Rhythms of the Night

It has been quite a while since I was infected with a lung infection. Almost more than a year. It came as a surprise to me when I got the infection.I still remember vividly,  I did not feel any discomfort prior to that and I even went for my daily jog that morning. It was Sunday and my wife was out with her friends leaving me with both my younger daughters at home. At about 11 am, I suddenly began feeling very chilly inside. I thought a flu must be coming so I went into my room to lie down. I knew something was not right when I discovered that I could not breathe when I laid down.

I quickly sat up and pulled in a few deep breaths, then tried o lie down again and again I could not breathe. All of a sudden both my feet began to feel very very cold and I kept breathing hard. My daughters heard my commotion and rushed in to see what hashappened. I had a very bad feeling that I am having a heart attack, buthen I felt no chest pain.

Since my feet was cold as ice, i told my daughter to fetch me a pail of hot water and I dipped my feet into the pail. All of a sudden, the warmth came back and I could breathe easier. I sat there for a few minutes with my feet in the warm water and slowly I felt better. I then tried to lie down again, and I was very relieved that I could breathe normally again.

The next morning, I went to see my favorite doctor, and I swear to god that it will be the last time I go back to him. The momoent he saw me and the moment I told him what happened, he knew it was something quite serious. He asked me to go to the adjacent clinic to get an x ray of my chest as his clinic got no xray machine. When he saw the x-ray, he did not tell me the seriousness of my illness. He just said I had water in my lungs, gave a few tablets and sent me home. I too did not suspect anything but after taking his medicine for a few days, I still felt quite weak, so I went to another doctor who had a scanning machine. He did a scan and I showed him the x-ray that I took the last time. He was surprised that I am still here in his clinic. He told me my left lung had collapsed and I am only depending on my right lung to breathe! Without wasting anytime, he wote a report for me to get admitted to a specialist center to have the water in my lung drawn out.

I got myself admitted and the next day, the doctors pierced some sort of shaft through my back and into my lungs. I could actually hear the water gushing out! Was there for 2 days before I was discharged and it took me another month or so before I could start jogging again.  

I don’t know if it is going to be a good thing, but I am seriously considering getting another domain. The thought have been with me for sometime but I still haven’t figured out what i want to do with a new domain. One thing for sure is, I want to use the new blog to make some money.

I definitely won’t want it to become another personal blog like this one though. I have enough of these. Ranting in 2 blogs is kind od boring i think. lately, all my rants have ended up here, basically because most of my readers have migrated to my other blog, so I can rant as much as possible without boring too many people. Friends who still visits are those that likes to see me rant i guess.

What I would like is a blog that has an international appeal. Some niche blog where people from all over the world would have the same interests. The problem is, I myself haven’t figured out what I am good at that would appeal to all. Come to think of it, I am really good at nothing at all. I am like what people would call, A Jack of All. I know a little bit of this and a littlle bit of that. Maybe I will just start a blog on that line. Talking about a little bit of this and that. Would that be boring?  

Yesterday was Sunday. Normaly on Sundays, I close shop at 12 and have half a day to myself. Sometimes when I am lazy, I will just sleep off the whole afternoon, feel drowsy at the evenings and when it’s time for bed, I will lay wide awake looking at the ceiling. Since it has been quite a few hectic Sundays for me for the last few weeks, I decided to take it easy and do some light housework instead.

New Year is round the corner and the hose need some tidying anyway. The problem is my wife is a hoarder. Whatever I dumped into the thrash bag, she will double check and 10 out of 10 times, half of it will go back into the cabinet. Makes me want to scream. Why are women like that? All those useless stuffs  have been in the cupboard for years and years. Every year I take it out, cleans the dust of it and place it back and it gets, fuller every year. Would you believe it if I told you she even makes a fuss if I throw away those empty Coke bottles? I don’t know she wants with them. 

She went out for the afternoon, and Ha! i got a free reign. Dumped every worthless thing away without telling her. The funny thing is she wouldn’t notice because the cupboard is so filled wioth stuffs that even she doesn’t recognise. Disposed off those rubbish real quick, just in case she comes home and find her stuff in the garbage can. As long as she doesn’t realise I have thrown them away, she will be happy.

I subscribe to a free newsletter from Yaro Starak, the self proclaimed Blog Traffic King. He gives very insightful tips on how to write a good blog and attract more traffic. This is one of his articles. It is quite lengthy, but if you are interested please carry on

Today I’m going to introduce you to the main concept that is at the heart of my methodology for building blog traffic. It’s called "Pillar Articles".

Pillar articles on the surface appear to be standard blog articles, but for some special reasons they become the main drivers of traffic to your blog. They form the foundations - the pillars - of your blog.

SPECIAL OUTCOMES

There is no one particular reason that an article becomes a Pillar, rather it’s the results you get from the article that qualify it as a Pillar. A Pillar article will perform the following key functions for your blog -

1. Bring in a flood of traffic when first released. This is often the result people linking to or trackbacking your article and generating a little bit of "buzz" around the blogosphere (other blogs).

2. Provide a definition of a key term, an answer to a commonly asked question, or a brief how-to tutorial. The article’s value is not time dependent, you can refer to it in future blog posts, other bloggers will link to it and refer people to it over and over again. It’s timeless information, not news or personal blogging - it’s relevant to a wide audience for a long period of time.

3. The traffic keeps coming long after the article is archived deep within your blog. Often because of reason one above (lots of incoming links to the article) a Pillar article will rank well in search engines and consequently show up on the first page of searches, directing brand new readers to your blog long after you first published the article.

4. Provides a reason to bookmark and/or subscribe to your blog (and RSS feed). When a first time reader comes to your blog and they see all the fantastic content they are much more likely to bookmark your site for further reading later. They will start monitoring your blog regularly, transforming from casual random surfer into loyal reader because they can see the quality of your previous work.

