Since this blog got under way in March 07, I have, to date, received exactly 9,999 spam comments. Of course, everything’s been taken care of by handy dandy Akismet.
I feel a sense of accomplishment, even pride, in having reached this “magical” number 
25.Jun.08 
Blog Updates 
Comments (0)
Happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday dear… uh… Eastwood-Zhao-Happenings-in-a Nutshell,
happy birthday to you!
My blog is one year old! 
Blogging for a whole year has been quite a journey. I’ll let the rest of this post do the rest of the talking:
The Past Year… In a Nutshell!
There are certainly highs and lows of my “blogging career” . When I first started blogging back in March of 2007, I was pumped with blogging-juice and produced some quality content. For a while, I was producing quality content and enjoying it all. I even got some short-lived fame ‘n glory when my blog was listed as a “Hot Community” in MyBlogLog, along with The Thinking Blog (they actually were doing quite well back then… no hard feelings, Ilker 
) and ProBlogger. Ahhh… those where the days! 
However, things took a turn for the worse as I battled with the tempting forces of evil. My blog dipped big time in quality and creativity starting from April 2007. During that “dark period” , I wrote a whole ton of cheap, low-quality reviews. My readership practically dropped down to zero, and my blog was getting pretty darn close to becoming a “splog”. Though I made a couple hundred dollars, I have to say this: the experience was definitely not worth it!
My love for blogging really started kicking back in starting Jan. 2008. I simply told myself this: write about whatever you feel like writing about. If you don’t feel like writing, take it easy, be kind to yourself. Don’t write for the sake of “ahh I gotta keep the posts coming or else I’ll loose subscribers” (not like I have a lotta subscribers anyway ). So along with my change in attitude came some really good posts. I started writing what I am really passionate about: driving (or, what I call defensive eco-driving — ooo I really want a Prius nowadays), music ( — the effortless mastery of), among others.
Another major change I made was removing all advertisements. It was clogging the blog up — making it look like a chicken market. Besides, I wasn’t any money that’s worth my while anyway. Surprisingly, not too long ago, after I made my changes of removing all the junk from my blog, there were offers that came in requesting text-link placements of $50/month. What did I do? I stayed cool and flatly refused 
.
107 Published Posts in Total Eh?
Out of the huge pile, I’ve picked out half-a-dozen or so of my favourite/most controversial/most commented posts. Check ‘em out:
Creative Writing
Life (Blah blah blah… )
Defensive Eco-Driving (Oh believe me, this section’s good 
)
While you’re at it, check out my “Top Posts” also. Maybe you noticed that I’ve left all the nasty political stuff out. For a good reason! I’m not exactly into these things nowadays. I prefer more to have a nice walk on the seawall on a beautiful, breezy day, then to point out the wrongs of our world 
(there’s simply too much to list)
You Are Here Because…
You are here because… I’d like to thank every single one of you for the support — no matter how much, or how little — over the last year. But… hey! I have a PR 4 blog : Spiderman’s uncle Ben once said (if I can remember this correctly), “with great powers come great responsibility” . Where I’m I going with this? The link-lovin’, of course! Listed below are some of my favourite bloggers:
Do you have any blogging experiences that you’d like to share?
16.Apr.08 Blog Updates, Internet & Technology Comments (16)
This is really getting kinda sad. What used to be a great blogging community where users share ideas and communicate with each other — yes, I am referring to MyBlogLog — has now crossed over to the dark side… a more spammy side.
I rarely receive legit comments now. Most of the comments that I receive — if not all — are mass-sent, and contain one type of link or another.
Time to wake up, people: MyBlogLog is slowly phasing out. It no longer brings in a ton of traffic. Considering that most comments contain links, I rarely pay any attention to them now.
Anyone else noticing this?
29.Feb.08 Blog Updates Comments (7)
Spammers are becoming increasingly annoying and tricky nowadays by using Black Hat techniques to boost their websites’ search engine rankings (usually parked pages with tons of ads, which, in return = $$$).
A Little Background
At first, they targeted free blog hosts like Blogspot and Wordpress with automated blog generating programs to create hundreds of spam blogs at a time. These spam blogs would contain back-links to their websites, which improves their SEO. However, these spam blogs are so common now that they usually get suspended/deleted within 48 hrs or so of creation.
Spammers’ New Targets: WordPress MU
Individual blog hosts using WordPress MU are the spammer’s new targets now. The following is from a Black Hat SEO article:
There is a script available from Wordpress called Wordpress Multi-User (WPMU) that allows you to give your website visitors free Wordpress blogs.
Literally thousands of webmasters have installed this script on their servers.
That’s good news for us. Why? Multiple domains/IPs + free Wordpress blogs = extremely easy backlinks to our websites.
Solution to Prevent Spam Blogs on WordPress MU
Spammers find vulnerable WordPress MU blogs through a simple “Google Hack”. They enter the following search query:
“you’ll be blogging seconds later” inurl:wp-signup.php
This allows spammers to go directly to the doors of WordPress MU sites, enabling them to register spam blogs.
To make it harder for spammer to find your WordPress MU blog, simply edit the wp-signup.php file and remove the line “you’ll be blogging seconds later”. This will make it a lot harder for spammers to find your WordPress MU site and register spam blogs.
08.Feb.08 Blog Updates Comments (8)
As you can see, Eastwood Zhao dot COM now has a new theme! My blog’s now running on the Orange Web 2.0 theme by Ericulous.
I like this much better than the other one for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s a lot cleaner; I’ve stripped away all the annoying pay-per-click ads . I wasn’t making any money on those ads… so I decided, why bother keeping them? This has greatly increased the visual appeal of the page and the overall speed of the blog. Yay! Liberation at long last from those annoying ads (note that I wasn’t using Google Adsense — had I had Adsense I’d probably be way better off).
What do you think of the colours? I really like the design, especially the contrast between the orange and black. Though, I’m still trying to find a header graphic.
Here’s a quick poll: do you like my new theme?
19.Jan.08 Blog Updates Comments (2)
