GIMP, just enough for me to have picture editing while blogging!

It seems to be lacking of some ideas what to write about today. Anyway, this blog post is all about is always the question that my friends and colleagues always ask, “what I use for picture/image editing since I’m on Linux platform?”. It’s GIMP. I’m no good at all at any graphic editing work. But, I’ll always need to include some pictures on my blog, as I always feel that the blog post must be associated with some pictures then only ut looks nice. So, GIMP is the one that I always use for resizing pictures and then upload to wordpress here.

Especially, when writing on this blog, I always need to capture the screenshot, as this blog contains entries about software, web app, Linux stuff that always involve capturing screen shots and also resizing these captured screenshots into smaller images in order to go nicely on blog posts. So, GIMP is the tool I use for doing all that. I ain’t no expert of graphical editing. What I know only is to open up a picture, lets say a captured screen, and then using GIMP’s image scaling function to scale down the image. For example, a captured screen of 1024×768 then I’ll always scale it down to have only the width of 450.

I hope to spend more time to explore more on GIMP. I’m kinda no graphical design background although I’m pretty familiar with web app development such as those PHP, JSP. But when coming to using GIMP or exploring other similar image processing tool, such as Photoshop, I seem to go impatient of doing that. Anyway, GIMP has been the tool that main tool for image editing since I was on Windows platform. Due to mainly it’s open source, no need to bear any license. All free for use. And it follows me even I’m on Fedora Core 7 now. GIMP had gone in during the installation, so to access it, I normally go to the terminal there to type “gimp”, then it will pop up! I hope to free up some time to explore more about the tutorial on GIMP later…

Who is the king or queen in the blogosphere? Wordless or wordful blog?

Isn’ t it a pretty hot topic that you have to have a wordful blog or a wordless blog? What I call a wordful blog is a blog that contains many posts that each has at least a 200 hundred words. Those folks like ProBlogger will mostly ask you to write a post blog that is long enough in order to be liked by Google search engine and its crawler.

But, recently another type of wordless blog, ICanHasCheezBurger, a very famous blog that is all about those cute and funny pics of fat pussies simply for LOL. This kinda of blog is simply wordless or contains only one or two lines of words as what is mentioned in the pic. And they’re full of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Of course, it’s definitely a blog full of fun, funniest ever over the blogosphere with all the cute pics of those fat cats. It’s not meant for writing formal stuff, the kinda of grammatical & spelling mistakes are simply meant for the cats, for the LOL fans, that’s how they keep it funny. And they’ve even triggered some hot trend over the famous “icanhas” phrase and people seem to create the kind of craze to purchase those “icanhas” domain names.

By judging at ICanHasCheezBurger’s archives, it’s only a blog of 7-month-old started in January, this year. But, it’s obvious that it’s a super hot blog that receives millions of page views a day and makes few hundred dollars or more from blog ads a day. This can all be learned from its WhosAmungUs stat counter that shows over 500-1,000 concurrent LOL fans over the past 10 minutes. Theb history about this blog was it first started by the two programmers which was meant to have fun only. And they started finding the traffic doubled each month. Finally they “can has blogads” that is profitable enough to even make them quit their day job and focused on this blog!

My conclusion is your blog needs to be unique with content, no matter it’s the kinda of long content or simply short content or only funny pics. The most important is keeping a blog to target audience instead of search engines. But think in another way, isn’t it ICanHasCheezBurger able to pull more organic traffic from the search engines, due to most performing searches on Google or Yahoo all failed to spell or construct sentence correctly? It could be! That could be the way how the cheezburger managed to pull all the traffic initially. Of coz, the icanhas blog is definitely the funniest one that ensures its success to retain its audiences! Ummmm… started thinking of to have more typo in blog posts here, so I could probably pull more organic traffic, LOL!

Can we customize WordPress.com’s template? Yes, you can! But it costs some money!

Actually, having a blog on WordPress.com is only an idea recently popped up, just for a try. I’ve read somewhere else that having a blog on a blogging commonplace such as WordPress.com or Blogger would be potential to pull more traffic. As this commonplace has the feature to roll your blog or your most recent post among the bloggers who registered and blog here. It could be right and it could wrong. Although, I’ve been blogging over my own domain name using downloaded wordpress blog software, but I’d like to take a try here today to start blogging on WordPress.com simply for fun. Currently, I still remain anonymous about who I’m, which I’m gonna disclose after this blog is 5-month-old.

As mentioned, I’ve been blogging on my own domain using downloaded wordpress and I’ve been very used to having blog ads and some other customization for blog templates to make some money out of blogging. The first shock after a few posts on wordpress.com here was the themes and templates allow NO customization. I’ve tried thousands of mouse clicks over the presentation option, switching themes but I failed to find anyway to do it. So, something came up in my mind, oopppsss, what if one day this blog gets popular, then I wanna make some bucks out of it? What can I do if there is no way to customize it? So, I started googling around and I found this post of Lorelle on wordpress. Yes, you can customize it, but with a fee, which costs you $15 a year. $15 per year, sounds cheap, why not if your blog has started making quite a lot from blog ads and others such as ReviewMe, PayPerPost. And it’s simply cheaper than hosting the blog on your own hosting, unless you’re quite a tech savvy, that you have to deal with MySQL and some PHP.

There have been tons of debates out there if to host the blog yourself under your own web hosting and domain or to write on blogging commonplace such as Blogger or WordPress.com. There is always good and bad sides of any of the two. To have blog on WordPress.com is easily to create buzz and pull traffic for a newly start-up blog. Anyway, I can only tell you more precisely once this blog gets popular. I’ll have a blog post to track this back if this blog manages to become the lucky guy, being one of the popular blog in the blogosphere, then I’ll pay the $15 and start adding blog ads here….