Tip 200: Getting feedback from blog readers

Yippee, my 200th blog posts. As I review my blogging activity, I find it fulfilling to have spent time reflecting on parenting, thinking about tips and what I have learnt, posting photos of Haruka throughout my travels and most importantly remembering that God is good to me through each and every tip that has been posted. I hope it will be a blessing to my family as well as it has to me to reflect on our love documented here on this blog. As I review, it takes around 9 months to complete 100 tips. At times, I would have more time to blog regularly, while the remaining period is spent on catching up with work and life. The coming months would again see a slowdown in blogging as I accumulate more photos and tips to share.

At my 100th tip, I was a little ambitious for promising a Christmas gift for every reader who participated in the poll to rank the best tips. I ended up not delivering any presents after all. Sorry for the disappointment. This time again, I wish to do a poll to rank tip 100th-199th tip to understand what tips connects to the reader the most. Please do participate and select 1 tip you like. If you like more than 1 tip, feel free to vote more than once. But please only vote once for each tip and not more, eventhough you would want that tip to stand out as a winner. I do actually review my blog traffic and noticed the votes last time round had certain tips voted more than once by a single visitor. Though, I do appreciate the participation.

(Photos show the many scenes of Shinjuku, Roppongi and Tameike Sanno. The purple skies do give me a nostalgic fondness towards Tokyo).

Tip 133: Photos for the sake of blogging

I came across a blogpost with the title, "What do you do for the sake of blogging?" It is very amusing to read the many responses of bloggers from all walks of life, being gung-ho to snap photos for their blog. Nowadays, everyone have a digital camera by their side and whenever there is a good story idea, the camera is out. It can be a food review, a humorous signboard, an event or a beautiful scenery. Photos do make the blog more interesting. The urge to want to post photos on the blog also improves the photo taking experience to churn out more quality photos that can be reviewed by our children and loved ones. Ultimately, a good blog, full of photos of your family experiences with your children is a nice present to pass to your children. It can also be a treasured memory held by daddy as he looks back at his life as a daddy, the many places he has been with his family, the ups and downs, his thoughts and his efforts. I did not have many photos of my childhood, but I am now attempting to do more for my children. Glad that there are readers to my blog who are encouraging me along the way.

As you may notice, I have taken many photos of Haruka and us as a family during our weekend trips. I have videos too, but have not posted them. What you may not know is the time spent to call out to Haruka to get her attention. She is now a little more understanding as she have seen the photos on the camera and video and know the tiresome efforts of daddy to produce something good for her entertainment. So, after 1 minute calling her name, sometimes Haruka does entertain me by looking straight at the camera. Also, daddy is always eyeing for a good shot. I would place Haruka on different edges or corners to capture the best scenes knowing she is now sitting straight up and would hold still. Haruka is a very sensible girl who understands danger more than daddy. Of course, mummy would scream at such sights. Then, there is the longer time spent in a particular location for too many photo taking that mummy begins to get hungry and impatient. So, daddy will need to have the skill to quickly snap photos and still be able to complete as many trips to different locations, while ensuring mummy and baby has enough rest and food. But, the proof of the pudding is in a blog where one can review photos and understand the joys and efforts of daddy. Its hard to express these in words all in 1 day. Yet, you can possibly scroll down the whole blog of years of blogging in 1 day.

Do share with me what you have done for the sake of blogging. Oh yes, I did not mention the time when I snapped photos in a British museum in between guard patrols. Photos of that out soon.

(Photos show the Chi Lin Nunnery next to the Nan Lian Garden. The temples are constructed by binding wood frames together without nails based on Tang Dynasty design. Photo of food is from a Taiwanese restaurant along Jordan road showing an oyster noodle and dessert of ice with yam and sweet potato balls).

