Philippine Blog Awards 2009 and PLDT+Nuffnang Watchpad Launch

Its been a very busy month for me - we're doing some major stuff with my bosses' websites so I had to crunch my time and lay-off blogging for a bit. And lately, I've been inspired to blog again because of the recent blogging events me & my wife just attended.

10 Plugins to Make Wordpress a Great CMS

I've been using the blogging platform, Wordpress, as a CMS for the company I'm working with right now because I find that Wordpress is THE best CMS out there. It is very easy to install, simple yet powerful out of the box, extensible with the use of plugins, a gazillion resources online to do anything with the platform, and it takes me less time developing an effective theme and integrating it with the e-commerce software, Prestashop.

I stumbled into Dave's post about 10 plugins you can install on Wordpress to make it a better CMS. Here is the list from his entry:

My Blog Is Now Penalized By Google

It was really a big mistake when I migrated all my posts from my Mikeyhacky Blogspot blog here to my self-hosted WP blog. I wasn't aware that Google would spank me with the duplicated content from my old blog to this new one. Now I did some redirection from Blogger to Wordpress from the instructions here. But my problem is that I am now penalized by the Big G. Some of my pages are not indexed, I don't have a pagerank... How do I lift that penalty? I don't know. Hopefully in a few months my blog can be re-indexed.

If you know something that I can do to solve this problem, PLEASE please let me know. :)

Goldilocks & Nuffnang Contest Awards Night

Me and Ianne went yesterday to our second bloggers event for the awarding of winners for the "You're the 1, Goldilocks" blog contest with Nuffnang although we were about an hour late. We had an entry for the contest and we actually had high hopes for our entry, but it seems the judges had different winning "preferences". But there's no point being upset, we just enjoyed the night. Dingdong Dantes was present in the event.

It was a fun night, with lots of food and of course, cakes for everyone. Juddha Paolo was also there to host the awarding. The grand winner of the ASUS laptop is Ms. Noemi Dado. Congratulations, madam!

All in all, I think it was a great night. We saw a lot of fellow bloggers (and we ate a lot of food, haha!) Congratulations to all the winners and hopefully another Nuffnang contest to join and another blogger event to attend! More photos of the event after the jump.

My Goals For MikeWagan.Net

They say you have to have a target or goal before you can succeed. I just started this blog and I am still learning things about SEO and blogging and I have also seen the success of other bloggers in this field. With that, I want to set for myself some goals that I want to achieve on this site. I know it will be a rough terrain to conquer, but motivation is the key to success. And a person can be motivated if he/she will set goals to himself. So here I list down the things I want to accomplish with my blog.

My short-term goals:

1. Earn my first $100 from Google Adsense.


2. Earn $500 in one month (with Adsense and other money generators).


3. Get my first 100 subscribers.


4. Make 100 blog entries.


5. Achieve at least 300 visitors per day.


6. Other short-term goals I might think of in the future.

My long-term goals:

1. Constantly pay our utility bills with the money I earn from blogging.


2. Buy something big (car, house?) with my online earnings.


3. Get my own private server.


4. Earn $1000 monthly or more from blogging.


5. Keep on earning online until I die (hehe).

I'm not an expert with SEO or blogging, but I hope to accomplish these goals in the future. What do you guys think? Any tips from the 'masters'?

MikeWagan.net is Alive!

May 01, 2009 is the date when this site got live. Labor Day in the Philippines. I got the hosting FREE for two years from the promo of DreamHost for the Geocities refugees (thanks to my lovely wife for informing me about the promo). Good thing I had my CMSC2 (introductory course for the Internet) project uploaded on Geocities back in 2005, and I was one of the lucky 1000 who got the free hosting. I was blogging on Blogger.com for quite a while and I was aiming at gaining some amount of SEO juice from it, but time passed and I gave up because I needed Wordpress to succeed. But at that time I lacked the resources to pursue 'money blogging', but this day changed all that.

I'd still be playing around with this fresh install of Wordpress and do some tweaks to make this site how I want it to be.

Goodluck to us in blogging! Aude et spera!