Gonna party like it’s my bday

written on March 25, 2010 in Life

My roomie CK kindly reminded me the other day that I’m going to be turning 22 before any of them even turn 21…and guess what, today is the day! I remember I was super psyched last year when I finally turned 21¹, and went out 2 days in a row and got wasted. But this year, with so much going on in my life² and the fact that I’m turning old³, I’m just not in the mood to organize any crazy nights. But my amazing roomies JZ, CK, and HL planned out a little surprise for me just before midnight last night, complete with candles, cupcakes, brownies, the “happy birthday” song and lingerie⁴. It was very sweet to say the least, and we got to have some quality roomie bonding time over yummy desserts. But there are still more plans to come, as I desperately need to get out and unwind:

• going out karaoke-ing on Thursday night with some friends, which will probably end up with us singing Chinese oldies while drunk
• spending Friday afternoon hanging out with JB and catching up on life
• going out for some yummy Korean BBQ on Friday night? this one is still in the air
• going clubbing right afterwards with JZ and KQ

And somewhere in that schedule, I’ll need to squeeze in time to find the best regression model for predicting sale price of cameras on Ebay before Saturday 11am and reply to the many comments I’ve neglected on this blog. Um, good luck to me.

On a brighter note, here are the early birthday presents I got from my mommy and from FY:

Princess by Vera Wang - I got this from my mommy The scent is very sweet and girly, with a hint of sensuality to it.

Princess by Vera Wang solid perfume charm. This came with the perfume in a gift set. I really like the little crown charm on it!

J'adore by Dior from FY. It has a very feminine, sexy, and sophisticated scent. Also rated the #1 perfume every woman should have.

My fave WordPress plugins

written on March 17, 2010 in Blogging

Ok, seeing as how my head and heart is still lost on the dance floor, I really can’t be arsed to write out anything intellectual or enlightening. So uh, I’m just going to share with you all some of my favorite WordPress plugins¹, and why I think they’re awesome.

Post Snippets

Very useful if you have a lot certain codes that you use repeatedly in your posts, but you’re too lazy to type them out each time. For me, I use the <acronym> </acronym> for the people’s names in real life, and it’s a pain typing out the same description each time (as if I can remember them all), so with this plugin, I can add the code to the snippets repository and easily include it with one click when I need

Hide Posts

You can see it in action in my previous post about my crazy night out Basically, it allows you to hide a portion of your posts for registered users only. Since my private posts will usually be extremely long, this plugin gives the readers a small teaser, and they can decide if they want to register/login to view the post or not. I recommend using this plugin with Register Plus so you can get total control of who views your private posts.

Comment Reply Notification

I wrote a now obsolete post about improved comment notification via email a year ago, but this plugin does the job much better. Basically, I have it set up so that if the commenter is interested in getting an email when I reply, they can simply check the box at the end of the comment form, and they’ll receive an email with my reply when I get around to it

Platinum SEO Pack

Everyone recommends the All-in-one SEO Pack, which I also used before, but consider this plugin the All-in-one version, but on crack It has all the features of All-in-one, but a lot more. I mainly use it to hide my paid posts from search engines so I can avoid being Google bitch-slapped. If you do write paid posts, I’d highly recommend getting this plugin, and then reading my posts on how to hide paid posts from your feeds and how to hide them from your main page.

Post Avatar

No real use for this plugin, except for the fact that I like being able to include an avatar next to my posts This, and the friends only feature, are what I miss most from using LiveJournal, but with this plugin, I can have unlimited avatars! It’s easy to customize and use, no complicated coding needed.

Post Ideas+

Sometimes I’d have a bunch of ideas for posts, and other times, I’d be completely brain dead (which explains the fluctuation in my post frequencies). I use this plugin to jot down ideas for posts, and it shows up as a little widget right on my dashboard, so I can see it right away when I login. Very useful if you suffer spontaneous writer’s block like me.

What are some of your favorite, but lesser-known, WordPress plugins?

