techies. If you're a techie, I presume you should already know that Firefox is the better deal. Its the ordinary user I want to help out, and saying 'Exchange.ph encourages you..' means that it supports and recognizes Firefox and would like (but is not forcing!) everyone to use it, whether or not Exchange.ph looks better on it or not.

Whew. That's a lot to say huh.

But anyway, it's on the sites now, with a link leading to the download Firefox site (I hope they never change that!).

You know, I can't say enough of how important the browser is not only as far as our Internet experience is concerned, but this has to do with things like freedom of speech and the ability to access services freely as well. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talked about it on the surface a little bit on their discussions at at the All Things Digital 5 Conference, and it always sends chills to me as to how absolutely crucial it is that the browser remain completely independent of any bias, whether corporate, political, geographical or whatever.

I know that sounds a little off, but think about it. Both Jobs and Gates (especially Gates), if they had their way would want you to use the 'net to buy stuff off of their companies or company's partners. And you can't blame them. That's what companies do - try to make money. But if we were to allow them to make our browsers, then they'd shape it in such a way so as to favor theirs over everyone else's. Why do you think MS is more in the news for their litigation situation rather than their products? Jobs on the other hand, wants to, and I have no doubt, will do the same if he could, and might even do a better job at it, since he controls both hardware and software. Proof? The much touted iPhone is closed to 3rd party apps. Why? Obviously because he wants his own apps, and in so doing removing innovation from the equation in pursuit of his company's goals. More proof? Safari is now available for Win. There is no other compelling reason to make it so if it wasn't a commercial reason, right? I mean, why even bother spending the money and effort making it suitable for Windows if there wasn't some prize at the end?

And again, you can't blame him. That's his job, and he's hella making a lot of money for his stockholders, making him very good at it.

All over the world, people, governments, companies, etc., want to control the Internet. And the best way, really, is via control of the browser. Most everything funnels down to the browser. It is our window to what's out there, and if there is even so much of a smudge on that clear glass pane, keeping us from seeing things clearly, then we are being kept from seeing what we want to see, and this defeats the great promise of the Internet.

Damn I realize now I've spent waaaay too much time talking about this. I need to finish something, get my car in the garage, get my new laptop (HOOORAAAAAAAAYYY), and maybe play ball later. See ya'll and have a nice weekend :)

Jen doing her thing.

Second, it's happened, and finally Phoebe my laptop and I are on the letting go stage, and another one, tentatively called Karen (after the great Karen Walker from Will & Grace), is currently the apple of my eye. The details are irrelevant, let's just say that we tried, we tried reaaally hard, but things just didn't work out, and it's time we move on. Let's all be strong now, no sense in looking at the past. She'll be packing up her things and should be gone by the end of the week. No tears now, no tears.

And finally for my 3rd piece of news for today, yes, yet another dreaded server memory upgrade, bringing it to 480mb now. For what it's worth though (and it's getting to be worth A LOT more now), the sites are loading so much faster and there's far less swapping with the hard drive. The helpful folks at Rimuhosting were I think, too shy to outright tell me I needed more RAM in the light of the fact this is my 3rd time in just my first month to need an upgrade. Instead they kept talking about checking memory and error logs and stuff, but last Fri mysql crashed again and I just had to finally ask if they thought more RAM was needed, after which I was given a quote, ie. "Well, no one ever got fired for adding more memory.", which paraphrases from that 70's (or 80's) 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM' line. Yup. I got reaaally smart, thoughtful and witty system administrators taking care of my sites.

In retrospect, so what did I expect to be told anyway? That I needed less?? At any rate, with dudes like them at least I know the money's put to good use.

So anytime I wanna blog here, I actually think twice because I know it's just gonna tax the db since we're on the same host, even if just one bit. Last night I finally got email to work and stopped short of installing Spamassassin when I realized it can be a big RAM hog as well, even though I know it's necessary.

I am on the verge of ordering another 128mb. making it 480mb. which adds another $13 dollars to my hosting. Each upgrade cost isn't a lot, but like they say, a dollar here and a dollar there, and before you know it you're spending a whole lot.

Then again, that's what servers are for, to push to the limit. I just gotta get everything to pay off and asap.

All my 2.1.3 wordpress sites, which had been around since wp 1.5, used to use the structure:

%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

ever since a recent server host move, the sites have started to insist on the ff. structure:

/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Appending the 'index.php' to all my URLs is a complete disaster as I use the Click Counter by Ozh plugin to count my most clicked links. These all now go to 404 pages. I really wanna keep using this as it has been recording my hits since forever.

I tried putting it back to without the index.php but it doesn't work out, resulting in errors.

PLease help!?

Ok here's more details. Exchange.ph, due to the websites it contains (Kikay, Mom, Basketball, Mobile and Movie), was already suffering from extreme server loads, causing me to surpass my monthly download limits on a regular basis, sometimes 2x in one month. In total, the sites get up to 1,000 to 1,500 visits a day, averaging close to 30+ gb. a month worth of downloads. Actually, I wouldn't know if that's accurate, since everything stops when I hit 30gb. and any further requests would go to dev/null I presume.

