One of my good friends Chee Wee Ng from Betshopboy completes a great milestone of blogging for one full year tomorrow and is celebrating first blog anniversary this month.  He has lined up some great gifts to give away to his readers.

I realize I should have announced it on my blog a bit earlier as he had weekly drawings and even early bird draw where if you entered early and secured 20 points, your points would be doubled but still there is one grand prize draw that will be on August 31.. The prizes for this coming week and the rules are listed below but first, check out Chee Wee’s video about his contest..

Prizes for 24 August draw

1st prize - 4GB Sandisk Micro Cruzer skin flash drive
2nd & 3rd – a 125×125 ad book for 7 days (from 25 – 31 Aug) with PerformancingAds on my sidebar

Prizes for Grand draw on 31 August (one winner)

A 2GB Creative Zen MP3 player with 2.5? TFT LCD for videos & audios & SD card expansion slot. Click for specification.

A 125×125 ad book for entire month of September 2008 with PerformancingAds on my sidebar

Early Bird Bonus
The first 25 submissions with minimum of 20 points each will have their total points doubled!

So here is the deal, if you want to win one of the prizes, then here is what you need to do to gain those points:

* Registration and 1 point –> Subscribe to our RSS Feed via email (mandatory) and comment below that you are registered to win. You can use the subscribe option in the sidebar or at the end of this post.

* 1 point: Stumble or Stumble Review this contest

* 2 points –> Follow me on Twitter and Twitt about this contest with link to this contest page.

* 5 points –> Make a *New* blog post on a publicly accessible blog (cannot be on a password protected page such as myspace or facebook) and link to this page and the homepage. Additional 5 points given if you embed the above video(found in this post) in your post.

Earn Bonus Points
15 points –> Make a *New* blog post (separate from above post) and embed anyone of my videos found in below posts with a short writeup and link to the respective posts. That’s 15 points for each new post with a video.

Video post #1: Singapore Toys & Comic Convention 2008

Video post #2: A Prelude To F1 Grand Prix

Rules:

* This contest is all in good fun and is open to anywhere that snail mail goes.

* Participating blogs must be 90 days old and consist of at least 10 posts.

* Comment must contain link to twitter posts and blog posts, Twitter id and StumbleUpon id, so they can be verified.

* Winner must have an active subscription to Betshopboy.net when selected.

* Winners of ad spot must supply your own 125×125 image, which will run during the period stated above.

* Winners will be selected by random draw and will be contacted by email and you have 7 days to response. If there’s no response, a new winner will be drawn

* Contest ends on August 30th at 11.59pm (GMT +8).

* The organizer (that’s me!) reserve the right to reject any entries from websites that are generally offensive or pornographic, and any websites that can be classified as spam.

* The organizer (me again) reserves the right, at my sole discretion, to modify or replace any part of this contest, e.g., depending on the participation rate, additional prizes and/or early bird bonus may be thrown in if my subscription target is hit.

Submit your entries early to qualify for the weekly draws and to double your points for the first 25 submissions with minimum 20 points!

Congratulations Chee Wee

Last year, I had joined thousands of bloggers all over the world during Blog Action Day 2007, and the topic of conversation was Environment. 

This year, on Blog Action Day (October 15, 2008), once again bloggers across the globe will unite in bringing awareness to the masses and the topic will be Poverty.  

Many people ask what can one person do about Poverty?  Or how can blogging about poverty make a difference?   There is power in numbers and unity.  When thousands write about the same issue, in a sort of a brain storming way,  giving ideas to each other about ways to end it, educating those who have no idea about it, bringing awareness, inspiring each other to take actions, and changing minds on a global scale, our society can be better.

Also, there is a very compelling video posted on Blog Action Day site just to answer some of such concerns!

And you can also read up a bit on what poverty actually means.  This link explains very that poverty does not hit just the third world countries, or the developing countries,  it spans many families and individuals even in the most developed and so called ‘rich’ countries. 

On this day, some people will write about how they feel about poverty, others will write about what they think should or could be done to eradicate this affliction, and still others will talk about what causes it and it history or whatever else they want to bring forth about the issue. 

As you can tell, I will be joining again this year by writing something on that day and would love to hear if you are planning to join the Blog Action Day this year. 

You can find more websites and resources on ways you can help and also check out topic ideas they have compiled to help promoting the day.