Is this what you are looking for?

written on March 11, 2010 in WWW

I was looking through my site tracker the other day, curious to see how people found this blog. Asides from the obvious, aka. links from other blogs, I also noticed that quite a bit of my visitors were referred here by search engine results. Of course, being the curious (I hate this part of me sometimes) person that I am, I checked to see what people searched for, and here is what I found:

• Super Girl

  According to Google, my site is the 3rd result if you search for “Super Girl”. But is this really what you were looking for, or did you just click this link out of curiosity? Either way, out of all my search engine referrals, almost half got here because they searched for this term.

• Blair Waldorf ‘s lingerie

  Apparently I’m not the only one infatuated with Blair’s choice of lingerie on Gossip Girl, because this is my second most popular search term. I don’t blame these people;  I used to be one of them, searching blindly for where I could buy something close to what B wore without breaking my wallet, until I found my way to Macy’s lingerie department, and that’s where you should go too if you’re stil searching

• fat smilies

  This one made me laugh, because I never knew there were actually things such as “fat” (or even obese) smilies. I thought I made up the term when I ranted about how people who were literally challenged liked giving their emoticons extra chins, hence making them appear fat. Well apparently these emoticons have a name now: fat smilies. Talk about stating the obvious

• digital perms

  Technically I never blogged about my digital perm, but I did share some great products for curly/wavy hair that I use. But in a nutshell, a digital perm basically gives you the curling iron curls, vs the I-just-got-struck-by-lightening poof of the traditional perm. It’s supposed to be less damaging, but that’s a bunch of BS because my hair pretty much died after my perm. I’m still in the painful process of nursing it back to life Oh well, at least the waves I got from my perm are pretty enough to make up for the damage.

• talking dirty

  I know I mislead some of my readers with my post about talking shit about others, but apparently it mislead a couple Googlers, who were actually trying to learn how to talk dirty to others. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t think I’ll ever write a tutorial on how to do that. Go download some pr0n¹ or better yet, read Cosmopolitan².

And that’s pretty much it. Talking dirty is about the most obscene search term I got on my list, and it’s not even that obscene at all. I was kind of hoping for something so absurd and out of this world so I could use a laugh and maybe write an entry about it. However, I did have someone search for “Jenny Wu Wingstranger” and find this blog. Stalker much?

Have you noticed any interesting search terms for your blog? If so, what are they?

Invasion of tweens and teens

written on March 6, 2010 in Blogging, WWW

The other day when I was bloghopping, I came upon this site, which features the top 100 youngest bloggers of the world. I’m not talking about 14-year olds who have a small personal site on Blogger, but informative niche blogs with hundreds of subscribers. When I think of informative niche blogs, I think of sites like Smashing Magazine and Six Revision, with articles written by professionals with years of experience, who are actually legal to drink and vote. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that there were so many niche blogs out there¹ written by kids who have yet to hit puberty.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying that tweens and teens are incompetent as bloggers or web designers, no. I know a couple 18-and-under people whose blog I frequently read and whose designs inspire me, and I’m sure the authors of the above blogs aren’t total twats either.  Heck when I was 14, my designs were mediocre at most and my blog entries were so bad that I can’t even stand re-reading them, so kudos to them for their achievements. But to me, the idea of following the blogging advice of a 12-year old boy²  is almost as ridiculous as taking relationship advice from my 13-year old male cousin. All I can think is, do they really know what they’re talking about? Maybe they do, but surely I can get more credible advice from someone who is older and more experienced, no?

It’s just like those tween/teen-run hosting sites that offer “unlimited” space and bandwidth all for $1/year³. Yeah it’s cheap and yeah you get everything those $5/month hosts offer, but is it reliable? I know I’d rather spend that extra $59/year to have a product that I know won’t screw me over without warning⁴. With informative blogs though, everything is free, so between the blog written by a 14-year old kid and one by a 30-year old web designer, wouldn’t you rather read and follow the advice of the latter? I’m not discriminating on age, but rather, on experience, and unfortunately, that’s something that can only be accumulated with time. To the tweens and teens running those blogs, give yourself a pat on the back, but you’ve still got a long way to go.

What do you all think of the emerging trend (or what I call invasion) of the tweens and teens outside of circle of personal blogs (aka. hosting sites, niche blogs, etc)?