Jaxon’s Review

This blog was down for about two hours just now, reporting 505 internal server error when I tried to access it. My other blogs had also gone down with it, so imagine my desperation in seeing all my blogs became inaccessible.

So I waited, thinking perhaps the problem would heal all by itself and that maybe there was a server maintenance going on at my webhost’s end.

But after two hours, I became restless. So I contacted Bluehost, the host provider, through its real-time chat feature. Below is the exchange, with some editing. JS is me, Alex is the guy who attended by queries. The time is 9.16 am (US time).

Alex [9:16:42 AM]: Welcome to our real-time support chat. How can I help you today?

JS [9:16:42 AM]: Hi, my site www.jaxons.org has been down quite sometime now, reporting 505 internal server error. Any idea what happened? Thanks.

Alex [9:17:03 AM]: let me investigate one moment please

JS [9:17:20 AM]: ok

Alex [9:19:59 AM]: looks like the 500 error is caused by the .htaccess file. [alert] [client 74.6.18.XXX] .htaccess: Invalid command ’sql/mysql.sock”, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration [Pause] [9:20:50 AM]: I am assuming that is your IP?

JS [9:21:36 AM]: I’m not really sure and no idea how to fix this

Alex [9:23:23 AM]: let me see if I can investigate a few things for you.

JS [9:24:58 AM]: [I checked my IP] Ok, I’ve looked up my IP. And that is not mine. Mine starts with 60.54…

Alex [9:27:12 AM]: yeah I see it in the log now. And I am investigating the .htaccess thing. One moment please. [Pause... some two minutes later he came back] [9:30:59 AM]: site should be working fine now.

JS [9:31:34 AM]: [Checked my site and it's true it was back online. I shot a reply] Phew! Thanks Alex.

Alex [9:32:39 AM]: anytime

One of the blog I frequented is Rajawang.com run by a fellow Sabahan and although I have not left any comments there, my presence is recorded by the MyBlogLog widget on his blog. He also occasionally visits my other blog.

Rajawang.com is run by a guy whose sites monetised well that he can afford to laugh all the way to the Western Union to claim his Adsense income. Of course he’d have to stop laughing once inside.

That is, until recently when he decided to ditch Adsense to experiment with new ads, and still earning good money.

Raja is the Malay word for “king” and wang is “money”. During my recent visit, I came to know, through his blog, that someone has set up another blog with the name Rajawang on the domain name. This time, its Rajawang.net.

Both blogs are about make money blogging and since I’m also interested in the topic, I might as well jump into the bandwagon and buy Rajawang.org. No?

But I don’t think I can handle one more blog. I’m already pumping my blogging reservoir dry with several blogs at the moment.

Best of luck to the two rajas.

I took my last three tablets for my cough and fever today. Although I feel I have fully recovered from whatever that hit me since the past one week, I took the medicine anyway… for good measure.

It feels good returning to my former healthy self. I feel refreshed and fully recharged, like a newly-serviced 4WD truck — with new engine oil, new air filter, all the rust checked and removed, the brakes in tip top condition and the body washed, shined and waxed. And polished.

All fired up

And most important of all is that I can feel the fire re-igniting in the belly and there is a strong urge to resume what I love doing, and that is going online and blogging.

I feel like a man addicted to tobacco, who was being deprived of the nicotine for a week, and was finally given all his favourite brand of cigarettes to smoke at will. I know its a bad comparison, but that is how I feel right now. I’ve been a smoker and I know how it was like to be deprived of the cancer stick.

I no longer smoke though. I’ve quit for already two years after chain-smoking for 20 years. Not a bad feat huh? Quitting smoking is something. Quitting at the very height of addiction is another.

Blogging is therapy

Anyway, back to blogging. You know what? During the time I was bedridden, I still think about blogging, about what I could have done all the while, and how I should approach my blogging activities from now on.

Things are certainly looking up at the moment. Apart from my new found vigour, there are also some tangible results from my blogging activities that helps fire the enthusiasm.

Some blogging update

Text link sold. First, I received an e-mail that someone has bought a text link from one of my blogs today. Although it’s not much in terms of the price, it’s a guaranteed payment months after months so long as the link is not removed from my blog.

It’s what you call a passive income. You sell one text link and that’s it. You’d get paid monthly for forever so long as you don’t remove the link from your blog or so long as the buyer wants the link to remain on your blog.

My Chitika|Premium is seems to be also looking up. It has been giving me a small amount of money every other day and this convinces me I must have done something right with it. The only thing to do now is to replicate what I’ve been doing to make the trickle larger.

And then I’ve also launched a new blog. Well, it’s not really new. I’ve bought the domain name in May this year and soft-launched the blog in June. But that was it — a soft launch, and nothing had happened ever since.

Now, I’ve refurbished the blog, done the desigining, decided on the niche and it is now ready for a very hard launch.

Google Ads. Well, as you know Adsense is Adsense. It performs quite very so-so across all of my blogs. However, I’ve just reached the magic number where I can now claim my payment from Google.

However, I’ve chosen not to claim the money for the time being because I want to let it grow to a certain amount before claiming them. Claiming the Google Adsense money would be easy, you just need to register with the Western Union to do so.

Paid reviews. As I mentioned in many of my previous posts, I’ve stopped doing paid reviews. There are several good opportunities out there but I chose not to take them because I’m not comfortable with the requirement to embed the “in-post” disclosure.

So, that’s it folks. For now. More active blogging soon.

Jaxon S,
Reformed Blogger

Seventeen days to be exact without a blog post on Jaxon’s Review. The truth is I was down with a nasty fever.