I have documented (geeks like to document) most all my experience in The Big Move as I like to refer to it, in the past two posts. My main issues were importing my +-200mb. gz databases (each), the exporting and importing of which possibly developed a few white hairs, and causing me to actually get a zit on my forehead (that's what happens when I get no sleep. Even back in high school.)

And now I can say with 90% surety that everything has gone well. Not bad for a first - timer, especially given the fact I had to do the whole thing six times over (because there are six sites total, including this). As a result I am now ready and far more confident that my sites are gonna do ok. No more 10 - 15 seconds to load a page. Kikay, by far the most popular, downloads in less than five seconds. I gotta tell you that is astounding. Well ok sure it can actually do better, but hey I think that's pretty good at this stage, especially during the afternoons when an average 20 - 30 people are loading it at the same hour.

So what next?

There are still a few niggling tech issues here and there, but the main important thing right now is to get all this tech geekery behind me and concentrate on business. Primarily, marketing and related activities. Basketball Exchange was invited last night to a big sports event, while Mom Exchange has been offered a pretty sweet deal that we can't wait to take up. Kikay is the biggest mover of the two, but the fact that it's queen is burying her head in study these days means we're gonna have to back that up a bit. No biggie. We'll get there in due time.

MomEx has a few new features coming up that will make use of all that juicy bandwidth and server power. And of course, there are two new Exchanges that I am preparing to launch, probably both before the year ends.

So what can I say? The biggest hurdle I had have to face with my Exchanges, hosting, has been resolved, and I am on a high. I dreaded the days leading up to the Big Move because many times I felt I was in over my head. In fact, I think I was at some points, and if it weren't for the help of a few kind souls I'd have been in the dark growing zits. But that is all in the past, and now, I have to move even further.

Saying I am excited is putting it mildly. In fact, I'm rather reminded of Archimedes. Ok I know your eyes might be rolling at this point, but he's the one who said 'Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world'.

Finally I have a solid place to stand. Now let's see about Moving The World.

I cleared that out, and apparently only Kikay had that problem. Mom, Basketball, Movie and the rest were ok. After checking them all out, this is the page that says everything's ok:

I gotta tell ya deleting that record had the same effect as stamping out a cockroach! Or deleting a virus that had a chance to propagate again once accessed.

But let's be frank here. What's really special is the fact that the VP for Product of OpenDNS is reading my blog. Or that he has time to even read blogs, let alone mine. So I will take advantage of his audience to say how impressed I am at OpenDNS. This is how a DNS server should be run. If you think about it, there really is no better way to run one other than the way they do it. I mean, re - caching service per domain? Who woulda thunk right? If it weren't for that, then how in heck else could you get rid of an old record as immediately and as efficiently as what I did? Make nice emails to sysads who are either too busy or too lacking in human communication skills to respond?

I wonder if they can repackage what they've done and sell it, or better yet, GNU license it up and offer it to ISPs (I have one particular Philippine telco in mind already). They already make money, I presume, on the redirects and searches (am I right?). On the other hand, their DNS server is top notch, and I can only imagine how faster it'd be, say, once they use solid state storage devices which are essentially one big RAM stick (unless they do so already).

So anyway, success, after this, the morning of the 3rd day of the Big Move. Thanks John! Now I got a meeting and gotta run...

1. Turns out php's default 8mb allocation was the culprit when I was doing stuff like accessing wp-admin's pages and it was returning white empty pages. I bumped it up to 16mb. and immediately, that wasn't enough too. So I bumped it up to 24mb. and I haven't heard a peep since.
2. Around this afternoon all the sites suddenly got MySQL errors of the highest order. Stuff I've never seen before, like tables loading but not fetching data ("mysql disappeared" messages) or the default "I cannot connect to the WP db are you sure your password / username is correct" sort of stuff, aside from getting bog slow after initially being lightning fast early on. After a quick support email it turned out the installed 160mb. RAM wasn't enough to handle the load, and they offered me a 96mb. upgrade for a discounted extra $10.00 a month. I said YeeaAAayyy aLLelujaaaaAhh and they set it forth onto the server posthaste. Looks ok so far although I've received some complaints of slowness, so we'll see.
3. Finally the biggest issue of all is DNS. And I mean 3rd party DNS and not my server DNS (thank God). After an hour or so of working on my sites, I try again and get 404 errors. After delving into it I realized I've been pointed back to my old server (!?!?!!). Yet another support email, and cause for alarm was raised, and they started asking me to check out stuff. After some settling down we both realized it was probably OpenDNS (which I use on my PC) maintaining an old record which pops up from time to time. Although I'm not particularly sure how and why that is, since I am dependent on that server it suddenly fetches the wrong record after the requisite 10 minute rotation. Now that is just plain weird. At any rate, the only solution is to just wait it out. I initially thought that it was some sort of failback issue, where it serves up a 'second best' record should the first one fail for some reason, but the tech support guys said DNS doesn't work that way so that's not it. I'm glad (although I was initially freaked) that it turns out the problem is confined to me. Which is freaky still in a way considering I'm it's admin, and I'm the one having probs accessing it. Figures, right?

Anyway that's it. I can't keep my eyes open any longer. Tiring day, and the promise of another again tomorrow. Later then.