Someone once compared a pastor of a church with a blogger. He estimated that a pastor needs 20-30 staff to help run a church that spreads its message to a congregation of 2,000 people, once a week. In comparison, an average blogger can reach an audience of 500 people per day. Most times, this represents the efforts of only one blogger, without any staff. How’s that for reach vs efforts?

Over the last month, I was contacted by the PR teams of YTL and Maxis to cover the Yes4G launch and review the new HTC HD7 Windows phone. With little effort, these corporate giants are able to leverage on the strength of bloggers and their respective networks to their advantage.

Maxis places a lot of emphasis on their reviewers programme and aptly calls it Maxis10. They select 10 key influentials, allow them to review cutting edge soon-to-be-released phones and let them keep the phones, subject to several conditions. Oftentimes, this selected group spend hours upon hours crafting blog posts, videos, photos and social media postings, thereby increasing visibility and anticipation for the devices.

Here’s the Maxis10 section on their official Facebook page – right now, they’re looking for reviewers for the HTC Desire Z.

Here’s a few of the Maxis10 squad who were selected to review the HTC HD7 phone (photo by Maxis).

From left: Alex TheBackpackr (ME!), Nicole Msxeroz Chua, Saimatkong Tian Leong, Effi Obefiend Saharudin

Here’s an example of what it looks like after the functionality is enabled.

It’s a pretty straightforward process, really.

Step one: Click on “Add New” under the Plugins section, then type in “facebook social plugins”.

Step two: Locate the plugin that is by Olivier Lussier and click Install.

Step three: You may be prompted for your FTP details. Key them in and proceed.

Step four: Click Activate. Now, click on FB Social Settings in the left bar, under Settings.

Step five: The rest should be fairly self-explanatory. Select where you would prefer the “Like” buttons to appear, and you’re done!

And thus, a new chapter for thebackpackr.com unfolds – I vow to blog more regularly and talk about topics that will really be relevant for those interested in anything creative, technology and business.

Any feedback or suggestions you’d like to give me?

OLD AND CLUTTERED

NEW AND IMPROVED!

Well, well, ladies and gentlemen… we are at the advent of yet another year. ’tis the time to make new resolutions and decide how we’re going to change for the better.

As I was perusing the Twittersphere (as I seemingly always do), I spotted a tweet by @GodsMac that talked about the idea of showcasing a photo a day of the life around you. He calls it Project 365. I thought, that’s pretty easy to do… and these days, with all the technology freely available, we can SURELY achieve that easily, right? (and yes, I may be dead wrong!).

Anyhow, I think I’ll give it a shot and use whatever means I have to share a photo a day with the world. I’m not going to go down the path of using a DSLR, but rather whatever implements I have (which probably spells out i-P-h-o-n-e). After all, setting the bar overly high will make it counterproductive, in my experience thus far.

I think I’ll stick with using Facebook to publish my photos, and once a month, I’ll create a montage of photos and post them here. This beats writing a diary (or even blogging, for that matter!).

Will you join me on this endeavour? So far, I’ve had some response from the Twittersphere on who will embark on this too.

Share your pictures with me (send me your URL whether Facebook / Flickr / etc), and I’ll be happy to highlight them here on a monthly basis too.

Here’s a few links to the homes of several Project 365ers. Leave a comment here if you’d like me to add your link here.

@andychin – andychin365.posterous.com

@annarina – Flickr

@astherlau – Facebook

@ben_israel – Facebook

@chaiyenw – chaiyen.blogspot.com

@chiayi91 – chiayi365.blogspot.com

Debbie Ng – Facebook

@edwintcg – Facebook

@ericcheong – Facebook

kankai – Flickr

@joycescapade – joycescapade.posterous.com

@leviasher – Facebook

@lucidconspiracy – lucid365.blogspot.com

@meiyingt – veraikon.wordpress.com

Mollytail – molytail365.blogspot.com

@petrinalee – petrina.posterous.com

@ProPhotoSafari – prophotosafari.com

@qwertyjuan – juan365.posterous.com

@rickrduncan – digitalredeye.com

@ShootDiva – Facebook

@sivinkit – Facebook

@the_boggler – Facebook

@TheBackpackr – Facebook

@yongschew – parenthood-adventure.blogspot.com

I kept getting the same error over and over again, and decided there’s a better way of overcoming this problem. Thanks to Nazham, he had some pointers on his blog to share on how you can edit the file (/wp-admin/includes/file.php) and modify this line:

$response = wp_remote_get($url, array(’timeout’ => 30));

to increase the timeout to something longer like 120.

However, this method apparently is overwritten when you upgrade your WordPress installation in the future. Felix Ker has a plugin that permanently fixes this problem, perhaps you could try it out instead.

Oftentimes, I feel there has been a death of new content and many just try to hop onto the bandwagon of another site, and harness traffic based on certain keywords and content. Regurgitation of the same is really not very cool, if you ask me.