Tip 125: Blog to shape baby's memory

A baby learns exponentially about languages and new experiences. After each experience, a baby would develop preferences for certain experiences, play or taste. Yet at a certain age, the baby does not know how to accurately express himself/herself on what preferences he/she may have to communicate with others. The baby may not even remember what are all options available and the language term for each option. Only when the baby experiences it a second time, the baby would recall the preferable experience and smile or laugh doing the activity. Yet, blogging together with the use of camera and videocamera is a powerful tool to reinforce a baby's memory and teach the baby the different language terms for each activity and experience and further increase the speed of learning. As the activities are participated by the baby, the baby has greater interest to participate in the learning compared to reading a book that is not personalized. The baby thus would not mind going through a blog, video or camera over and over again with daddy teaching him/her the many names of activities in the blog. This could be the solution to recapturing childhood memory, many of us adults have loss. More than memory of activities, a blog can recapture the memory of the relationship parents share with their babies/children.

Like many, I do not have a strong memory of my baby or toddler days or the involvement of my parents being there for me. As my mother is a baby sitter, I could guess that my parents would have been as caring to me, as they had to the other babies I witnessed them caring. While my parents did capture a few photos of the many activities we were involved as a family during our childhood, these were not digital and some may not have been kept well. Also, there were less efforts to be taking photos of every activity and to capture as many special moments in each activity since the speed and cost of photo taking was higher previously. The power of digital photography and video making creates a whole new world of recapturing memories of the past and reinforcing new meaning to them. It further adds possibilities to what a daddy can do for his children and potentially creating a gap between parents who have done, and those who have not. While I observe that consumers are beginning to be more demanding of the services and products they expect from manufacturers, so I foresee children to be expecting more and more from their parents in this consumerist society as children compare what other parents are offering their children. Besides just joining a potential rat race to be the best daddy, I have found that blogging and capturing my child's development is an effective means of teaching. Whenever I am free, I would show Haruka my blog and would tell her the story of her life through all the blog posts and photos. She would begin to learn the different language terms of them. For instance, she would know that she likes to go to a bird park and in the bird park, there are many different birds. As her understanding of experiences advances, she may even be able to differentiate between a bird park in Malaysia, Singapore or a bird park in Hong Kong. I am also glad that I have spend a lot of time capturing photos and videos and in my free time, I play it over the TV and Haruka could recall the activities we do together as a family. Technology has advanced as such that it is simply a plug and play effort and does not involve any complicated steps. One day, when Haruka can read, she will also be able to understand my sentiments and ideas behind parenting and would appreciate the time and effort I spend on my children because I love them very much. This again reinforces the importance for a daddy to blog.

Have you also used a blog to teach your toddler/children? Do share.

(Photos show a relatively small but well designed bird's aviary in Hong Kong park, a footbridge nearby, taichi at Victoria park and a marriage registry at Hong Kong park.)

Tip 93: Increasing your blog's google page rank

I have now earned a Google PageRank of 2/10 and an Alexa ranking after 5 months of blogging. This google page ranking simply means whether you will be placed at the top or bottom of google's search list when others do a google on keywords on your blog. It takes quite a while especially to get the ranking on Google as the page rank is updated after a while. I was checking my traffic details and found many visitors referred to my blog while googling various keywords, yet my page rank was still 0/10 a month ago. I am not sure if high traffic blogs also get their google page ranks updated slowly, and surely my blog can not be compared to the blog of ex Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohamad who now has more than 8 million visitors even when he started blogging almost the same time as me. But, I will attempt to list tips by others while I was learning about google page ranks, as well as my own time tested practices in increasing the popularity of my blog.


