Basically, MyBlogLog is a very useful tool for building relationships online. It gets authors to know their readers more and vice versa. It benefits everyone both ways. Learn more about others’ interests, about their community and thus build networks. The benefits are enormous. Below are the 8 solid reasons why MyBlogLog is brilliant for authors and readers to operate at the same level.

To show appreciation to visitors

Daily, I write around 4 posts in 3 blogs. A health blog, a motivational blog and a technology blog. Each of them are in a category of their own and have different sets of users. With MyBlogLog, I can appreciate my readers, new and returning, by showcasing their presence. This allows each reader a chance of being clicked into and checked out by other visitors. I find this very important and have located the MyBlogLog display as the second widget at the top. As the saying goes, ‘encouraged people achieve the best, dominated people achieve second best, neglected people achieve the least’.

To build a solid community



MyBlogLog empowers authors and readers to run at the same level. Everyone who reads my site can learn about and engage with one another, and in the process take the conversation to a whole new level. Readers can become friends with other people who read my favorite blogs. Readers will see what else they’re reading. If you wanna know someone deeper, you can check out their MySpace and Friendster profiles or even view their Flickr photostreams.

To get writing ideas when hitting writer’s block

There are times when I run out of ideas to write. Everyone experiences writer’s block once in a while. However, there are a million things to write about out there. The solution lies in knowing where to go. That is where my community of MyBlogLog comes in. By checking out other readers’ choice of blogs helps to generate ideas. You know, like for example, I came across 2 blogs writing about 10 or 9 reasons to use MyBlogLog and felt something missing. I didn’t feel ‘the kick’ reading it. So thanks to my readers, I have now filled in the blanks and completed the missing points by producing this brilliant post. =)

To motivate yourself

Every author has low days. Days where you hit rock bottom in terms of spirit and strength. I feel demoted and low when I get less than usual in terms of Adsense. Or when there had not been any prominent reviewing opportunities for the day. However, the picture of the people displayed in MyBlogLog tells me that I have people who read my site. A community waiting for the next interesting post from me. And that itself is motivating. Everytime I visit my own blog, I feel both excited and responsible for myself to get back on track.

To keep track of stats



I have 3 tracking codes embedded in rangit.com. Google Analytics, OneStat and MyBlogLog. Google Analytics is the best. However, Google Analytics is a bit more complicated than the rest with all the features and reports. Onestat is simple and easy to use. However the reports are not detailed enough for me to analyze and improve. MyBlogLog on the other hand is cool! The lock on displaying yesterday’s data in the free edition is good! It keeps users from being distracted to keep on checking the results. MyBlogLog has 3 of the most useful data displayed in the dashboard. I get to see the full URL of :

• Where readers came from
• What readers viewed
• What readers clicked

To show that you are of the same wave with the author

As a reader of other blogs, I leave a footprint behind when I visit. The footprint in MyBlogLog will show my personality when authors view me out. MyBlogLog will display my blogs and communities for the world to see, so as a reader I get to show my favourites and authors of the community will get a chance to know me. It allows forming of ideas and opinions on me. Imagine a geek meeting a geek. Or a joker meeting another joker. It connects people. Isn’t it cool?

To attract readers with your avatar picture



Yeah. Attract clicks. Put up an interesting picture. It can be anything. I’ve a reader who has the Chinese God of Wealth as his avatar! It would attract a whole load of God of Wealth devotees. Or if you think you are a cool dude or a hot chick, put up your best picture. This will help strengthen your community and increase readership. As the saying goes, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’.

To increase your chances of knowing people who can promote you

Wouldn’t you be surprised if someday someone BIG visited your blog? Like for example, if you see John Chow’s avatar in your MyBlogLog community wouldn’t you get excited? A BIG person’s presence does make a load of difference. It protrudes a sense quality which helps a lot in convincing readers to stick around. If you wrote something that catches the eye of the BIG visitor, who knows, you might get mentioned about something of high value that you wrote. Then, you’ll have to thank me in the comments. =P

MyBlogLog Community
Begin to build bridges

When I first started work in my first company, I was assigned to redesign the entire web portal of the business presentation site. It was a bit of a challenge for me as I had no prior knowledge on using the tools given to me. I only learned about MySQL and PHP during my uni days, not Oracle. However, I had no choice but to get the job done.

Part of what I learned was on where to get free, open, copyleft images. Surely I wouldn’t want to land any party in any legal tangle. I found many, many useful image repositories during the 6 months on the project and it has widen my knowledge. Here are 9 of the most reliable sites to get re-usable, high quality, free images for your website, blog, adverts, banners, etc.

