Just wanted to wish each and everyone of my readers, a very Happy New Year!

I am so thankful for the support and encouragement you have shown. I have had so much fun last year blogging here  I have gained many new readers as well as made some good friends.

If you are reading this post, I invite you to come out of hiding and say hi. We have a very friendly community here and everyone loves to help one another.

I am not too big into resolutions as I forget about it in a few days anyways. I do admire people who can make one and follow it up throughout the year.

Do you have a new year resolution?

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Ever since I have started blogging, I have been amazed at how helpful, friendly and nice my fellow bloggers are. I have never been turned down a favor or help. Blogging must bring the best out of us.

Jeanne Dininni of Writers Notes has been kind enough to award me an awesome award just in time for the weekend! NICE MATTERS Award! The concept behind that is you could have great content. But, what makes a great blog even more personable is if the author is kind, helpful and respect their readers comments and opinions.

Check out Jeanne’s blog and you will find that she absolutely deserved this award. I have to give this to a few fellow bloggers who have been really nice to me. You guys rock the blogging world!
Please don’t feel that you must pass this on or that this is a meme.

• Stephen - Scratch99
• Garry - GarryConn.com
• Brown - Brown Thoughts
• Mark - MeAndMyDrum
• Kyle - Kyle’s Cove
• Shankar - Shankar Ganesh
• Tish - ChattieKat

Thank you

In the spirit of the Christmas season, I just wanted to thank everyone who reads my blog and motivating me to keep going forward. Also, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to visit ShanKri-la’s page at RSSHugger and stumbling it.

ShanKri-la is now at Number 6 in the top 100 blogs for December! We couldn’t have done this without you! So, thank you! We are just 14 views short of making it to Number 4!

Also, I wanted to thank FreoReviews, About Blog Contests, Free Flip Vid Cameras, Free Site Reviews for getting in my ScratchBack Topspots! It is much appreciated.

I have some juicy good reads coming up tomorrow and a smashing new post I am really excited about on Monday! Have a great weekend everyone.

Just wanted to add a quick note thanking our first tip from FreoReviews. Congrats on snagging the first of the TopSpots after I reduced the price tip from $4.00 to $2.00.

If you read this on a RSS reader, you would have to click over to ShanKri-la to look at the prominent placement, ScratchBack widget gets on the sidebar. If you don’t want to, no worries. This is what it looks like.

I love the new Christmas theme they have released and I think it would garner more attention with its colors.

I have been tied up bad last couple of days and I will be posting more on topic tomorrow. I have some good posts coming up. Stay tuned!

I good friend of mine Brown of Brown Thoughts recently conferred me this awesome award - Be The Blog. It was originally created by another great friend of mine Mark Sierra of Me And My Drum. I am flattered and humbled that such fine people recognize and appreciate my humble efforts. Thanks Brown!

Be The Blog award can be summarized in Mark’s own words as:

That phrase stuck with me because I think that really sums up what a successful blogger does. And what I mean by successful is that they make it their own, stay with it, are interactive with their readers, and just plain have fun.

Mark is not only talented at creating such a great award but he time and again has impressed me with his graphic skills. Check out this awesome looking award for a proof!

It is meant to take blogging to the next level and that is exactly my plan for the new year! Luckily, I haven’t lost focus on what I set out to do with this blog, that is to help others find good stuff in the internet.

You can read my earlier Why Do I Blog? post or my About page to get an idea if you are new here.

In the coming year, I hope to provide more useful info that you and I can use it in our daily lives without having to understand the technical mambo jambo. Who said geeks are the only ones who can have fun with internet?

Now, I would like to present this award to a few people who have inspired me, guided me and shown me the fun of blogging and conitnue to inspire me.

Yes it’s you - Garry of Garry Conn, Kyle of Kyle’s Cove, Chris of Blog-op, IngaOz of NiggyBuzz, Stephen of Scratch99 and Matthew of Blog About Your Blog.

You are all the definition of ‘Be The Blog‘!