What I first did was listed my blog for free at dmoz.org and yahoo. Dmoz is crawled by many search engines and if your website has lots of useful keywords and items of interest, hits would climb steadily. For instance, my international research paper published on my website 5 years ago has now more than 17,000 hits. Of course, if you want to boost your hits faster, you can always pay for premium services to list and promote your blog. Though, good content very much determines whether you get loyal visitors who browse your site for longer and thats tracked by advertisers as well who are interested to pay you advertising revenues to advertise on your blog. To list my blog for free, I used my own website and other networking sites such as multiply and linkedin.com and listed my blog site on every section and page. It helps that my linked in profile has more than 7000 contacts and I am at the top of the search of many recruiters and visitors to my profile who would click on my blog site to learn more about me personally. Yes, it means I am now a public figure, but these days, you may want to differentiate yourself from the many pawns in the industrial and global chain and put a personal face on your presence. Another method you may have noticed is that I diligently do a lot of internal links within each blog post to refer to the previous blog posts I published. This does count in adding your page rank, though not significantly. Then, be sure to search up similar blogs with high traffic and leave comments there with your blog website so that interested visitors could check out your blog as well as allow google to crawl your blog while crawling the more popular blogs. For Alexa ranking, you need to have visitors usually from USA who have installed Alexa software on their PC to visit your blog. Last but not least, be sure to post a variety of interesting topics ranging from informative subjects, personal experiences, investment opinions, product reviews to cultural themes. Just sticking to rambling about your life can sometimes not be such a popular search keyword. I do know that putting more photos does make the blog more interesting and I will strive to do that more often. I have also learnt later in my blogging, to seek for more comments from readers and to learn from them. Participation is key to a good blog visit and I very much welcome more comments... please keep them coming and add me into your blog roll. Leave a comment on this blog post if you have added me in your blog list, and I would reciprocate and do the same on mine.

So that you would not forget Tip 100, add me on your blog list or favorites and bookmark me. Tip 100 ... contest for everyone. Leave a comment here if you have added me.

Tip 45: The 4 Minute Rule to start blogging

I read a review of a book read by my HR manager. We have recently set up a bulettin board on the intranet in our company where we share experiences, book reviews or anything interesting. He shared that a book recommended to start doing something just for 4 minutes to assess if you will like doing it more. This 4 minute rule is to help create good habits or help the mind battle the question that the task is impossible. Once we get involved in a task for 4 minutes, our mind begins to see the bigger picture of how this task can be engaged, the fruits of it and how it turns out to be not that difficult after all. How about trying to blog for 4 minutes? Set up an account and blog for 4 minutes. Then, try again the same rule the next day. I am beginning to be more and more convinced that daddies NEED to blog. Why? Because the next generation of kids will ALL be blogging.

I was on facebook and saw an update that one of my contacts just updated his blog. He was a teenage (maybe he still is. time flies and before long, i will be a grand daddy maybe) from my previous church back in Malaysia. So I visited his blog and is impressed by the well captured photos that look very professional. Kids these days have their Nikon, Pentax with SLRs, the latest Zoom etc etc. One wonders where they get the $$$ to buy these expensive cameras. Then, I saw his blogroll and there were almost 30 names of other teenagers from church that I knew. (Hey, I have only 1 link on my blogroll! Add me if you are blogging so I can add you too.) Wow, all 30 of them were blogging already. And all of them have professionally taken photographs from their Nikon or Pentax. Now, if 30% of all youths with computers blog today and the blogging frenzy just started 3-5 years ago, how many percentage would be blogging in 13 years time when Haruka, my daughter is a teenager? I would say 100% and they would be using high tech phones, touch pads on their jackets and sunglasses with special sensors to blog and update the world of their observations. We are beginning to extract and share information at a speed no one has guessed possible a century ago. It will not be long before the next Tower of Babel is built if the world does not see another world war in the next 50 years. So start blogging already, daddies. Create a blog at wordpress, blogspot or any other blogging platform. Then, click on my link below to review my blog post and get paid for it by pay per post. You need to create a paypal account and can either use the money for online shopping or transfer the paypal balance to your bank account. Its that easy these days. A decade ago, I was doing a research paper on e-commerce and discussed the doubts consumers have on online shopping. But, as people have accepted the US dollars for decades even when its not hedged against gold, so will people be using e-commerce and blog and have a life on the virtual world. Start for 4 minutes and you will never think you will never finish a task. And if its never finished, you can console yourself that even the tower of babel was left uncompleted. Then, enjoy the rest of the day not on the net to see the beautful flowers in spring.