(Image source: sxc.hu)

I’ve read articles and been inspired to craft a blog post based on it, but with a mash up of my thoughts and that from other sites. That is still original in nature, due to the research that has been put into it and is different from a pseudo-replicated-story. But what we’re seeing these days is somewhat wholesale copying (almost like what every university student used to do), but with changing the sentence structures, so that they are not so easily detected if certain phrases were pasted into Google!

Boy, you almost see a transformation from sentences such as “ImageShack Launches Mediocre TwitPic Alternative” to “Mediocre TwitPic Alternative Launched by TwitPic“!

Perhaps old-school creativity and the passion for writing has been lost. OR, bloggers feel very pressured to deliver article after article and they are already sapped dry. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d prefer to have less frequent articles, but genuine ones that weren’t almost copied wholesale from another site.

Don’t plagiarise, strategise! (Gee, is that a corny quote?)

Then, spend some time reading the official WordPress upgrade guide which is found here.

It took me about 30 minutes to read up about the process, deactivate my existing plugins, backup all the necessary files, download the new latest.tar.gz file, I was off on my SSH spree to decompress and copy over the necessary files, while preserving my original theme and customizations.

I forgot to take a screen capture of The Backpackr backend before upgrading, so I grabbed one off my company’s blog site. This is how it looks before the upgrade – fairly clean, but quite severely lacking in navigation, hence the need to install third party tools to improve admin menus.

And ta daaa, the ALL-NEW-AND-IMPROVED WordPress 2.7 – one of the most major changes is really the user interface. They’ve spent a lot of time noting down the common paths that bloggers take and made them handy, with less clicks to get to. The Dashboard on the left is really nifty too with nice new javascripty sliders. Bravo, WordPress…. BRAVO!

As I was writing this post, I already noticed they have improved the image upload mechanism. Previously, when you select insert image at full-size, they LIE… they still try to squeeze you into some WordPress-thinks-you-need-500-x-400-size or something. Now I seemingly have power to go full-size and REALLY have wide images without tweaking the HTML behind it.

Other functionality that is advantageous to the blog administrator is the ability to upgrade WordPress with a click and a little typing, rather than having to download and manually upgrade it like how I did. It’ll save you a good 20 minutes, at least. I haven’t tested this feature yet, obviously… as there aren’t any upgrades to be had yet.

Here’s a snippet from the WordPress blog that I thought was interesting.

The Story Behind 2.7

The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.

I’ve been commenting on blogs for awhile now and wondered how these people just seem to have their pictures pop-up everywhere. Surely they can’t have uploaded their pictures onto every person’s blog, right? Duh, stupid question!

Anyhow, the answer is really simple – get a GRAVATAR. That stands for GLOBALLY-RECOGNIZED-AVATARS. WOW… what a great idea. So here I am traipsing over to www.gravatar.com (incidentally, they share the same database as WordPress, and if you have a WordPress account, you can log right in) to get myself an avatar.

Yup, go choose a suave picture of yourself, and send it to the server. Your email address is now associated with that image, and when you go onto a WordPress / Blogspot site and leave a comment, your picture will automagically appear if the blog owner enables gravatar support! Amazing, eh?!

For those geeks who want to know how it works, I did a tad bit of reading, and in a nutshell, each blog engine encrypts your email address with something called an MD5 encryption method (the FBI/CIA folks probably created it… hah), and then sends the information in the form of the img src tag to the gravatar servers, which then return the associated image! That’s quite a brilliant idea, and your email address never gets submitted directly to their servers.

Go, get yourself a gravatar today and look cool-er!

You don’t want your blog to look like a plain Jane one, so get cracking, and select a happening design theme, download it and install. Here’s an introductory chat about themes and plugins.

This clip does not cover the process of installing themes, but here’s a video clip by Steve Dougherty that illustrates in step-by-step form how to do it.

As for installing plugins, you could take a look at a step-by-step guide I’ve written on how to do so. It’s really dead easy.

Alright, have fun exploring WordPress even further!

Most plugins are free – a good place to start downloading them from is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Step-by-step walkthrough to install a WordPress plugin

1. Download the plugin you wish to install. Unzip it on your machine.

2. Open your FTP client (Filezilla – highly recommended, and free!)

3. Connect to the hosting server (your webhost should have given you the FTP information, or else shoot them in the foot)

4. Once connected, look for the wp-content folder, double click on it. Then look for the plugins folder – that is where you will transfer the downloaded plugin to. Double click on the plugins folder and you should at least see “akismet” which is a default plugin supplied by WordPress.

5. Upload the directory that was created when you unzipped the plugin earlier. You can right click on it, and select Upload.

6. Once uploaded, we need to log into the WordPress administrative Dashboard and click on Plugins in order to activate it.

7. In my case, I’m installing a plugin I bought for USD1 called Ajax Comments. As such, look for the header Inactive Plugins, and hit the Activate link.

8. That’s it, really. But for some more complex plugins, you may have to configure them further. Click on the Settings tab which is on the administrative Dashboard and you’ll see the name of the plugin that you installed. Tweak to size, and Save!