I may be a webmaster of more than ten websites and blogs but I certainly am not as proficient in HTML or CSS coding as I would like. Just the other day, I was thinking of adding a poll to my blog post and I absolutely had no idea how to do so. I have seen many people embedding myspace surveys on their MySpace profiles and I thought it would be neat to use those on my blogs and do a little survey of my readers.

A friend told me that I do not have to write my own poll and I could use a ready-made one. There are plenty on the web if only I would search! The key points to look out for are user-friendliness, reliability and customization.

Easy-Poll, like the name says, is really “easy” to use. I mean, how easy could it get by just typing in your survey questions and options? They also do have different color schemes to suit the theme of our site and that is very important to me.

OK, so it is not enough that my Streamyx was down for a whole week. Last night, my PC gave up on me. I do not know what happened or why it suddenly K.O.-ed but I did not shut down my PC for slightly more than a day so last night, I thought I would reboot it as it was lagging. Little did I know that it would not even be able to load Windows. No, not even in Safe Mode.

So, this morning, I took my PC to the computer repair shop and their Streamyx was down as well. I came home and called up TM and asked them about my line and they told me that the problem is from my side. They said it could be wiring or modem or cable.

WTF, man….. don’t tell me the computer shop also same problem as me? Why can’t they admit that Streamyx is f@rked up in Ipoh? Now they are telling me to disable direct connection because they do not “support” it. They only support “manual connection”.

Argghh I am so pissed off….I think I am going to go on a holiday.

If you are also on a Celcom Broadband plan, you will know that Advance is RM98 per month while the normal 3G plan is RM66 per month of unlimited use. When I first subscribed to Celcom 3G for my mobile device, they did not have an Advance plan but I had to pay RM99 per month.

Subsequently, they created this plan called Celcom Broadband Advance which supports up to 3.6G. They then upgraded my package to Advance and I was billed RM98 per month instead of RM99 per month. Well, a Ringgit cheaper for a faster line.

Anyway, these few days, as you know, I have been facing serious downtime with Streamyx and Celcom has been my saving grace. However, using my mobile device, Nokia E61i, as a modem to connect my computer to Celcom’s broadband, I am not getting the maximum potential of what I am subscribed to because Nokia E61i only supports up to 3G, as far as I know.

So, I have been wondering, do I upgrade my device or do I downgrade my broadband subscription? Right now, I am suffering from dropped signals even though I did not move my phone at all and I feel as if I am wasting RM32 per month.

What do you think? If I were to upgrade my mobile device, which would you recommend, that could support 3.6G, besides LG Viewty?

As a blogger with more than ten blogs and websites to my name and running an online business, no less, you can say that I was desperately in need of a business card which I got printed at a local printer.

I would say that was one of the worst decisions I ever made! It is not that the print quality was bad or that their customer service was not up to speed BUT I subsequently found out, a little too late that there are printers offering free business cards suitable for business or personal use.

If you check out the website of Bizcard.com, you will see that they are one of the companies that are offering a total of 250 (!) business cards for free! That is a lot of free cards! Some of my blogger friends managed to get free business cards from other sources too but they were only being offered 50 or 100 cards. What a vast difference, isn’t it?

I am someone who can’t draw or design to save my life so having the option to select from the many ready made templates is a godsend. Designing my card using their card editor is a breeze. Yes, you heard right. Even though I have already printed my own cards from a local printer, I am getting mine done here too. It’s free, how can I let this chance pass?

I mentioned that I have more than ten blogs and websites and a friend asked me how I could manage them all. Well, filling them with original content is not that difficult. The difficult part is building readership, comments and most of all, link popularity.

Sometime back, I read that submitting our URL to as many web directories as possible will improve our link popularity. As you know, I am so busy working that I do not have the time to submit all my sites manually. Of course, I know there are many automatic link submitters but none that I tried worked well enough.

I also thought of engaging the services of companies that offer web submission services for a fee but my friend had a bad experience and that put me off from paying for my web submission.

Just now, I was told of a human edited web directory called Max Directory that is free for us to submit our blogs and websites with a reciprocal link back. However, because this is a human edited directory, we would have to pay $5 for the review process and get Standard listing or pay $10 for the cost of review AND Express listing. Naturally, if you have selected Express listing, your listing will appear above those with Standard listings.

If you think that it is not worth paying $5, consider this: Human edited web directory is of better quality than web directory that do not have a human reviewer to review their listings hence all and any links could be listed, bringing down the quality of the web directory as a whole.

Navigation of the site is really very user-friendly however, the only improvement I would like is to make submission easier with a prominent link on the top bar to a submission form instead of having to browse to a most appropriate category and submit from there.

I just realized that although I have written more than five thousand posts since I became a blogger slightly more than two years ago, I have not once posted a poll on my blog for my readers. I didn’t feel the need to do any survey or make little questionnaires.

Just now, I was given the chance to check out a website that offers free polls for blogs and websites. The good thing about this poll service is that we do not require any HTML technical knowledge or coding. We just need to sign up for an account and input our questions and select options to create polls which we can then embed on our site.

I did not sign up for an account but I can see that there are many color options to select from to match the color of our site and these polls are not only free but also easy to use.

I know that this company is the same one that offers free web counters that I wrote about last night so I expect these polls to have a link back to a poker site again. However, you just have to ask yourself if you mind linking to a poker site and if your readers mind that too in exchange for free use of a web tool.