The winners are …

Now its time to add that special bonus to Easter for some lucky readers. My Pay It Forward contest winners are:

First prize - 1,500 Entrecard credits plus plus …….drum roll ……. Site Hoppers.

Second prize …. 250 credits …… Sly.

Third prize ….250 credits, also ……. Kai.

Congratulations! I’ll be in contact with you about your prizes.

Now for the special bonus for the comment that appealed to me most. The winner is Jayne, for her comment on our improverished politicians.

Blogging yourself nuts!

Internet addiction is a “common” mental disorder that should be recognised by health officials. The American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial claiming that internet addiction met the criterion for a mental disorder and called on the American Psychiatric Association to officially list it as such.

According to the editorial, internet addiction consists of three particular subtypes: excessive gambling, sexual preoccupations and email or text messaging.

Phew!!! That seems to rule out blogging … unless of course you’re blogging about gambling, sex or email and text messaging (although I suppose you could say those latter ones and reading and posting on blogs are very similar).

Paying it Forward

I won 500 Entrecard credits on the Paying It Forward contest at Dipping into the Blogpond this last week. Thanks, Meg!

Now I have to be nice to someone else, as per the Paying It Forward tradition. Hmmmm, I pondered this for ages and came up with this.

What you have to do?

Simply leave a comment on this post.

You also need to be willing to participate in the Paying It Forward initiative and run your own Paying It Forward contest if you win (or you’ve already done one on your blog).

When do you have to do it?

I will award the prizes next Sunday, Easter Sunday. Think of them as another present from the Easter Bunny. Thus, comments need to be made by midnight AEST on 22 March.

What are the prizes?

First prize:

• 1,500 Entrecard credits; plus
• a free ad on my site, 125 x 125 size, right below the Entrecard in my sidebar - for one week.

But wait, there’s more ….a free set of steak knives, maybe, do I hear you ask? Not quite, but I’m going to pick up a nice little trinket on my trip to China next month, maybe some sort of fun USB toy, maybe something else, and it will be all yours if you’re the winner.

Consolation Prizes:

250 Entrecard credits each to 2nd and 3rd place.

Bonus Prize:

250 Entrecard credits for the wittiest or most interesting comment on my blog during the next week, and this is not limited to just this post. Any comment on any post is eligible. I will award this bonus prize based solely on my opinion of the interestingness or wittiness of the comments.

Speeding up your daily Entrecarding, and win something

I’ve recently been on a bit of a mission with Entrecard to see how high I can get my card in terms of price for advertising.  A few days ago I discovered Power Dropping which makes the task of dropping cards quickly much easier.  Essentially, you use a list of sites with fast loading Entrecards above the fold, together with a Firefox addon called “Perma Tabs“, to load up multiple tabs, click through their Entrecards one after another, and then load another batch from the list.  I find it very quick to scan through a couple of hundred sites a day and  drop my card on them.  I know just doing a drop and run is gaming Entrecard to maximise credits, but I am on a mission for now.  Even so, I do like to keep about 100 (you can drop 300 cards a day) to drop on blogs that have dropped on me, bought an ad off me, from my favourites, ones I might advertise on etc.

While on the subject of Entrecard, Tina has a competition going at her blog, and is giving away 2 prizes of 1,000 credits - actually drawn from a hat by one of her children.  Her competition ends February 29th.  Enter now by posting about her contest, its very easy, and you’ve got to be in it to win it, as they say.

Tina is one of the very active Aussie Bloggers, and I noticed on Power Dropping there are plenty of us on the list.

Entrecard - nice little game

I’ve mentioned that I’m using Entrecard to promote my blog before.  You’ll notice that in my sidebar just under the subscribe button I’ve put an extra widget linking to a neat little game Joe Tech is running.  It works just like a poker/slot machine and its a little bit of fun.  I’ve played twice and so far won over 100 credits.