PicSearch



One of the most accurate and fresh image search on the web that indexes over 1,700,000,000 pictures! Picsearch connects its users to the vast visual resources of the internet by using its own technology to crawl the web and create a searchable index of images. When a user sends a query to Picsearch the returned result is received as a set of thumbnail images that are sorted to ensure that they are as highly relevant as possible. When the user clicks on a thumbnail they are linked to the original web site where that image is located.

Parents, relax, because Picsearch is family friendly so children are able to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out. The site is also very user friendly as it’s designed to be simple, fast and accurate. Good stuff!

Woophy



Woophy stands for World Of Photography. The website is founded by a Dutch collective of photo aficionados and internet designers who believed that navigation on internet can be more visual, logical and associative.

With the help of (amateur) photographers across the world their objective is to ultimately cover every inch of our world map with images that represent the world’s beauty and peculiarity from all different cultural perspectives. You can search by city, country, category keywords or member to find photos. The categories are animals, culture, landmarks & buildings, objects and people. You can also limit the search results by date and sort by number of views. Thumbs up!

Free Stock Photos



Download images and use it for personal or commercial design projects as many as you want for FREE! There are some restrictions in using photos from the site such as retaining the domain name when you use the photo for your website or blog.

YotoPhoto



Originally an experiment to facilitate easier image searching of the Wikipedia, Yotophoto eventually expanded to index over 250, 000 free images. Yotophoto is a search engine for free-to-use stock photographs and images. These are images that are either in the Public Domain or released under generous Creative Commons, GNU FDL or similar licenses. Yotophoto’s goal is to help people locate, remix, republish open and copyleft images.

Stock Xchng



Stock.XCHNG was launched in February 2001, as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. In about two years the site evolved into a massive community indexing over 1.000.000 registered users and more than 250.000 photos online!

The site encourages users to share photos with fellow designers! The aim is to keep SXC as a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to the public free of charge.

MSN Search Images



MSN, one of the top 5 search engines. The returned results are almost as good as Google’s or Yahoo’s. Just click the image to get its details like the source and the image availabilty. There is a written term saying that ‘MSN Search is not affiliated with the contents or authors of the page displayed below. We are not responsible for its content. The image may be subject to copyright laws.’ So check the image’s page to find out if it’s copyrighted or not before using it.

Yahoo! Images



It’s good! No doubt about it! However, images appearing in the results may or may not be copyrighted. What you can do is, if you find a picture that you want to use, review the site and contact the owners to find out about using it. Yahoo! Image also lists popular image searches by web surfers so you can check out the top search by everyone.

Google Images



Relax, and be happy for this is the mother of all image searches. You will MOST likely find the image you are looking for, here. There’s a lot that you can do besides keying in the keyword and press ’search’. You can also limit images to a specific size, a specific format or even colors! Once you find a picture, check the site or contact the site’s owner to find out about using it.

Again, the important thing to understand in using this search is that the images come from all over the Web and there’s no guarantee they’re free. What I usually do is just send a mail and offer a backlink as ‘appreciation’ for using the images. I have had 100% approval rate using this method as every website appreciates backlinks that boosts their search engine rankings. Everybody is happy that way. =)

Flickr



Flickr’s 2 main goals:

• To help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
• To enable new ways of organizing photos.

Flickr has tons of features, very easy to use and a community of world contributors. This is definitely the BEST and COOLEST online photo repository in the world. I could spend an hour doing nothing but checking out the ‘last 7 days‘ section. What’s even cooler? Flickr lets you search for only Creative Commons-licensed images in the advanced search tool to save users the trouble of having to sift through thousands of images to find the ones free for re-use. Brilliant work by the Flickr team!

Other Image Repositories
List of small to large directories

Good webmasters will understand the importance of load time. A visitors to a website appreciates it when pages load fast. The significance in page load time is enjoyed by non-broadband users. Here’s a tip I wanna share with owners of website that has control over the ‘.htaccess’ file. These few lines of code will save your bandwidth and improve your load time to a maximum of 66%. I improved the load time of ‘rangit.com’ by 47%. Amazing stuff. Note that the server needs to be able to support ‘mod_expires‘.

Basically, the numbers that you see above are seconds.. Below is a simple conversion..

• 5259487 sec = 61 days
• 2419200 sec = 28 days
• 259200 sec = 3 days

Before

After

47% !

Here’s a related article about 13 tweaks you can do to your firefox 2.0 to further improve your surf experience.

John’s PHP Digest
Save bandwidth & loading time