Chat about your favourite American idols

Do you follow American Idol show on Fox? Well if you do, I suggest you go over to idolme.com. They call it "Adult & teen chat rooms - American Idol and music" but technically it's a message board. As the name suggest, most of the topics are on American Idol. However, there are separate rooms for Australian and Canadian Idol as well. Also under "Idol me chat", there are separate rooms for Music, Television, Sports, Funny Stuff, Politics & Religion, as well as 'Off Topic Chat'.

I nearly fell of my chair while reading this post titled "Why American's Should Never Be Alloed To Travel" under Funny stuff (yeah 'Alloed' is a spelling mistake). I give you one sample:

A businessman called and had a question about the documents he needed in order to fly to China. After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded him he needed a visa. "Oh no I don't, I've been to China many times and never had to have one of those." I double checked and sure enough, his stay required a visa. When I told him this he said, "Look, I've been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express."

The discussion group seems to be very popular with 4,630 threads, 81,163 posts and 12,371 members, when I last checked. I didn't need to register to read the threads, many of which are hilarious. However, you need to sign up first in order to post any reply.

At first I didn't pay much attention to it, but later on I found out that the short biographies of various music artists on the right hand sidebar were quite informative - a brief biography, lists of songs and usually a YouTube video featuring the artist as well. The site is also linked to their blog called "Idol Based Informational Nonsense". Several hilarious posts on the blog.

Before posting on the blog, I recommend that all teenagers should read the "Be Safe Online" thread.

More free blogger templates

One of the classic Blogger templates was the K2 Theme created by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis, Zeo, Steve Lam and Ben Sherratt.

Adam, a blogger who's studying in Australia has come up with several templates inspired by the original. These include several 3 column templates including some which are adsense ready. All the templates can be downloaded from his blog called 'K2 Modify | A New Variation on a Classic Theme'.

Free Blogger templates

if you are a Blogger user, you are probably using a generic template provided by them. That means that your blog looks like thousands of other blogspot blogs on the web.

if you want to stand out from the rest, it would be a good idea to select a unique template. If you are good at XML and graphics, go ahead and design you own. If not pay someone to design it for you. You can also choose from among the various blogger templates available for free on the net.

Blogcrowds is one of the best sources for free Blogger templates. They are all free for you to download and tweak. You can also see a demo of each template before you adopt them.

PR 3 in 4 months

I have had this blog for quite sometime but the Freebies blog only came into being in January this year. Before that, all I had was one single post that I updated regularly.

Was really happy last week when I found out that my blog's Google Page Rank has moved up to 3 from 0. Exchanging links with other blogs definitely helped.

Thanks to all my visitors, especially those who linked back to my blog. Check back regularly to read about more great freebies and bargains.

Related post: What is your PR

A man reformed

Reformed Adult Webmaster Reveals Cutting-Edge Marketing Secrets. I was intrigued when I heard about Woody Maxim (not sure whether that's his real name). Anybody who reforms himself is admirable and Woody now gives marketing advice for FREE on his blog rather than porn.

His blog only started in March this year but already has an Alexa ranking of 64,975 when I last checked. There are a number of intereting and useful articles you might want to check out.

Exchanging links

This blog has seen a sudden rise in visitors over the past few weeks but the PR is still (sadly) 0. I am hoping to change that and I need your help in order to do that.

If you like my blog, please add me to your blogroll. I will definitely return the favour and maybe even do a review post about your blog on my PR4 ah ok lah blog.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours. he he he

Blog of the day

Yeah!

I have been selected as Blog of the day on Fuelmyblog.

It's the first time any of my blogs has ever been selected as the "Blog of the day". It feels great.

Thanks guys.

Too many Internet gurus

"I think that it is simply unethical to claim to make millions using a system, when in reality you are making millions selling the system!"
That is an excerpt from a post on The Freedom Net blog

It was an eye opener. The author likens many of the so-called Internet gurus to Amway's Diamond distributors. Feeding of the greed of people to become successful like them.

There are now a mushrooming of Internet gurus all over the web claiming to help others make money. I did learn a lot from some websites but realise that the majority of such sites are just copying what the experts say or just posting news.

Recently a so called SEO expert e-mailed me, offering his services to help me improve my blog's PR. When I checked their website rank, I found it to be lower than mine (ah ok lah blog).



Read the post I’ve Sworn Off All “Gurus”.

Hosting with Blogger

The domain name of this blog is www.freebies.mutum.org but I am still hosting this blog for free with Blogger.

For your information, Blogger now allows your to have a custom domain name for your blog (without the blogspot.com at the back) but still host all your content with them. You will thus be able to use all of Blogger's great features and save on hosting at the same time.

Had registered the domain name mutum.org quite sometime back but haven't done anything with it. Now I am using the subdomain freebies.mutum.org for my blog, which previously had the url tidakapa.blogspot.com.

For more information, go here.

I love Blogger.

Official Launch

Today I am going to officially launch Tidak Apa - Freebies as my new blog.

Though I started this blog way back, I had only one single post, where I listed down all my favourite links. These were updated from time to time but the blog was largely neglected.

This new blog will focus on freebies on the net, especially open source software. However, this blog will also cover freeware, useful widgits and other free stuff on the net.

e-mail me at ahoklah@gmail.com if you find something useful and I will put up a link to you too.