And while on the subject of Entrecard, just after I posted the bit above, Andrew tagged me in the Chain Drop 8 above the fold meme for Entrecarders.  This is actually quite topical as I was thinking earlier on today when doing a run of Entrecard drops how much easier it is to do when the card is “above the fold”.  By “above the fold” I mean visible in the initial screenful of the page on my screen.  That makes it so much easier to find the Entrecard, and means I don’t have to go scrolling down the page, or worse still, having to search for the widget in among 50 other widgets in the sidebar - believe me, the Entrecard can be damn hard to find in some cases.  Yes, having it near the top does suit chain droppers better, and they may not bother reading your blog, but hey thats just a fact of life.  Just because you have it near the bottom of your page doesn’t make the “drop and run” people any more likely to read your content … just harder for them to achieve their mission of getting maximum drops as quickly as possible.

Now for me to tag 8 bloggers with their cards above the fold.  Here goes:

• By The Sea
• About Every Little Thing - StickFigureLis
• A Little Piece of Me - Claire (and Willy) … and if you go there today my card is there (woo!!!)
• Jamaipanese.Com
• Joe Tech - of course, I should mention his cool poker machine game again
• Gorilla Sushi - funny blog, and have advertised on my blog a few times, so I thought I’d throw a link your way
• Tina at Mummifiedx5 - a fellow Aussie blogger
• Andrew at Get a Real Blog - ha, ha, chucking the ball back to you …. now find another 8!!

Now I’m not a great meme person, I usually ignore them, so don’t feel bad if you don’t continue this meme.  I just liked this one, thought it was a bit of fun, and why not spread the link love.

Smiley Saturday

Lightening has a thing on her blog called Smiley Saturday.   It is something just to lighten up the day and talk about something that makes you smile.  So I had a funny story, which we’d been having fun with today, so I thought I’d put it under the Smiley Saturday banner.

My (18 year old) daughter’s bedroom window at the front of our house had some shrubs in front of it.  She liked the fact that it gave her privacy, but didn’t like that it was blocking most of the light getting into her room.  So she decided today was the day to do some gardening.

Of course, smutty humour lovers that we are, that led to a day of puns about her “trimming her bush”, and whether the garden shears were suitable for that task.

Yep, pubes, sex, toilets, farts and all those things are hilarious to my family.  (To be honest its me and two teenagers … my wife is usually above the level of crassness some of us engage in.)

Entrecard = Bloglotto

I’ve been using Entrecard lately to promote my blog.  Its quite an interesting way to discover new blogs.  Basically it works by bloggers creating an entrecard (a 125 x 125 graphic) which they can then put on their site, and use to advertise on other sites.  Everytime you visit an entrecard enabled site, you can drop your card, and likewise visitors to your site can drop theirs, earning credits in the process.  You can use these credits to buy advertising on other sites, which display your entrecard, hopefully attracting visitors to your site.

Some bloggers have been holding contests to attract traffic, and I won one today.  Thanks to Jamaipanese, from who I won 250 entrecard credits.

Excellent blogging resource

The Aussie Bloggers forum has only been going about a week and already has over 100 members.  It is well worth a look and joining in, if you’re interested in participating in a community of bloggers, and getting help/helping others out with your/their blogging.  Many thanks to those who have done all the hard work in setting up this excellent new forum - Meg lists them here.

There is also a blog to go with the new forum - Aussie Bloggers - it launches on 21 January, so keep an eye out for it.

Housekeeping

I’ve been fiddling around with this new blog, adding a header image, playing around with sidebars, widgets etc, and I’m quite happy with it now.  All ready to get back into regular blogging activity ….assuming work lets up a bit (I’ve been working like a dog this last week, finished after 1 am last night).

Also, cleaned out the garage today, roughly 20 years of accumulated junk being despatched to a big rubbish skip to be taken away on Monday.  We now have room in the garage …. to store some of the stuff thats accumulated in the house because we didn’t have room in the garage.

Finally, thanks to Snoskred, who’s hosting my blog and helped me with the Wordpress setup.  I’m beginning to get the hang  of Wordpress, having been exclusively a Blogger user up to now.

Time for a change

I’ve decided its time to make a change, so I’m now in the process of moving my blog from Blogger to Wordpress on my own domain.

I’ll have a new address in a few days time, but the witty, rivetting, fascinating, inspiring, insightful, etc comment (ok, its all really a load of self-indulgent crap) will still be available for all to read.