BasBasBas.com

Category: website

  • Happy New Year! Now, about these resolutions…

    Happy new year to everyone! Today while reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I ran into a good poem to remind you how to deal with new year’s resolutions and figured it would make a great post to start the year off with.

    Autobiography in Five Chapters

    1) I walk down the street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I fall in.
    I am lost… I am hopeless.
    It isn’t my fault.
    It takes forever to find a way out.

    2) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidealk.
    I pretend I don’t see it.
    I fall in again.
    I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
    But it isn’t my fault.
    It still takes a long time to get out.

    3) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I see it is there.
    I still fall in… it’s a habit
    My eyes are open
    I know where I am
    It is     my fault
    I get out immediately.

    4) I walk down the same street.
    There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
    I walk around it.

    5) I walk down another street.

    One of my own resolutions is to blow more life into this blog, since it has been gathering digital dust for quite a while due to personal circumstances. No more though, just subscribe to the feed (I recommend using Feedly) and stay in touch!

    Happy 2010!

  • Expat Business!

    Firstly, last week I had a guest post published on Top Ten Blog Tips. Go have a look at it, it’s called 10 Reasons Why Expats should blog.

    Secondly, quite a while ago I set up a blog carnival for expats called Expat Experience (the only one, as far as I’m aware). I will not have time to maintain it anymore and am looking at someone to take it over. Have a look at the last edition of Expat Experience. Also have a look at the idea behind it. If you’d like to take it over and host it on your blog, let me know. It’s very rewarding and gets you lots of traffic and linkback! I will not pass it on to just anyone though. So leave a comment or shoot an email to .

    Thank you.

  • Google Friend Connect

    Still apartment hunting. Quite exhausting and boring at the same time. You have to be ready to rush from apartment to apartment, but sometimes you’re simply waiting for people to contact you to tell you about new available flats.

    So, while I was waiting yesterday, I set up Google Friend Connect, which allows me to directly connect to the community/readers of the blog, but also for you to connect to me, or even each other. Google seems to be rolling out a lot of options for Friend Connect, with which it aims to turn the more static media on the web into social media, or even integrate them with the existing social media, such as Facebook.

    I’m going to activate some of them, for you (and myself) to play around with. First thing I want to experiment with is a wall on which community members can write their messages or even post YouTube videos that might be interesting to me or other people that visit this site. Not sure how/where to integrate it however, since I can’t reduce the width to less than 280 pixels. I’ll be looking at that. For the meantime get connected. Scroll to the Google Friend Connect widget in the left sidebar and join up!

    Bas

  • Downtime

    Last night BasBasBas.com got shut down by Bluehost over performance issues. The site’s back online now, but to prevent future account suspensions without notice in the future, I’m going to be changing the layout of the site to make it more simplistic. Since I’ll be moving to Bulgaria next week and the site’s current layout was mostly geared towards my stay in Istanbul, the shut down came with great timing to motivate me to change the site once again.

    Ulterior goal: to increase the pleasure of the reading experience.

    Sit back and don’t worry too much about the layout for now. It might be a good idea to subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox free of charge of course. 😉

  • So long, and thanks for all the drops! (8 Reasons to Quit Entrecard)

    I am leaving Entrecard. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about it and recent events have made the decision all the more easier. I’ve turned off advertising on my blog. When my last ad finishes, on the 16th, the widget goes. Until that time I’m still returning drops.

    Entrecard is a social network for bloggers who can drop by each others’ blogs and earn credits in return. With these credits, they can advertise on each others blogs. A nice system, but in the end it’s not worth it for me.

    8 Reasons to Quit Entrecard

    If you’re a blogger using Entrecard, don’t take any of the following points personal. If any of them insult you, please keep reading on until the end of this article.