We had a wonderful participation for this contest even though the prize was modest. I would like to heartily thank every one of you who took the time to enter the contest. Thanks for the blog posts. Thanks for the stumbles. And thanks for subscribing to our feed!

Here are the list of participants who posted about this contest in their blogs

1. About Blog Contests - gLF
2. A Book Worm’s Diary - aBookWorm
3. Contest Beat - Matt
4. Contester - Vijay
5. MeandMyDrum - Mark Sierra
6. ProBlogContester
7. My Blog Contest
8. Sephy’s Platzish
9. International Freebies - Mary
10. Contestu - Sensei
11. When Silence Speaks - Mitch
12. Amanda
13. My Blog Contests - Shrihari
14. Blog Contests on the Net
15. Blog Contest Central
16. An Army Wife’s Life
17. Laura William’s Musings
18. Mr. Prizes
19. Reviews & Contests
20. The Link Bait
21. NannaBees Life
22. Untwisted Vortex - RT
23. Blog About Your Blog - Matthew
24. Link and Earn
25. RevieWOW - Vincent Chow
26. TechXtreme - Abhinav Sood
27. Niggy Buzz - IngaOz
28. Making Money Through Internet - Married Melody
29. Chief Family Officer - Cathy
30. Ramblifications - Prince John

Diwali 2007 Giveaway Winners

1. gLf of AboutBlogContest - Wins the 1GB USB Drive
2. Sensei of Contestu - Wins the 1GB SD Photo Loader Card

Congratulations gLf & Sensei! Please use the contact form to send me your mailing address and I’ll ship them right away.

I have never shipped to Italy (gLf) before so this is a first! :-)  Once again, a big thank you for everyone who participated and it was fun having everyone over here!

For those celebrating Diwali, we wish you an extraordinary one!

Thanks IngaOz of NiggyBuzz for alerting me to the problem with our Contact form. I had mentioned earlier that the Diwali Contest ends tonight at midnight EST. But, since I had just posted the secret word in the RSS feed last night and the contact form malfunctioning, I am extending the deadline to email me the secret word to tomorrow Midnight EST.

The problem appeared with me trying to insert the secret word into the RSS Feed footer and messing the header code in a crazy way. I sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and hope this doesn’t dampen your Diwali spirit!

Instead, I would love to see you claim your 2 entries for having subscribed to our RSS feed. As of today, according to the FeedBurner chiclet there is 224 of you who are eligible for this contest.

Good luck to everyone and I will be posting the winner on Thursday, Nov 8th instead with links to all those who spread the word about the contest.

BlogsWeLuv is a blog dedicated to discovering new and quality blogs. Mike & Tish co-founded this awesome idea and have built it into a great place to find new blogs. A good thing has gotten even better with talented contributors like my friends Garry, Mark, and Bush.

Garry has been a guiding force for me ever since I started blogging and I am regular at his resourceful blog that is chock full of blogging tips. Garry has given me a great honor by showcasing and writing a great review about ShanKri-la at BlogsWeLuv. So, if you’d like to see what he has to say about ShanKri-la, you can take a look at his review here.

I had done a 10 Questions interview earlier at BlogsWeLuv back in August. Now, looking back I am assured that I haven’t strayed from my vision of where this blog is headed.

Thanks Garry for taking the time to write such a great review.

Google PageRank Update

If you are a blogger you are probably tired of reading Google PageRank update stories. For those unaware, Google has penalized a lot of blogs, some selling links, some part of blog networks and some for Google-only-knows reasons. As much as I rejoice having moved from PageRank 3 to 4 this weekend, I am saddened to see a lot of quality blogs that have taken a hit. Especially a few blogs authored by my friends have taken a hit and by no means it means their quality is any lesser than before. When the dust settles after this update, may be we can all learn a few things from this major series of events that is going to be sliced and diced by SEO analysts.

I think this just goes out to stress the importance of focusing on providing quality reading material for your readers. No one else has control over that except me. My PageRank or Alexa score might drop or rise, but as long as I share useful stuff, I know I can count on your support.