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So, why am I blogging you are asking?

I still remember the old days when I started to write blog. Like a child who found a new toy, I showed it off to all of the people. Not just showed off, but also tempted my friends to start their own blog. And I still remembered it clearly as day, one of my pals said these things. He said that what are blog used for? It’s just a narcissistic writing by some dudes, telling about their lives and bla bla bla. But you know that I don’t buy it, because you’re reading mine, right? And I don’t think I am a narcissist (0kay, maybe a little).

I’ll give you my story. It started some years ago. I was thinking it was cool to have a place where I can write some and access it from everywhere. Yes, I’m talking about writing on the clouds. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about what should I wrote. I just wanna write, that’s all. Continue reading

Howdy,

Couple weeks ago, I used pre-made template. I have to admit that the design is good. But there are some parts of it that bother me. So I decided to write a new design.

For this new design, I didn’t give a name. It’s a custom design anyway. I’m a man who believes in simplicity, so I’d like to write design as simple as possible. I also powered up the footer section. When I was blogwalking, I found some pretty blog doing the same. I like the concept and I adopted it in my footer. Maybe you like it better than the previous one? Well, it’s up to you to decide.

With this new design, I also created a new logo for sidudun. Just need some refreshments, no other reason. All of the credits for the icons and font creators is in the footer.

So, do you like it? Comments and suggestions are welcome..

Almost one year ago, I take a risky experiment. I tried to self-hosted my own Wordpress blog and bought myself a domain name. As you can see right now, I used second level domain provided by my own country, that is web.id. With this domain, I played around with setting own blog into one of free hosting provider. Ever since that time, some of my friends asking me about this hosting and domain. How to get the domain, how to buy a hosting, and all of other questions. And this article was dedicated to them and to you who wanna host your own blog.

This article is about some considerations we need to take before deciding what kind of hosting and domain do you need.

This article is NOT about detailed instructions in configuring and setting blog on our own hosting and domain. I wrote about these at another site in Bahasa Indonesia. You can read about that there (send me a comment if you want me to translate it into English).

So, you wanna host your own blog? Continue reading

Howdy.

One day, when I surfed the web, I found an interesting site. This site has function like a normal blog, but the post written there was posted from various blog sources. Later, I knew that this blog is called aggregator. How this blog aggregator works? It works by collecting RSS Feeds from various blogs registered. The feeds then posted as normal posts in the aggregator. One of the differences is the article title linked to the “real” blog source.

Ilkomerz 41 Blog Aggregator

When I knew that some of my friends also have their own blogs, I started to thinking about building this aggregator. The site that I found earlier is powered by Planet, a Phyton-based feed reader. I tried it, and ended up with failure. I just couldn’t configure and tested it properly. I didn’t have Internet connection and didn’t familiar with Phyton at that time. So, I tried to find alternative. I found WP-o-Matic plugins for Wordpress. So I installed, asked my friends permission to grab their feeds, and hosted it. I called it Ilkomerz 41 Blog Aggregator.

Another problem arose. This plugin will automatically read and parse feeds from its registered blogs every amount of time. To make this fetching run automatically, it uses cron job. The WP-o-Matic has two options of cron job. The first one is UNIX cron job run by web hosting. Free hosting, like the one I use, doesn’t give cron job feature. So I go to the next option, web cron. It will automatically calling fetching script on the hosting.

I use the web cron option for some months until suddenly the aggregator was down. Well, it worked again when I send a support ticket to the hosting provider. I know that maybe it’s not because of the web cron spending too much resource. I suspected that because of the multi-user nature of the aggregator, the blog automatically sending email to the blog writer. The hosting may called it spam. So I killed the auto-email feature. I also shut down WP-o-Matic and switched it to manual fetching. I know that maybe it’s not because of the WP-o-Matic’s web cron, but I don’t wanna take the risk losing this blog for the second time.

Manual fetching was a pain. I must open my Google Reader, find if my friends have new post, and then login to the aggregator, fetching the post, and the post will showed up. I was thinking, there must be a better way to do this. Accidently, I found out that there are some webs that provide free cron job. One of them is SetCronJob. This site can calls the cron script url of the aggregator. So, I tried it yesterday. I registered the aggregator to the site. And now, my aggregator works well automatically. I don’t know what will come in the future, but I have a high hope for SetCronJob.

Do you have another opinions or experience? Feel free to share it.

Good day,

I’ve been in blogosphere since 2007. From my first time there, sometimes I found a lot of blogs saying that blogger mustn’t copy paste carelesly another article to their blog. They were saying that blog content is a creation that must be respected. It means you couldn’t just duplicated blog content without authorization, reference, or at least a trackback.

Trackback

Wordpress has its own trackback system. If a blog content leave a reference to another blog (usually as a link), the referenced blog will be notified. The notification itself usually came as a comment on the referenced post.

I didn’t believe that someone could do something like that. Just duplicating blog content without reference or a trackback isn’t ethical to me. I wasn’t believe until couple days ago. Someone just copy-pasted my writing. For your information, I also write at another blog. In that blog, I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Wordpress blog. I divided the tutorial into several posts. Each post referenced (or link) to the previous and the next step of the tutorial. So every post got a trackback from another part of the tutorial.

My posting there got a trackback from another blog. It used to be the usual trackback. But when I checked it out, I found out that the other blog has my post written on it. Just exactly as what I wrote them. The trackback was sent from the link that I created to link my tutorial. So if I didn’t divide the tutorial and create referenced to the part, I’ll never know that someone copy-pasted my post. This other blog didn’t bother giving a reference to my post (not to mention my own trackback).

I was furious. But I controlled my emotion and write a comment to that blog. I wrote as polite as possible, telling him to give a reference to my post. The comment saved as moderated. I couldn’t expect more, and I left it.

The next day, an email came to my inbox. It’s from the copy-pasted guy! He said (I translated and edited some part of it):

I’m really sorry for the repost.
I’ll delete the post right away. I just doing your tutorial, thanks for the article.

From the tone,  I guess he freaked out. So I calmed him and explained that I just need him to give a proper reference to my post. That’s it. I think that was the ethical way. And I didn’t hear from him anymore. The post also disappeared from his blog. I dunno if he is still blogging or not. If he’s not, maybe it’s my mistake too. Somehow, I’m feeling sorry for him. But at least, I got my own lesson.

Do you have any experience like this?