    1. Poorly invested time. Unless you’re on a very fast connection, it’s going to take you a considerable amount of time per day to get the best out of Entrecard. To get the best out of it, 300 drops per day is a must and its results are spectacular then. However, your time is better invested in discovering and commenting on relevant blogs, using Twitter and more actively engaging the blogosphere, because…
    2. Entrecard traffic has low value. Much of the traffic generated through Entrecard just inflates your statistics and increases your bounce rate. Many people just “drop and run”, as it’s dubbed in the Entrecard community. In the end, the traffic has more value than that of most social bookmarking services, but is for the most part still of low value.
    3. Bad quality blogs. I’ve had it with low quality blogs. There are too many of them. Poorly written content, grammar and spelling mistakes all over the place, lots of sponsored posts, bad designs. Stay away from me.
    4. Non-interesting blogs. I suppose making a blog about your cats is fun, and I’m sure it’s fun for many others to read it, but I’m simply not your target group. You don’t need me on your blog and I don’t want to be there to be honest. There are many other types of blogs I am not interested in that I had to visit because of returning ‘drops’.
    5. I don’t care about your ‘hubby‘. Dear Stay/Work At Home Mom (SAHM/WAHM) bloggers, please erase this word out of your vocabulary. If I see it one more time I will puke. Never thought this word would end up on my own blog. Refering to your spouse like this in every one of your blog posts is like two ugly people making out right in front of me. My stomach cannot help but revolt. Sorry. I guess Entrecard has brought me to your blog, but I doubt you really want someone like me there.
    6. Linkback building obsession. My God, is there an immense obsession with getting linked back on Entrecard. It’s good to get links back to your blog, because it helps to build your status in search engines. Google Bombs are proof of this. Entrecard is a BAD place to build your linkback. Firstly, you want to get linked back from blogs and sites that are relevant to your site. I don’t need topdropper links back to my page from blogs about cars.
      Secondly, I don’t want to give “link juice” out to unrelated blogs. It’s unfair to the related, relevant or highly interesting blogs that I link to. More about this on SeoBlogr. I read a better article about it recently, found it via Entrecard, but forgot to bookmark it. Doh! 🙁 So stop caring about your Google PageRank (PR) people, I have zero PR and I get a LOT of search engine traffic. Start worrying about writing good content, writing some linkbait and having high keyword density (but not too high or you’ll get flagged as spam 😉 ).
    7. The captain is drunk. I’ve put a lot of energy into the community on the Entrecard ship and we’ve sailed far and become friends, but the captain has been making poor choices and I suspect he’s incapable of taking this censorship much further. I love the community on board, but I’m getting off before we hit an iceberg. Graham, the owner of Entrecard, is childish and yesterday banned one of Entrecard’s top users. As you can see in the comments, many people are outraged. I think this was the final proof of Graham’s immaturity and incapacity to make the right decisions at the right time. Although Turnip‘s tweet wasn’t a great show of maturity either. 😉 While Graham is saying the negative publicity is only good for Entrecard, his poor leadership is not and new and current members will soon realize that.

      8. (more…)

  • Flickr Banned in Turkey? Nope.

    It appears to be a false alarm. Flickr’s working fine now. Disregard this post 😉

    Just received a message that popular photo management and sharing application Flickr is unavailable in Georgia. The sender asked me about the situation in Turkey, since a few weeks ago when Blogger/Blogspot was banned in Turkey, it was also unavailable in Georgia.

    Guess what? Flickr is unavailable in Turkey also. Could it be a new ban? Who knows.

    I guess we will find out soon. Either it will come back online, or we will see something like the below:


    Stay updated. Follow my Twitter feed, or subscribe to this blog by RSS or email.

  • Changes

    The last few days my blog has gone through a few changes, mostly because I haven’t been able to come up with good content, so I figured I’d invest my energy differently. Why am I not able to come up with good content? I’ve had a stomach or intestinal flu for about 3 or 4 weeks now and since I’m going to Bulgaria this weekend, I wanted to be better so I decided to actually go to the doctor. The campus doctor’s consult was free of charge, and after describing my stool in detail to the medical student of my age (very weird, not to mention awkward) who then translated it for the doctor, I was prescribed some medicine. I don’t know what’s in this medicine, but woah, my mind’s completely unfocused! I’m curious as to what the medicine actually is (besides very, very cheap compared to Holland!), but in this state I keep forgetting to Google/Wikipedia it once I get to a computer. Nice.

