I didn’t had any much time studying about blogging until I have set a schedule for myself to force and read about it. Hence, here I am sharing to you my very first SEO series in Reality Bytes. For this series, I will be using WordPress as reference and main material for some instructions and tutorials.

To start off, let’s start with your site domain name and blog page and post permalinks. For those who are still unfamiliar with these jargon, the domain is your site’s “name” within the web space. URL Addresses started as IP address and by having long combinations of numbers to remember, thus, the domain names. Some examples of domain names are google.com, yahoo.com, datudomain.com, jreflores.net and etcetera. Permalinks, short for permanent links, are those that identify the URL Address of your blog posts and site pages. This what attaches to your domain URL to open those pages on your site.

Domain names

Firstly, your domain name must, of course, be easy to remember and is a keyword in itself. Your domain is just like your personal walking “tag”. It can be something that is generic and something that speaks about your site. The domain name is really somewhat self-explanatory. I’m sorry but I can’t deal so much time in fully explaining about this one.

Permalinks

Next, will be permalinks. This will be the main focus of this blog entry. When I started my new site, it came to me to apply SEO related features to at least make it have more life.

As soon as you open a blog and start writing posts and blog entries, post permalinks are formatted as something like /?p=xxx. Later on, most bloggers would intuitively find it unfriendly and awkwardly vague and ambiguous, changing it to something like /year/month/day/post-name. Until leading to the tendency of changing your permalink structure over and over again (trust me, I’ve been there)!

I have been researching more about how to improvise permalinks for SEO and efficiency (and big THANKS to all those who shared their knowledge in WordPress SEO). I collated and consolidated all resources until I came to conclusion that categorized and tagged permalinks are widely used and suggested. Your permalink would then look somthing like /category/post-name.

However, after I made further readings and research, and especially thanks to a distant friend’s evangelism on WordPress, he shared some performance issues with this type of permalink structure. Thus, it is well suggested to prepend the /year/ to fully optimize WordPress. Your blog’s permalink structure would then look something like /year/category/post-name or /2010/web/seo-permalinks.

Moving on to the next page, I will be illustrating how to setup a custom permalink structure to WordPress.

So here I am trying to work on balancing everything; freelance hobbies, interests, works, and of course, “rest”. Just recently, I have opened my new site; the “Dabawenyong Maniniyot”. Since I am now officially back to photography, I decided to make my own photo blog and portfolio as a freelance photographer and as a simple hobbyist. This site is currently under beta stage and hopefully be final until I get to fully test the theme I created for it. I have launched a couple of blogs that just went down the drain because of inactivity and lack of updates. I hope my efforts on this one won’t be for nothing.

SEO, SEO, SEO, and SEO. It’s everyone and every blogger’s topic. I hope I can find more time studying this. If I were to be tagged, I might be that oldy and “laos” blogger not knowing about the latest.

More and more blogging. Suddenly I got caught into focusing my interest in WordPress and how to make my blogging world a better place by playing around with plugins and themes.

But basically, my main focus is my photo blog.. *smiles* hehe :D By doing this one step at a time, I will surely get back to this blog and fix it once and for all.

Last April 24 was really one fun-filled day with a very great learning experience for 40 photographers in Cebu. Canon and IMag Photography held a joint Portraiture and Color Management seminar, with instructors from the Philippine Center for Creative Imaging or PCCI, Dail Derri and Jun Miranda, held at Crown Regency, Cebu. lot was taught from portraiture photography (with the chance to shoot with models) to great color management techniques and concepts. Canon also introduced two of their new SLR products; the EOS 550D and EOS 1D Mark IV, together with some of their new printer products. Other than the great learning experience was also the great eating experience. Sana next month or next year ulit. :D *laughs*

[View with PicLens]

I was ready to work and do some research when I noticed how green Google’s search page banner was. Then I realized, today is Earth Day! *laughs*. As soon as I got home, I grabed and searched in the deep labyrinth of my laptop’s hard drive. I collected all my nature shots from my 2010 365 project and got these 15 picks that I  dedicate to mother nature. Hope you like them. Composed, authored, and photographed by yours truly. :)

[View with PicLens]

You can also view my photostream and my nature set in Flickr for more photos. Once again, Happy Earth Day everyone! ^^

VS 2010 introduces various edition variants to fit developers’ needs.

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional

Features for these respective editions are quite many to mention so I provided links of these editions’ respective profile and overview. :)

Express edition for 2010 is also available for free.

• Visual Basic 2010 Express
• Visual C# 2010 Express
• Visual C++ 2010 Express
• Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP

These express edition applications are available for download in this link. Microsoft also offers a free trial of MS VS 2010 Professional. You can also check out this link for more information. :)

EF 75-300mm USM III, f3-5.6
This is the first ever lens I had when I bought the 500D. Used in Sinulog 2010 celebration and on some (semi) macro shots on my boring free time. I did not really enjoy the performance of this lens especially on low light conditions. Considering its focal length range, I could not use it as an all around lens. Also, not to mention chromatic aberration problems on full focal length shots. But based on its performance during Sinulog last January 2010, I was able to capture great shots as long as the sun was up and with some manual exposure adjustments, even with the crowd in front of me.

EF-S 18-55mm IS f4.5-5.6
Sad to say I regret purchasing the 500D without this kit lens. I could not maximize on practicing with in-depth photography without (at least) an all around lens such as the 18-55. Generally, image stabilization capability of this lens is above average. And generally, the 18-55mm is a good all around lens (that’s why it was a kit lens in the first place. hehe).

EF 50mm f1.8
This 50mm is the best for portraiture shots even when in low light conditions. This lens is also good when in DOF shots with bokeh on the background. Depth of field on your shots are minutely adjustable given it’s f1.8 maximum aperture. As a prime lens, it has no focal length. With it’s fixed focal length of 50mm, you might need to do the “cha-cha” when taking your shots. Since this has no USM, expect a loud noise when in AF mode.

Hopefully, I will be writing full reviews on these lenses based on my user experiences with them. In this way I could also share this with those starting with photography and hopefully help them answer all the confusing questions like how I started in all of this. :) To all my fellow photography-enthusiasts out there, keep those shutters clicking and flashes bursting. ^^

I discovered this new blogging medium through a friend of mine and I never had the intention of registering to this service. Until I realize that Posterous was just that easy especially for starter bloggers and even for casual bloggers. As their tag line goes; “The simple place to post everything.” Because it’s indeed simple.

What makes Posterous simple and flexible for me is because of its basic and useful features that are helpful for bloggers and the like. Its support for casual blogging, cross posting, and retweeting made it indeed simple to post everything.

You can also check out my Posterous through this link. :)

I found this new amazing feature from Google when I opened to checked my mail this morning. It’s the new Google Buzz. Buzz is a new add-on that Google added over their Google Mail (GMail). It works similarly with that of Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed wall. If you’re familiar with these two social network services, I’m sure you will not get lost when trying out this new Google feature. It includes the following cool features:

• Micro-blog buzz messaging. Publish buzzes privately or publicly
• Connect to other sites such as Flickr, Picasa, and Twitter
• Google mail box integration
• Comment, Like, and Share your buzz posts or posts of those you follow
• Muting of posts when you don’t feel you don’t care on a post’s updates

To get to this feature, you will simply need a Google Mail. You can create one through GMail’s registration page. After logging in to your new account, or your old account if you have one, Buzz will be accessible on your account page’s left panel. Happy Buzzing! :)