The other day, I managed to successfully customize a WordPress theme all by myself. I was so damn proud because a year ago, I was totally lost in CSS coding and I would keep asking for help every single turn. I was so afraid to start my self-hosted blogs because nobody has the time to help me out and I would practically have to beg for help.

Fast forward one year later, I am now more proficient in customizing WordPress templates though I would not say that I am an expert already! I still do not feel confident enough and I am sure that I have messed certain codes that rendered it not as robot friendly but I don’t care as long as my pages display well on my browser as I want them haha!

I know a couple of people who are so good with their CSS codes that they have turned them into profitable home based business opportunities. As for me, this is not something that I would want to do on a daily basis. I would rather try my luck in sweepstakes. Depending on Lady Luck is an easier way for me to get my hands on some pocket change!

Well, I don’t know, what’s why I am asking! For the past three months, I have been trying to find just the “perfect” WordPress theme but is seems that every time I found one that I actually would like to use without heavy customization, it is not widget-ready!

Sure, there’s a little tutorial in the WordPress site but that might as well be Greek for all I understand it!

So I know of a guy who offered to help people with technical stuff in his blog. I wrote in and he told me to check the WordPress themes website. Duh… I already browsed through the site numerous times but could not find something that I like enough to use for the long term.

So it’s back to more searching!!! GGGrrrr

If you a regular here, you would most probably notice that I have streamlined somethings abut my blog. For one, my blogroll is a lot shorter now. Yes, I promised that I would visit everybody to look for the agreed reciprocal link and now that people have backed out from the agreement, then sorry, out they go too.

Also, I have deleted one of my pages. If you are not observant, you probably would not even know that one of my tabs is missing. Which tab? Well, I’m not telling.

I spent a considerable amount of time uploading and activating plug-ins after upgrading my blog to the last version of WordPress 2.3.1. So far, everything has gone smoothly, thankfully. I would hate to mess things up since I don’t handle such technical challenges well.

Explore around and you would notice the slight changes which are all thanks to the plug-ins. WordPress plug-ins are so nifty to use I a thankful that they were written to help make things a whole lot easier. Boy, am I glad I am not the one WRITING them!

So I finally upgraded my WordPress and and so happy that I am finally up-to-date. Yay. What I am most happy about it is that I did all four WordPress blogs by myself and they did not give me a problem at all. The new WordPress is so wonderful in the sense that it let us know which plug-in has an upgraded version so that we don not have to go to each author site to check. That would be ultra tedious, wouldn’t it?

But seriously, after upgrading to the latest version that is supposed to thwart those wayward bugs and close some loopholes, I don’t see anything different. At least, I can’t see with the naked eye.

Oh yeah, which Akismet was deactivated during the upgrade, two spam mail hit my inbox. Sigh!!!

I am sure many of us bloggers using WordPress are faced with the menace of splogs or scrapper blogs. However, have you tried writing a post with the relevant titles but different content and see if they pick up your post?

For this blog, I get a lot of ping backs for my travel posts and whatever posts on Yahoo! Yes, these people have splogs for anything under the sun. I know that they have AdSense all over the splogs (I never bothered to visit), but how much can that bring them? I know of some bloggers who run legitimate blogs who took more than two years to draw their first AdSense cheque.

Ah… I think that these sploggers may earn more because they are very targeted.

Anyway, with the speed of ping back just right after published a post, I am wondering it they have my feed or something. However, it has been proven that if you write a post that bangs them, they won’t publish THAT on their SPLOGS! Hah!

I’ve got a bunch of plug-ins waiting to be installed and play with but then I tried these all on my other WordPress blog and I don’t know why now I cannot even log out of my own account. It keeps bringing me back to my WordPress Dashboard. I don’t know why and where the problem lies in and am not even sure if the problem is the plug in or the template. What do you think???

Also, it’s so frustrating to wake up every morning fighting spam comments on this blog. It’s not as if they are trapped by Akismet, though the majority of the comments are caught. Lately, they are coming through to my email box and I have to think that I have a legitimate comment only to find a spam comment! How many spam comments have I battled with so far? More than thirty freaking thousand and still counting!

It’s a super frustrating morning today. I don’t even have the mood to write anything good!

You know, I have been complaining of being flooded with spam comments on this blog. I don’t really know how they can spam me even on a post that has just been freshly published. But spam they did!

Since the day I activated my Akismet Spam on 8th August, 2007 (see, I started my blog in January, 2007 and managed to live with the Spam until August :D) do you know how many spam comments Akismet has caught?

Check out the screenshot!

I don’t know if this is a record or something but 25K of spam comments and counting is a huge number in my books! This seems to be a problem only with WordPress blogs. Is there a security loophole or something that attracts spammers?

On my Blogger blogs, I don’t even get 1% of the spam here, in total and I have THREE Blogger blogs. So tell me self hosted blogs are the best!