Vanilla Mist

I’ve had an account with MyBlogLog for a while now, but it wasn’t before yesterday that I decided to play with it a little bit. So, now I have a proper profile and all my blogs have the “Recent Readers” widget in the sidebar.

MyBlogLog allows us to connect with those who read our blog as well as with bloggers whose blog we read. For those of you who have never heard of MyBlogLog (where have you been?) here’s how it works: you sign up, fill out your profile and add the blog(s) you author. Each time you visit another member’s blog, if they have the widget set up, your profile image will appear in their blog, along with a link to your profile. If the widget is not set up, they will still be able to know you have visited from their control panel – however, you can choose to hide yourself from any particular site if you want.

Each blog has a community that people can join either by choice or automatically after a certain number of visits (defined in the settings). Members can message each other and add people as contacts.

The service also provides statistics, showing where readers came from, what readers viewed and clicked. New users get a 3 day trial of MyBlogLog Pro: realtime, historical, and full daily stats. After the trial period, if you don’t want to upgrade, your account is automatically set as basic – you still get stats, but with limitations.

There are 2 widgets available that you can set up in your blog: the one you see in the sidebar in this blog under “Recent Visitors” called “Recent Readers”, showing MyBlogLog members who visited the blog and another called “Top Links”, showing the most popular links in your blog. (I’m not using this widget here).

I really like MyBlogLog: it’s cool, it’s social and it drives traffic. And… it finally gives me a better way to connect with some of the people who read my blog.

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I know there are people from different parts of the world that come to this blog. My my stats show that most people are from the US, England and Germany, but I see visitors from several different countries. As I was looking through my stats, I started thinking “Wouldn’t it be nice to actually know these people instead of just be looking at ‘them’ as stats, charts, aggregated data and IP addresses? Where do they live, what do they do, what do they think, why are they here?”

I have many friends from all across the globe and I find it incredibly interesting to meet people from other countries. This goes way back, I started penpalling when I was around 12 I think, when the internet wasn’t even around. I would exchange letters and small gifts with boys and girls from other countries and I remember feeling very excited every time a new letter arrived in the mail. In each letter, I could see a different perspective on life, I was fascinated by it. Then I went abroad a few times and not only did I experience some of these different perspectives, but I also ended up making friends who I stayed in touch with for several years afterwards. I wonder how many more people I would have been able to meet if the internet was around in my teen years and early twenties. Wow, that would have been great!

So, I was sitting here thinking about this and decided to write this post. And ask you: Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do? Why are you here? I’m really interested. So, if you’re reading this, please introduce yourself, either in the comments or send me an email if you care about being more detailed or would rather keep it more private. (mpatricia at gmail.com). I realize this could generate either zero replies or so many that I might have trouble writing back, anything can happen, but I think it’s worth a shot. Even if we have no interests in common whatsoever, I would still like to know who you are. Be creative, if you feel so inclined. Cite a quote that means something to you, share a point of view on any given subject, I don’t know, give me a little bit of your own perspective. Even just basic info will do, if you feel it will be nice to introduce yourself but don’t care to share further details. I’m sure there are plenty of cool interesting people reading this blog, so, I’d really like to know who you are. Go ahead, don’t be shy! Post a comment or send me an email, as you will. And who knows, I might even make some cool new friends.

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If these rumors are true, then more people will finally migrate to Yahoo Messenger. I think it’s great!!! I can’t wait!! Why people insist in using MSN Messenger is a mystery to me. I hate the damn thing. For many different reasons, some of which I mentioned in an interview I gave last week to one of the big newspapers in Brasil. Yes, that’s how much I prefer Yahoo Messenger, I am so well known for liking it that I even got interviewd about it.

But honestly, why do people use MSN Messenger? It’s too big and takes a lot of space on screen, it doesn’t allow different status(es?) to different contacts, doesn’t send offline messages or even when you’re under invisible mode, the contact list is cluttered, not even the smilies are half expressive as Yahoo’s – and I could go on and on with reasons for people not to use MSN Messenger, but still it seems like everyone and their brothers use it. And I can’t convince many people to try using Yahoo, so if the above is true and Skype and Yahoo merge into one, I will be a very happy gal.

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I can’t log off my GMail… Strange!! I click to logout and it goes into some sort of loop and never completes the logout process. If I close the window and try again, I’m still logged in. I use more than one account on GMail, so I have to swich between them from time to time. I guess the only way for me to log out right now is by clearing my cookies which, well, I didn’t want to but might have to!!

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Adam has just told me that GMail has rich formatting. Yay!!! This is one of the features that I’ve been hoping they’d implement. GMail keeps getting better and better. Not enough? Storage space has been increased to 2Gb.

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I got myself an invitation to Yahoo 360º. Thanks to Kent Brewster who sent it to me (thanks a lot, Kent!). I will extend this courtesy to others who might want an invitation too, so leave your name and email in the comments if you want one. Currently having fun playing with the new toy.

I currently have 85 82 81 invitations.

UPDATE: COMMENTS ARE CLOSED FOR THIS ENTRY AND I CAN’T SEND ANY MORE INVITES.

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I finally emailed my 2 entries to the WPThemes competition over at Alex King. I feel a bit frustrated that Sadish and I were unable to get other themes ready. We had, as I said in a previus post, 8 themes altogether, but we will still make them all available at wpthemes.info in the near future.

The themes I ended up sending were Fleur-de-Lys, which is the theme I currently use in this blog (which actually has 3 different color schemes, but I sent just one of them) and another one called Connections – and boy, I had such a hard time picking a name for this one! I showed this theme to many people and was surprised to see how many different interpratations each one came up with. Take a look at this screenshot and tell me what you think the top image means. Every single person who saw it gave me a different interpratation. How odd!!! This is why it was so hard to name it, because apparently it means different things to different people. So I decided on a more generic name that, itself, can be interpreted in a number of ways. But just out of curiosity, I would like to know what other people think it means, so please, please leave a comment with your input.

I’d also like to mention that:

1. There was a huge number of entries in this edition of the competition.This is definitely a wonderful contribution to the WP community.
2. There are many many good designs. I think it’s such a bliss to see how many talented people contributed with their work. It will be tough to pick a winner this time. Perhaps in the future, should there be other contests, it might help to pick winners in different categories, maybe by design style, I don’t know. Last time I checked there were 105 themes and that didn’t include the themes that would be sent today. I think this is huge!!!

Good luck to all of you who participated, but I have a feeling that the big winner here is the WordPress community.

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I’ve read at Simply Geeky about this game and now I’m completely hooked!!! Not for everyone, I guess – you must have at least a little bit of geeky blood running through your veins, think outside the box, be creative and good with puzzles. Some levels are easier than others but so far all I can say is: be ready for giving your brain cells a good workout, use Google and other programs other than your regular browser and if you’re the type of person to give up easily, don’t even bother (this requires some patience and persistence). I’m now in level 8 and have been playing for a couple of hours. I foresee a long night ahead. Very cool!!!

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Do you think Blogsome should include a link back to theme developers on the footer – and not in some other page of their site – of the WordPress themes they make available for free to their users, considering that they profit from showing compulsory Google ads in every blog?? I think they should… Share your opinion here.

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User Experience Resource Collection

Worth a check for anyone working in this industry.

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