If you want to find more posts on Blog Action Day, keep watching this link : Blog Action Day Posts 2008

I usually work with large excel documents with thousands of records.  Many times these data reports need to be published on the web for our clients.  We also send these documents to our clients via emails but not everyone has compatible software installed on their pc’s in which instance we convert the documents to PDF format, ask them to download the free Adobe software to open these attachments.

Universal Document Converter is a software that can convert any of your documents, ranging from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel tables, Microsoft Power Point presentations and AutoCAD drawings or even web pages into Adobe PDF or graphical files in 7 popular formats: TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PCX, DCX, GIF or BMP.

UDC installs itself as a virtual printer on your pc.  So, once you open the document that you want to convert, clicking File->Print->Select UDC (from the available printers) will convert the document in your desired format.

Among the many benefits such as: exporting into many formats, ease of use, economy of system resources, and quick configurations etc, my particular favorite is it’s ability to use UDC on a remote computer since not every computer is hooked to the printer in my house!

The power of this software is seen with features like converting multiple documents in a batch mode.

OR appending different documents into a single multi page file

OR it’s ability to keep background images and colors while converting web-pages

Single Use license for Universal Document Converter (UDC) is for USD $69, and if you run a small business, the company offers very nice discounts for multiple licenses.

The website for Universal Document Converter offers many tutorials for converting different types of documents into other formats.  You can also download the demo version before buying it.  Also check out the Video Tutorial they’ve provided for clear instructions on how to use the software.

For a happy Monday reading, here are some of the wonderful posts I came across this week and am sure you’ll find them interesting too.

8 Attributes of an Olympic Mindset @ Freelance Writing

21 Digg.com Funny Resume Stories @ JobMob

Hit the Digg Front Page with Social Elves @ JohnTP

9 Keys to Running Multiple Blogs @ Traffikd

How Trust Made My Blog Triumph: 1000 Subscribers @ SEO 2.0

Categories, Bookmarks and Tags: Background and Basics @ aimClear Search Marketing Blog

The Curse of a Blogger @ More Than Scratch the Surface

Five Search Queries to find Sponsorship Link Opportunities @ GrayWolf’s SEO blog

4 Search Engines to Search Wikipedia the Pro Way @ MakeUseOf

Sleeping with the enemy @ Brian Gardner

and finally, an awesome link that made my day when Jim Kukral sang the Happy Birthday song for my mom. 

photo by: Stephane

YES… finally Stumble Upon has listened to so many of us complain about this and are planning to allow us to add unlimited number of friends.  If you remember, back in November last year (can’t believe it’s been that long) I blogged about not being able to add my Stumble Upon friends.

With just 200 friend limit, you had to constantly ‘clean up’ your ‘friends’ to make sure you get relevant stumbles delivered to you.  This limited you from getting those people’s stumbles who added you as friends but you couldn’t reciprocate.   Not any more.  I will be able to see most of my fans’s stumbles now since I can befriend them.

According to Stumble Upon’s blog:

Over the next couple weeks we are going to separate the social & content aspects of friendship on SU, so you can subscribe to someone’s favorites without necessarily becoming their friend, and become someone’s friend without necessarily seeing their stumbles. You’ll also be able to “Subscribe” to more than 200 stumblers, since we’ve changed the way they are stored in the database. Mutuals will just be “Friends”, fans will become “Subscribers” and you’ll simply be “Subscribed to” stumblers who rate great content. We hope these changes will make things a bit easier to understand for new stumblers, while improving stumble quality for everyone.

The upcoming changes are definitely going to make an already wonderful social media site more useful and enjoyable.  I can’t wait to see the changes as the Stumble Upon team fixes some of the other bugs as noted in their post, like removing “ghosts” from the system.  Changes like “Mutuals” gaining a status of friends and “fans” becoming your subscribers.  The option to “opt-out” of stumbles of certain friends whose interests do not match yours, is going to make it even better.   I can’t wait to see the changes.

