BlogMalaysia.com – Malaysia Bloggers Directory!
What’s the hottest thing on planet now?
Yeah…blogging…
A new phrase in the late of 20 century, so very popular now in the 21st century.
What is blog? It is more like a diary, a personal webspace to post one’s thought and sharing. Blog becomes so popular with the boom of internet and many free blog space given out by big companies (eg. Google).
For those who have their own domain, the most popular free blog management software out there is probably WordPress. Yes, free but so feature rich! Yes, I am using WordPress for my blog as well. It manages my blog nicely, and the new version has some simple but practical WYSIWYG features for me to type my blog entry sufficiently.
Now…back to the title of this post – BlogMalaysia.com!
I got this domain from Brian (founder of PhotoMalaysia.com) last year, after Brian decided to discontinue free blog offering and let the domain expired. The domain was registered by Brian in July 2004, and was expired on July 2007. Brian has to pay a little extra money to renew the expired domain after it expired (US$10 or US$15 penalty?) and renew with one year fee (US$8.99) to get back the domain, and later transfer it to me. For me to receive the domain at my registra, I have to add another year of subscription. Of course I paid all the suspenses. For me it is still very cheap to get a nice domain name. Quite impossible to register such domain name again nowadays, as most are already grabbed by others. 
So, what am I going to do with the domain? My personal blog? Nah…I don’t want to use that domain name as my personal blog. I actually plan to make a Malaysia Blog Database or Directory, with as many Malaysians blog URL as possible. I found a nice software for the project, and found a nice template design for it…but not as perfect as I hoped. Modification and study structure of the software are a must, if you want your site to be unique and looks good, you need to pour in your effort.
I did a basic design for it few months ago…and try to gather as many bloggers info as possible to key into the database. But one thing I knew, I can’t survive like this. I don’t want to key in the info myself, I want bloggers to come and register their URL themselves at BlogMalaysia.com!
How? Honestly I have no idea. It is hard to promote a new site…very hard actually. Online forums will definitely not allow me to promote BlogMalaysia.com for free, and I do not have a budget for advertisement (maybe I shall find some budget for advertisement…). 
Today, since I was quite free and have the mood (most importantly), I revisited BlogMalaysia.com and did some changes to the template design. Below are some of the improvements that I have done in the last couple of hours (yeah, learn something new too):
- Edited site preview with previews from new source (previous girafa preview is no longer available).
- Make site preview image clickable to the actual URL. I have wanted this feature since day 1, but don’t know how to do it. Today I manage to solve it out myself.
- Make Latest Links clickable to the actual URL. Was having problem previously with broken links.
- Added favicon.
- Added little “
” mark to each line in the right sidebar. This makes the side bar easier to view and click.
I shall think of what to add next…if you have any suggestion, feel free to comment.
