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.

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!

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.

I am sure you have entered our little Diwali 2007 Giveaway. If you’d like to give your shot at some some cash prizes, I have some more contests for you.

• Blog About Your Blog Contest: Blog About Your Blog is running a Bidvertiser contest that ends Oct 29. There are some cool cash prizes ($100, $50, $50) to win plus a chance to win some free reviews. You need to subscribe to their RSS feed to gain 1 entry and make a post like to gain 2 more entries. Winning some hard cash is always great!
• Romance Tracker Contest: Romance Tracker has a cool contest where you can $100 paypal cash by simply subscribing to their RSS feed (1 entry) or give them a link love with the anchor text ‘love’ from your blog to gain another entry. You can also get a free linkback from Contest Blogger for entering this contest.
• Gadgettastic Comptetion: Gadgettastic is giving away a free 3-month advertising spot on their site supposedly worth $1800. All you have to do is write about the contest in a few lines and link back to the contest post. Ends Oct 30.
• Win $50 Amazon GC: Macs Money Blog is offering a $50 Amazon GC. To enter you can blog about the contest and link to a FinanceFavorites.com with the same word as an anchor text to get 2 entries. You could also gain more entries by posting your finance favorites in their site. Winner will be chosen 1st week of November.
• Free Stuff Times Contest: Everyone loves free stuff. I trust Free Stuff Times for my daily dose of free stuff out there. Now, they are running their first contest and giving away some very cool prizes. You could win a gaming keyboard or a mouse or even a hard $50 cash prize. If you are the creative kind you have a better shot at winning an additional $50. Check it out today as the contest ends Oct 31.

Most of these are very simple to enter so don’t waste any time and enter them now. Oh yeah, wish me luck and good luck to you too!

It’s been a while since I participated in meme’s. I have tried to stay away from some for obvious reasons but when my friend Stephen Cronin of Scratch99 tagged me with the Blog Improvment Zone meme, I had to take it.

It couldn’t have been better timing to be tagged with a ”How Can I Improve My Blog‘ meme. I am just in the process of finishing an overhaul of ShanKri-la and I have made some improvemnts. I still do have a list of improvements I would like to work on in the coming weeks.

Improvements I just made

• Cleaner Layout: I think this layout is visually more appealing than the last theme. I was losing a bunch of above-the-fold space in the previous theme.
• SEO Benefits: My previous theme loaded the sidebar before the content area. This has some negative effects in terms of SEO and when I tinkered with changing the loading order, I managed to completely mess up the theme. Another ill-effect of that was that if one of the sidebar widgets like BlogCatalog took time to load, it appeared like ShanKri-la was loading real slow. With the new theme, even if it the zillion things in the sidebars took its sweet time to load, you will see the content right away.
• Customization: Because of the way the header graphics were used, customizing my header or other parts of my theme was harder than it should be. One of my big interests is in learning a little bit of web design and tinkering wtih ShanKri-la is my learning experience.
• Better Comments Section: The comment section is now much more easier on the eyes.

Improvements I would like to make

• Pillar posts: I would like to write a few pillar posts that would serve as a reference for myself as well as others.
• Increase RSS subscribers: I have been postponing running a contest to gain a little bit more exposure and increase .
• Comment Avatars: I would like to add a face to the commentators by implementing one of the Avatar plugins.
• SEO: The new theme instantly gives me some SEO benefits with the content area appearing before the sidebar. But, right now the pages have 2 H1 tags and I would like to remove the other. Also, the content headers and the sidebar headers are all H2 tags. I am planning on making the sidebar headlines to a H3 to emphasize the content title’s importance. With these and other changes, I hope to increase the search engine traffic.
• Monetizing: I haven’t made any serious attempts at monetizing ShanKri-la besides running Google AdSense. So far, my search engine traffic has been just around 20% of the total. With improved SEO, I hope to attract more search engine traffic. Plus, I am planning on looking at other monetizing options in the coming months. But, I am only looking at options that wouldn’t be interfering with your reading experience.With a predicted Google PageRank of 5, I was hoping to use services like ReviewMe, PayPerPost to write sponsored posts in between regular content. But, it looks like Google PR update may never come.
• Favicon: I would like to get a logo designed for ShanKri-la and get a favicon as well. Right now, you are just seeing the default favicon that came with the WP theme.

Now, since this is a meme I have to tag a few people to keep it going. Please feel free to ignore this tag if you don’t like participating or have already participated. I just think this is a good opportunity to look back at what you have accomplished and what kind of improvements you would like to make to your blog. There is something about writing things down for me, I usually get them done.

Now I would like to tag

• Mark of MeAndMyDrum
• Brown of Brown Thoughts
• Kyle of Kyle’s Cove
• Chris of Blog-Op
• Tish of ChattieKat

I have mentioned a few improvements that I think are important. But, what matters the most are the improvements you would like to see here. Let me know in the comments and it will not be falling in deaf ears.

I entered a few contests as you can read in this post to test my luck. It looks like the lady luck has shined on me today. I just found out that I have won a $50 BestBuy gift card at the LiveLearnInvest Blog contest.

Thanks to Kenric for hosting the contest and UltimateKilimanjaro for sponsoring the gift card!