So, have you subscribed to my stumbles?  If not, check them out, I’m sure you’ll find something interesting there.   Also, if you read this blog, leave your Stumble Upon URL and I’d love to add you to my network and subscribe to your stumbles.

photo: Owlets

This is the second part in a two part guest post by Matt of “The Fantastic Site of Lord Matt“.  Read How I Manage Multiple Blogs - Part 1

photo: Nathan Borror

About email

The one thing I do not do is check my email. I loath email and find it irritating to use. One day I’m going to find the time to write a gateway program that will convert email to something using XML… When I do check my email it can kill half a day. Often there will be people that I should reply to and sometimes a spark for a post idea but mostly there will be sixty million system messages, along with the spam, marketing junk and general **** that email is full of. I maintain a lot of in-boxes which helps to segregate the mail and some boxes have a higher priority than others. For example the mailing lists box is just archived via POP3 into thunderbird unless I need to ask a question and then I’ll check the box for a few days before ignoring it again. Email is your worst enemy. You can spend hours corresponding with people and writing short post length replies when the same basic information can be contained in a PM, tweet, Stumble or wall note. IM is sometimes useful although I am rarely on-line these days because I love to gossip and get no work done if I do not watch it. As I said my wife chuckled when I told her I was writing about productivity and time management. (As I said I start at the top and stop at the bottom and I’d got this far before she asked me what I was doing).

The trick behind the trick

I am not very organised and probably will never be. However, I apply patterns of behaviour that are productive along with systematised methods that provide short cuts to getting things made or done quickly. I also stack up my resources ready to use and make sure I have a rich collection of “things to use later maybe”. The result is that when I combine this with social media and interaction with other people is that I make for myself an unending and unstoppable avalanche of ideas and potential. Each morning I step into this fast moving current and “go with the flow”. This works because I find every last part of it interesting and I love to write. In this way I do not manage my time so much as set my surroundings up to rush me from one task to the next in a constant run of enjoyable and interesting things to do. The blogs simply act as strategic placed landing pads for the results. If I do not find the topic interesting enough it dies away and “lesson learned” I move on (the current buzz42 is an example of this). In all that I have big projects on the “slow burner” that I go back to time and again. Eventually they get completed but along the way I produce interesting code or learn new geeky things and this again pushes me back to blogging. It might even be true to say that blogging is a way of not killing myself with an utter overload of interesting things to react to.

Segmenting the day

More by necessity than by intention my day is segmented into parts. 7am until 9am is the morning shift where I try to remember to eat breakfast. At 9am the boys go to nursery (pre-school) and some days I have to take them and some days my wife takes them. So I may or may not work until 10am when the rest of the day is often mine. This does not always work and I have commitments to the local Community Mutual that bite into my afternoons and sometimes the entire daytime period. This acts as a good forced time away from the computer even if I am often thinking about some computer related project. These things called clients also happen to need attention and in solving their problems I often find inspiration for geeky blog posts too. This also pays the bills more efficiently than blogging does. The final phase is the evening which starts around 5pm and although I sometimes work during tea, story time and getting changed time I am working in the same room and the activities and can stop to join in. Once the kiddies are in bed I will often try to bring the day’s activities to an end. However, it is not unusual to see 12 notepad2 files and a firefox with 10 or more tabs open (I had 55 open one time) but this acts as a to-do list for the next day.

A free-form “to do list”

By the end of the week I will have a to-do list that is too long and I start the culling process. Closing tabs, bookmarking pages and saving notes. Often this leads to more ideas and more posts (mostly of the quick type). Recently I wrote a post asking “Does Rich Schefren eat his own dog food?” I had been meaning to write that for almost two weeks before I got around to it. It lead, as I thought it would, to interesting conversation with the likes of Andy Beard and will probably draw a little traffic for a long time to come. Maybe even Rich Schefren will pop by and say something - stranger things have happened. Likewise, I have interviews and reviews that I still mean to get done and will get to one day. This list is always there at the back of my mind and is supplemented by the tabs I leave open for myself and the notes I have yet to do something with. I can do this easily as I have plenty of system resources to waste on browser tabs but it is not something that will work for everyone.

Getting more done

However, not everything I do is an end result. Much of what I do is about automating and simplifying my tasks so that I can do more with the same amount of time. This can mean taking the time to write code libraries that I can reuse or systematically cleaning up my bookmarks. The one thing that is not used are lists. If I made lists of things “to do” I would spend hours making them but start with one item on the list and then free fall from there. This does not work for me so I create a matrix of “stuff” and place myself in the centre. That does not mean I am disorganised but it is just the way that works well for me. What makes me more productive today than yesterday is (a) experience and (b) better tools. Some of these tools I made but others I have found (open source projects are great). For example, I use an ad server to manage my on site adverts and this allows me to see what works and where so that affiliate banner ads that are getting low clicks can be deactivated in favour of more productive stuff. It is a tool that allows me to do more with less time. I use what used to be called phpAdsNew but was renamed to OpenAds and then to OpenX. It’s free to use (Open Source) and for any blogger with more than one blog and some reasonable hosting (or a server) it is worth thinking about.