    Anyway, for this reason I’ve been unable to come up with intelligible stories, hence the lack of updates. I’m doing well though, I feel I’m getting better and my classes have started and they’re interesting! Oh, and tomorrow I can finally apply for my residence permit!

    Okay… so what have I changed/updated on my website? And why?

    • I got FeedSmith and transferred my RSS feeds to FeedBurner after reading an article at Rockfuse about messing up your RSS feeds 😉 .  I did this so that I could track my feed subscribers better. I was quite surprised when I found out I had about 36 subscribers, instead of the 15 I expected. I proudly put up my feedreader count at the right and an option for people to subscribe by email. Thanks to you all for subscribing!
    • I put my Entrecard widget to the left sidebar because it loads before the rest of the page. It’s really important to have your widget in the part of the page that loads the fastest, because many droppers just want to drop as fast as possible and it earns you credits to advertise!
    • This freed up space for an “above the fold” banner at the top right side of my page! It’s still rather cheap, so go place your ad now!
    • I put in a cool weather widget so you can see the weather I’m having here!
    • I removed my MyBlogLog widget after reading an alarming post about the type of information they’re releasing (accessible to everyone!) about your blog. Not cool!
    • I added a contact form, which can be reached by navigating to the bottom of the page and finding the contact link.
    • I put the link for announcing my Entrecard topdroppers reward closer to the ‘drop’ button. In case people miss when they click, they’ll see the reward system (and hopefully keep dropping here). Also, they’re more likely to notice the rewarding if they’re just here for a fast drop.
    • I also put the PayPal donation button under the Email subscriber form, because I think people with their attention focused on that part of the page are also more likely to donate. Not that I really expect anyone to donate, but who knows. 😉 A button can’t hurt.
    • That’s about it. I also uploaded a new header image that you’ll see when you visit category pages.
    More Istanbul (and Bulgaria!) adventures very soon! Right here.

  • Entrecard Topdroppers get EC’s!!

    For those of you that are not familiar with Entrecard, click here.

    For all the visitors from Entrecard, I have a special deal for you which I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Add my blog to your daily dropping rounds and get credits! At the end of the month, I will spend 1000 credits on the top 3 droppers.

    Number one gets 500 credits.
    Number two gets 300 credits.
    Number three gets 200 credits.

    So get to dropping on my Entrecard widget and please try to participate on my blog. I have SezWho installed, so it’s yet another way to earn credits… Oh and if you drop, I follow! 🙂

    Happy dropping!

  • Time to get moving!

    Okay, I’ve been procrastinating loooong enough (plus I’ve been ill for a while which really ruined the momentum). It’s time to get this exchange in Istanbul sorted! Firstly, tomorrow I’ll get all the forms fixed so I can deliver them to the partner university in Istanbul, called Yeditepe. This means that I’ve been selecting courses. The courses I plan on following at Yeditepe these fall are:

    • Introduction to Political Science;
    • Democracy in the Global Society;
    • Society, Culture and Communication in the 21st Century;
    • Scope and Social Impact of New Media;
    • Consumer Behaviour;
    • Humanities;
    • Theories of Mass Communication;
    • Corporate Public Relations;
    • Semiotics;
    • Persuasion and Perception.

    Needless to say, I’m very excited! Those that know me well will understand, based just on the list above here and how well it suits me 😉

    Second thing is, the to-do lists are back. Last year they were here as I was preparing for Bulgaria, disturbing my natural laziness, now they’re back. Tomorrow I have an exam, so I better start studying now. I discontinued the ‘Latest Updates’ posts – they’ll now just be placed in the side menu. Besides that, more posts about my life and about going to Turkey: I promise.

    Also, the website is still under construction, but it’s about 80-90% done now 🙂

  • Reconstruction

    Dear visitors.

    I’m currently revising my website. The lay-out may change, options in the menu’s might change, who knows. Thank you for your patience.

    Love,
    Bas

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