I didn’t know what had hit me, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t dengue or that funny, tongue-twisting viral infection called the Chikunguya.

The tablets above are what the doctor had prescribed for my severe cough. In fact, I had asked for the strongest antibiotic he had in his clinic for I suspected that some mean worms were holing inside my lungs, but he told me I didn’t need the antibiotics. All I needed was medicine to bring the cough down.

Am still recuperating and only manage to summon my strength to resume blogging today, with my head still throbbing and my joints aching.

Which got me into thinking. Had I been a problogger — one who relies on blogging and blogging alone as a source of income — what potential loss of income I could have suffered during the 17 days of no blogging?

The issue still left me wondering. In the meantime, I’ve also found other use for the medicine. As a subject for my photography hobby.

One year, I think, is enough. There’s no point of doing the same thing over and over again, and getting nowhere in the process.

I guess, it’s time to rethink about blogging direction for Jaxon’s Review, like giving it a specific niche and blog around it day in and day out.

A niche is what this blog severely lacks. All the while, it has been going this way and that way, exploring everything within its reach, but as it is, it has yet to find its true path.

I do have some ideas about the niche but this will require a drastic action, like deleting all previous posts — over 200 of them — and start anew with the niche subject I have in mind. But do I have the courage to do so?

Would you be willing to sacrifice a year’s worth of blog posts just to change the direction of a blog?

I was rather shocked recently when I run the virus scanner on my laptop to find that one of several threats discovered was from a Wordpress theme folder I recently downloaded.

I won’t name the template, suffice to say it not all templates out there are safe. It’s better to scan them before uploading to your server because you don’t to upload some sinister scripts on your server.

I was sitting alone in office in the early of July last year — I was still working in Singapore then — when I decided that that was it. I was going to get me a blog host and a domain name.

After hours of window-shopping for a suitable webhost, I finally chose Bluehost.

I took out my wallet, yanked the MasterCard out and entered the card number on the keyboard and paid a year’s worth of hosting and registered the domain name jaxons.org.

The jaxons.org domain name comes free with the hosting package of US$6.95 per month (for a two-year package) or US$7.95 per month for a one-year package. I had wanted to register for jaxons.com but that domain name had already been taken.

On July 12, this blog reached its first year during which I’ve posted exactly 200 posts — not a good achievement but I intend to do better in the coming year.

So, happy first anniversary to Jaxon’s Review.

I know a traffic puller story when I see one and the latest sodomy accusation against Anwar Ibrahim is one such story.

It’s about a police report lodged against Anwar by a 23-year-old aid, claiming that the politician had sodomised him on Thursday, June 26.

Anwar’s news hit the blogs after midnight

I came to know of the story well before midnight last night. Had I blogged about it, I would have been among the first tell the story in the form of a blog entry.

Heck, I could have been the first to blog about it in the whole wide world as other bloggers, I noticed, only started to post entries about the issue after midnight.

This blog would have benefited in the form of a spike in the number of visitors, notwithstanding that most Malaysians were asleep during the hours when the story unfolded.

Information everywhere but not a post to blog

I was at home, sitting in front of the computer at around 11pm when I came to know about the story. I had all the information I needed to write a blog entry — enough to tell that a police report had been lodged against Anwar.

Had I blogged about it and consistently updated the blog entry right till the wee hours, I could be assured of hundreds of visitors to Jaxon’s Review in a matter of hours.

It’s all in the intention

But I chose not to blog about it and in a sense, failed in my task as a blogger.

Why? It was because I had problems with my intention in doing so — that is, to take advantage of the situation just to pull traffic to this blog, and not so much about wanting to inform others. I guess it’s a problem of conscience. Too much of it.

Timid blogger

In a way you can call me a timid blogger — one who had difficulties getting past his conscience; who could not bring himself to blog about other people’s embarrassing situation.

Strangely, it had happened to me before — in the case of the sex video scandal involving a former health minister.

I had the information more than a day before the minister himself confessed that, “Yes, I’m the man in the video.”

Yet, I had chosen not to post a blog entry about it. My conscience failed me.

Blog world is no country for timid bloggers

Looking back and on hindsight, I should have gone on and blog about Anwar last night for I have now come to realise that the world of blogs — I hate the term blogosphere — is no country for timid bloggers. It’s a cruel world out there, offline or online.

So from now on, if I ever find myself in a similar situation again, I will just let my conscience go down the drain.

Links are important to a blog. The more the links, the higher the blog’s authority on Technorati. Blogger Piebuko posted this question over at Blog Catalog, So “what makes you link a blog?”

There, I’ve just given the reason for linking a blog.

A 24-year-old Singaporean blogger who wrote the f-word in reference to a race, was arrested for posting what the police said might “wound the racial feelings of another”.

According to a statement from the Singapore police:

On 20 May 08 at about 9.45 pm, Police arrested a 24-year-old Chinese man at his residence at Paya Lebar Way for posting contents in his blog which may wound the racial feelings of another person. A computer, believed to be used to post the suspect’s blog, was seized for investigations, which are ongoing. The case came to the attention of the Police on 19 May 08 when Police received two reports complaining of the alleged posts by the suspect.

Under Sec 298 of the Penal Code, Chapter 224, whoever, with deliberate intention of wounding the religious or racial feelings of any person, causes any matter however represented to be seen or heard by that person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 3 years, or with fine, or with both.

Deputy Commander of Central Police Div HQ, Superintendent Lee Ping Yue (Ms), stressed that Police take a serious view of such irresponsible blog postings in a multi-racial society like Singapore and will expend all efforts in tracking the perpetrators. [Source]

This is what he has written (the asteriks are mine): Read the rest of this entry »