photo: motumboe

Other tricks are things like getting a bottle of tap water and putting it in the freezer over night. In the morning you take your frozen bottle and put it on your desk. It will defrost over the day so that you have cold water with a big ice cube in it to keep it cold and it is available all day. For php I have the Orbit42 Base Class which was written for a project that was never made. However, it does a few neat things not least of which is that it stops me needing to write safe SQL by stopping me needing to write SQL at all. I hand the function an array and table name and it figures the rest out for me. That alone can save me up to an hour a day in code I never have to write. It also contains an extensive debug system and a plugin system that allows me to create generic plugins that work on most things I create. All that by default - doing more with less time.

Conclusions and thoughts

I work full-time and own my own business. Not everyone has that freedom but everyone does have an optimal way of working. My trick has always been to make sure that what I do I enjoy totally so it’s not so much a case of trying to get motivated as finding a point where I’m willing to stop and remember to eat. My system is not perfect. For example, I have been meaning to re-do my main blog’s theme to a design that I completed almost 7 months ago and upgrade the code base that runs it. The problem is that there are so many interesting things to be doing that I don’t find the time. I may be the only person for whom writing so many blogs is a time saving device (or I may be mad). Who knows.

That’s my fresh perspective on productivity and time management - what’s yours?

Matt has been running many blogs very successfully and has written great content that we can all learn from.  You can follow Matt on some of the popular social media sites: twitter.com/lordmatt, lordmatt.stumbleupon.com and a number of forums, blogs and communities.

You can see the most wonderful spam catcher Akismet has caught more than 31 thousand spam comments on this blog and needless to say blogging would have been a nightmare if all the bad comments had not been caught at the entrance but when my own comment got caught as spam, I got a bit worried.

Have the spammers got so good that Akismet cannot distinguish between a legitimate vs spam anymore?  And that too from the blog author?

Your

Doctor?

Pharmacist?

Hair Dresser

Attorney?

Maid?

Friend?

OR

Mother-In-Law?

(trusting “myself” is not a choice)

Update:  If you came here earlier after seeing this post in your feed reader, I apologize… the format kept getting all messed up for some reason and I had to delete the post!   I’ve been writing posts from either Windows Live Writer or BlogDesk and am so not used to the dashboard of this new version!

photo: OiMax

I was surprised the other day to learn that my brother, who is a veterinarian by profession and oversees his own web site, had no clue about what RSS was.

So, how do you explain to someone why they should ’subscribe to your feed’ when they have no idea what you are talking about?  This is what I told him and fortunately, he got it the first time.

Oh, the RSS… well, lets see: 

Its a way to read new content of any website on a single page, so you don’t have to remember each website’s address!

There are many companies who let you do that… Google does it through their application called Google Reader.

Its fairly simple to have a Google account and then click on Reader option and start adding sites that you want to see the newest content from.  Also see here: A Quick Tour of Google Reader

I personally prefer Bloglines - another company that also lets you read your favorite sites on a single page - after signing up with them of course… you can see the sites I’ve added on my Bloglines here

I then showed him how to set up the his Google Reader since he already had a Google account.

Its easier to understand what RSS is once you sign up with either of the two i mentioned here and see it in action…

Go ahead, click on any one of these orange icons and you’ll be taken to a page where you can choose one of your favorite readers to subscribe to my feed and you’ll be able to read the latest content of this site as I publish it.

While you are here, I urge you to take a look at the Most Commented posts from menu below the header image OR click on any of the posts displaying in the gallery and see if you like the conversations that follow on this blog.

Don’t forget to check out the Archives for some interesting posts either.  Here are some of my favorites:

Who is reading your blog?

Communicating with people you haven’t met

Links, Backlinks, Pingbacks and Trackbacks - What Exactly Are They?

Creating Content From Everyday Life

Don’t let it bring you down!

I cannot add my Stumble Upon Fans as friends

Dilemma of Paid Reviews!

My Best Blogging Achievement

Coordination, Cooperation and Collaboration - Lead to Success

Delete or Edit Comment?

Any questions? still not convinced?  don’t hesitate to come back and ask in the comments.