Tip 36: Get paid to review my posts

You may have noticed the Purple tag with the title Get Paid to review my post scattered around my blog. Its a tag that I have entered into every post myself. I think its a neat idea to have other bloggers review my blog and get paid for it and at the same time, my blog gets linked by other bloggers and have more traffic. And don't you think its time to start blogging? Read Tip 4 about a reflective blogging dad. Besides, I think its a good way to let our children understand our excitement, thoughts, intentions and dreams for them. Blogging help anyone understands us better as we reflect upon our values and our feelings and write about them. In fact, for many who seldom reflect, it helps us so much to think about what we really want to tell others. Before you click on that link, you would first have to create a blog such as blogspot or wordpress. I realised some blog accounts such as multiply account does not link well to pay per post. Then, after creating a blog, click on that link and create a pay per post account and then review my blog. And send me a comment so I can visit your blog too.

Pay Per Post is a community of blogs that encourages blogging and links it to advertising. Its a concept called blog marketing where bloggers help each other to review each others' blog and at the same time earn some revenue. If they are very interested to review other products and services on the internet as well, they would earn more revenue doing so, but they can choose to blog the same way they do. I am not very much driven by this urge to make money out of blogging. I think blogging for me is really to reflect, express myself and leave a legacy of daddy for my children or others to read one day. Its sad that a lot of things we do each day just stays forgotten if we do not reflect on it. But, when we do, we begin to learn from history and even teach others how to benefit from our lessons. But that being said, if my blogging platform is supported by other bloggers who want to review my blog, link me and bookmark my blog and read it regularly, it does encourage me to continue blogging. I think this then becomes a viable option to motivate bloggers to join pay per post if at all it encourages them to blog. Writing does do a lot of good to people and if in this age, blogging is the way to learn, I would support blogging full heartedly. Reflect on your history, and have an ambition to improve on it. Thats the foundation for success. Remember that God your creator is behind every step in your history and give thanks to God. And if getting paid is a motivation to get you started on blogging and reflecting, I think its not such a bad motivation either. Just reflect on the right things. Happy blogging and hoping to hear from you if you do review my posts.

Tip 5: Photo for your blogs dos and donts

Photos captures a million words. And often times, we wished we had captured many sentimental moments in our family but did not. Hence, having a camera nearby always is pretty handy. But I realised what we deem special and proud of ourselves may be different one day to our children who may find it inappropriate. So, the rule of the thumb when posting photos of your baby on the internet is to avoid excesses and only the necessary. I often make a point to censor the photos when necessary too. Yes daddies, its your blog and you can do whatever you want since you are the head of the household. But a Japanese principle of respecting everyone holds true and I think I will try to respect my child's future point of view and preferences even though as a baby its not fully developed yet.

I often times ensure I save the photos that I edit for censoring so that I always made a copy of the original photo. Then I rename that copy with a symbol that has undergone edit or censoring. This hopefully saves me any lawsuits in the future for infringing a person's privacy. But I am sure if we communicate well, our children will know we mean well and is all excited being a daddy, especially for the first time. Holding life in your hands is a very special moment. You want to value it, protect it, nurture it and love a new life deeply. And what better way to capture these moments as you do.

(Photo shows Haruka at 1 hour old.)

Tip 4: A blogging daddy reflects on parenting

I have to admit to be less of a blogger previously as I was debating the need to keep my life private and be less judged by others. But a dad is a public figure in his home at least. And with blogging kids in the near future, its better to keep the records straight early on in your parenthood. In this information age, its no knowing what petty details are sought after or if you need to protect yourselves against a lawsuit in the future. :) As blogging enters every sphere of life be it, professional work blogs, hobby blogs, travel blogs and personal blogs - a daddy/parent blog is becoming necessary and probably much expected by the next generation of kids. As these days, blogs are becoming more specialized as much as all of life is, its a good practice to start a blog just on parenting or at least most of parenting.

I have been a strong proponent of "reflection on action" which leads to better action and have written an international research paper on it even. When we blog, we reflect upon our conduct and practices and even publish it for others to comment and further contribute towards improved conduct and practices. But, more so the act of reflecting and praying over it helps us to mentally evaluate how we plan to get more out of our daily experiences. Besides, learning from history is one of the two components of success. The other one being to have a desire and ambition to improve and to create something better for the world. And blogging can document these reflections and aspirations as an inspiration for children to read one day and learn and understand their daddy better and seek after success. Start blogging today. I probably started a little too late and have missed many tips in the first few weeks that I could not recollect now. Better late than never. And, never say never.