This blog has closed. Sorry!

The Blog of a Passionate Programmer

July 3rd, 2007 by Spud Oregon

There’s nothing very personal on Enrii.blog. No “about” page, not even a name that I could find, but that didn’t stop me from subscribing to one of the net’s better kept secrets. Clicking through a path of links landed me on the owner’s former blogspot site, Life As Programmer, and the profile there gave a few clues as to who the blogger is, and what his blog is about.

Being a programmer, one has to know programming, operating systems, networking, databases, web designs, and the list goes on. In this blog, I’m going to share my experiences and views as I explore the ICT world as a programmer.

I also discovered that this young Malaysian programmer goes by the name, EngLee, and is a passionate programmer, camper, hiker, and marathon runner - when he’s not suffering from knee injuries! Until May 2006, EngLee kept a personal journal of his “path“, in which he talks about his running expolits (literally), university graduation, and entry into the IT industry. Now, it seems all his blogging is focused on Enrii.blog.

The first thing that you’ll notice is EngLee’s custom-made, clean and delicious, All Blue Theme, which he put together over a year ago after his move to Wordpress. Recently, he updated his theme to make it more suitable for Google Adsense, which is so well blended, you’d hardly notice it was there!

Speaking of Adsense, EngLee seems to love it. He’s got a bunch of ugly old blogspot pages which seem to serve no purpose other than to attract clicks, but I’ll forgive him for those since he’s been quite reserved on his current blog. Way back in September 2005, he posted a nice little snippet of PHP which can be used to prevent Adsense from tracking ad impressions when you visit your own blog. Depending on how often you look at your own site, this could make quite a difference to your Adsense statistics: lower impressions / same number of clicks = higher click-through rate! Hmm… it sounds great in theory, but somehow I don’t think you’d be earning much if most of your traffic is you!

As an alternative to Adsense, EngLee applied for YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network), but since he’s not a U.S citizen with a social security number, he’ll have to wait another decade like the rest of us. It’s very sad to think that YPN has been in beta for so long, and is seemingly no closer to going international after all this time. Ho hum…

I first came across Enrii.blog when searching for ways to check blog compatibility with mobile phones, and was more recently interested in his post about showing your website structure as a graph. I decided to follow his recommendation and see what Nice4Rice would look like when depicted as a colorful, fireworks display. 

Some of EngLee’s blog is a bit too technical for me, but among all the tech tips are some great little posts that make it worth subscribing to, even if you’re not much of a programmer. He once talked about how Google has officially become a verb, and can be used in the sentence: I used Yahoo to google for books! EngLee also pointed out a fun site which lets you upload a photo of your face and have it put on the front of a dollar bill, among other currencies.

Since I’m using Wordpress to host Nice4Rice, I have the choice of Akismet or Spam Karma to keep those menacing comments at bay. Actually, I’ve always used Spam Karma since it was much easier to set up than searching for an API key to use with Akismet (not that I can actually remember trying). Anyway, it’s reassuring to see that EngLee was getting a bunch of spam when using Akismet, and eventually moved over to Spam Karma. If you’re not happy with Akismet, despite everyone trumpeting it’s effectiveness, perhaps you should try Spam Karma, too? 

With all that said, take a look at Enrii.blog and see what you think. If you like it, maybe a bowl of rice would be nice? 

Rice:

Posted on July 3rd, 2007 in Web Development.
Comments: 4

Voting has been disabled for all posts since this site's closure on 9/13/2007.

• Possibly related:
• Golden Rice Bowl - July
• Too Nice for Rice
• MyAvatars stack overflow error
• Meaningful Work Rocks!
• About Nice4Rice.com

4 Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.