SPIKE ARTICLES

Don’t get confused between a Pillar and a Spike article. A Spike article is all about a quick rush of traffic that often disappears within a day or two and has very little long lasting impact. Pillars are timeless, Spikes are temporary. One of the tricks is knowing how to convert a Spike into a Pillar.

Without Pillar articles most other traffic building techniques fail. If you don’t have Pillars in place most traffic techniques you implement will be Spikes, maybe generating a rush of traffic for brief bursts but very quickly dropping back to where you were previously. You won’t convert first time visitors into regular readers.

FOLLOW A BLOG TRAFFIC METHDOLOGY

A well constructed blog, one that follows a traffic building methodology, will retain an audience long after the blogger stops writing. This has many positive outcomes, including -

A) You can stop blogging for a week or two without worrying about losing your audience. This means less stress and a more solid blog foundation.

B) The resale value of your blog will be higher because it’s value and popularity are based on the existing content, not the potential future content that evaporates when the blogger stops blogging after the sale. It’s more about the blog and less about the personality behind the blog.

(Although personality is still very important - more on this in future email newsletters.)

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak Blog Traffic King

See? that’s the high i wqas talking about. For the last 2 days, the comments section was giving trouble. I thought I solved it yesterday when I went an updated the option in my dashboard. I didn’t realised that only me, the administrator have that previlege and my readers don’t. On checking my e-mail, I got a note from Lucia telling me that the comments is still not working. I was quite surprised, so I logged out and tried to comment in my own blog. Indeed, it was not working.

I went scouring for info in the blogsome forum, and I finally found the answer. Seems that from May, Blogsome has added a spam control function where a commenter must go through to comment. So, I went back to my dashboard and enabled that function, and voila! the comments are working again! So, sorry for the inconvenience if you have to type in some numbers before your comments appear, but it’s just a small one, just like Blogger’s Word Verification. That’s the self satisfaction I was talikng about. Able to solve these small nitty gritty gives me a ‘high’

sorry for the boo hoo yesterday. The comments box  is OK now. So blast away!

As usual, Saturday is a slow day. More so with all the world cup football going on. Saw the fishmonger dozing off in his stall. People tell that he had lost a few thousand bucks since the World Cup started. Looks like we will have an empty fish stall soon. Then there is this guy whose father left him a flourishing business. Every morning he will be pouring over the papers, making anylisis of the coming matches. He even has a computerised chart to help him out. Don’t know how much he has won or how much he had lost. But what the hell, he is loaded, so he can afford to loose. In the end, nobody wins, except the bookies. They get a fat commission on bets and if they can refrain from betting themselves, they will be the ultimate winners!

Let’s not talk anymore on the World Cup. Let’s talk about something I like. For instance, like changing my blog themes. If you guys still can’t comprehend what the term "itchy butts" means, that I am it. I have a damn itchy butt. I can’t still. Always scouring the net for any new themes and designs that i can use. Yesterday I found a site that offers free blogsome themes and here i am today with a new theme. That’s itchy butts for you! I get a ‘high’ when i does that. Self satisfaction of sorts. Just like masturbating. Self induced orgasm.

Sooi2, one of my more loyal readers were concerned about my lack of comments on this new site. Yaaa..at first when I just started blogging it kind of a disappointing when you put in a certain effort to come up with some rubbish and you don’t see very little response. But I think i have past that stage. Of course I still love lots of comments, but I am not so particular these days. Hell, even probloggers like Darren Rowse don’t get much comments, but when you check technorati on people linking to his site,the figure is near 10,000. The funny thing is there are bloggers like Mr. Kenny who have the uncanny ability to attract comments from his fans. He can sneeze and he will get hundreds of comments saying,’ Oh what a good sneeze’ or something like that.

I have accepted that fact that I don’t pocess any of these capabilities that makes people want to comment on what ever I churn out. So now, I am more than happy if I find new sites linking to me everyday. I am more that happy if I check my stats and I find the people coming here have increased a little more than last week. I am happiest when I check my adsense account and find that I have 2 clicks more than yesterday. Other than the chance to vent out my frustrations, I think thse are things that makes my blogging hours very worthwhile.

That’s right. I changed because i felt itchy. Other than that, I found something i liked here. I can categorise my post. See, like this boring post, i categorised it under boring shits. So fun! Last time, I can’t do that. Then,  i can trackback.  In case you don’t know, tracking back is a very useful feature to increase your readership. This excerpt from this article explains the usefulness of trackbacks.

Trackbacking is a system that notifies a blogger that another blog has written an article about one of their blog posts. For instance, if you decide you wish to write a post about someone else’s blog article, you would use a trackback. If you were writing a trackback article, you would go to original article and search for their article’s trackback URL. You would then insert that trackback URL into your own blog management system trackback notification system. When the new article is saved with the trackback URL, a notification to the original blog will cause that blog’s management system to insert a link to your post to appear on the other next to the original article. The blogger will also receive a notification usually by e-mail that someone blogged about their blog, and sent a trackback.

In my previous blog, I can only do this through a 3rd. party.  The layout here also looks more professional. I think this is the next best thing to having my own domain. I held back from buying my own domain because I don’t know when my itching will stop.

Anyway, I am having lots of fun tweaking this new baby. There are still so many functions that I haven’t have time to learn. Only complain is they don’t have more templates to satisfy my itchy fingers but given her growing popularity, rest assured that there will be somebody out there who will start designing templates for Blogsome in time to come. Of course there are plenty of free Wordpress templates out there but to make it suit Blogsome will need an intimate knowledge of stylesheets and stuffs. I am hopeless in that. But what the heck, I can keep changing the header image whenever a bout if itchiness strikes.