I’ve had a couple of contests here last year but this is the first contest I am sponsoring.

My wife Shriya & her friend Nithu are running their first ever contest in SpicyTasty.com - Fortune Cooking Contest!

What’s Fortune Cooking?

Fortune Cooking Contest!!

Most of us having varying degree of affinity to zodiac signs. The idea behind the contest is

We have matched different zodiac signs with different food items. All you have to do is pick a sign and prepare a dish. The sign you pick can be yours or your family member’s or friend’s or even your pet’s.

What can you win?

2 Winners will be picked randomly and awarded these cool prizes!

The First prize will be a beautiful jewel set ($25 value) sponsored by Lakshaya.com - A Fashion in a Click. Will be shipped to wherever you are.

The Second Prize will be a $20 Amazon Gift Certificate sponsored by (shriya’s hubby) Shankrila.com. Yes, that’s me!

How do I enter?

I won’t ruin the fun of reading the whole juicy details at the contest post. But, you can easily enter if you have a blog or not. And it’s open to everyone and the jewel set will be shipped anywhere you are!

How hard is it to share a recipe of a dish you make everyday and maybe share a few pictures of it?

Contest Deadline

Contest ends June 1 2008 midnight EST. Winners will be announced June 6th at SpicyTasty.com and will have 48 hours to claim the prize.

So make sure you grab SpicyTasty’s RSS feed!

No, my wife didn’t make me post this and yes, I will get some brownie points if you enter the contest!

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!

It’s been a while I have been on Fark. Everytime I stop by, I just laugh my ass off. Here are a few headlines that caught my eyes today:

• Dumbass: If you plan to shoplift from a store, be sure you don’t leave behind any evidence that can tie you to the crime. Like your son. Awkward [link] - oh crap!
  
• PSA: Apparently needs to be said: If two strangers in a parking lot offer you “a large sum of money” in return for your savings account information, do not give it to them [link] - this one needs to go into the dumbass category
  
• Interesting: Remember how those nifty $50 fluorescent bulbs were going to solve America’s dependency on foreign oil? Turns out they will actually kill us while we sleep [link] - not everything is as it seems to be.
  
• Amusing: Pics of what happens when an ATM malfunctions and starts giving out twice the amount of cash customers request. “It makes up for all the bank charges, I guess” [link] - I really wouldn’t want to be the guy/gal who programmed that machine. Check out the pictures of the long line at that ATM. I know i would have been there in that line.
  
• Silly: Man illegally poaches deer from his bathroom. And that’s not even the weird part [link] - wow!
  

Get NCAA Scores by RSS

March madness is on and you can keep track of NCAA scores during the day via RSS feeds from a cool service, TotallyScored.com. You could get the scores by Sport or by team too if you don’t care about rest of the sports or teams than the one you are interested in.

The WWW Blog Contest

It’s been a while since I posted about contests. The WWW Blog is hosting a cool contest with prizes worth over $350 in value! This includes some cool cash prizes from sponsors, a chance to win some advertising space, some hosting packages, etc. Chetan is a dental student but has an interest in SEO, blogs and even a bunch of web directories as well. I like his style of writing and have subscribed to his RSS feed as he talks a bit about technology, mac apps, seo etc. Pretty much the stuff I like to read about. The contest ends on march 23rd and make sure you get your entries in before that.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Extend Firefox 2 was a contest run to see who develops the best Firefox Extensions from around the world. Obviously with my addiction for new Firefox extensions, I checked out the winners and decided to dedicate this week’s Picks of the Week post to these great extensions.

3 Grand Prize Winners

1. MiniMap Sidebar Extension by Tony Farndon (UK)
2. SamePlace by Massimiliano Mirra (Italy) - my favorite!
3. Shareaholic by Jay Meattle (US)

12 Runner Ups

1. All in One Sidebar - Ingo Wennemaring
2. Boox - Nicolas Martin
3. del.icio.us IncSearch - Hirokazu Onozato
4. Fast Dial - Sergey Suhoruchkin
5. FireGestures - Taiga Gomibuchi
6. FootieFox - Boris Ruf
7. qtl - Gilad Kutiel
8. Shrinkify - Mark Muday
9. Table2Clipboard - Davide Ficano
10. TwitterFox - Kazuho Okui
11. Update Scanner - Pete Burgers
12. URL Fixer - Christopher Finke

The grand prize winners each get a 15″ MacBook Pro & some other awesome goodies and the runner ups get some nice gifts as well. Check out this contest winners announcement post for more details.

Of the extensions mentioned, I stumbled across SamePlace and started using it and was just blown away by the elegance and the ease it gives using an IM client. It is far from perfect yet but nevertheless is a great extension to check out. Especially, if you have a wide screen monitor and don’t mind having a sidebar. I will soon be reviewing it here if you’d rather hold off before trying it.

Extend Firefox 3 is getting ready to launch in early March and I am eager to see what kind of prizes they offer this time and what kind of cool extensions people come up with.

Happy Valentine’s Day to my beloved readers!

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.

$200 Cash Contest from Lifejotter.org

I made a good friend from helping Bunk move his WordPress.com blog to his self hosted WordPress blog, Lifejotter.org. Bunk talks about lifestyle design and the art of making life work to your advantage. He makes convincing and insightful points in every post he makes and I totally recommend his blog if the topic is of interest to you.

I am actually sorry that I didn’t post this earlier as I wanted to but I guess it’s better late than never.

Bunk is running a $200 cash contest to kick off his new blog location and the contest ends on December 2nd. As runner ups you could win a copy of one of two excellent books Lifehacker by Gina Trapani or Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale Evans.

You could participate in one of 3 ways but visit his post for full details.

• Subscribe to Lifejotter.org feed (1 entry)
• Join his MyBlogLog community (2 entries)
• Get others to join Lifejotter MyBlogLog community (3 entries). (I’d appreciate it if you drop me a line here if you join his community after reading it here.. no worries if you don’t! )

As you can see, joining and getting people to join Lifejotter community has its biggest rewards. With just a few days to go and just a handful of members in the community gives you a great chance at winning this contest. You are going to want to subscribe to his blog’s feed after you read his posts, so why not get an extra entry for it as well?

Shake It Up $100 Contest

The Writer’s Manifesto Blog is giving away a $100 to a lucky winner in a fun contest. There are more than one ways to win this contest and you have to check out this contest entry for complete details! If making short videos are your thing, you have a great shot at this but the entries aren’t limited to just that. Here are a few ways to enter the contest:

• Make a 30 second video about The Writers Manifesto Blog and post it in your blog linking back to the contest (30 secs) - 10 points
• Post the same video on YouTube - 5 points
• Write a 250 word review about the blog and link to the contest & the blog home page - 8 points
• Write a post about the contest linking to the contest post & the blog home page - 8 points
• Subscribe to their RSS feed - 4 points
• Write a review on the author’s StumbleUpon profile - 3 points
• Leave a comment with your entry links - 1 point

Contest winner will be drawn on November 30. So, what are you waiting for? How many points can you score for your chance at a hot $100?

Link Bait Me $100 Contest

Join JoeTech.com running a fun and simple to enter contest giving away $100 cash. All you have to do is to join LinkBaitMe’s 3 MyBlogLog Communities to get 3 entries and if you post about the contest in your blog, you get 10 more entries! I wish him good luck winning the MyBlogLog contest and you can also help him win by posting in your blog. Contest ends November 30th. So hurry!

Freezing Hot $400 SEO Package Contest

Freezing Hot, an Internet marketing company specializing in small business seo and ppc management, is running a contest and giving away a search engine optimization package worth $400 to the winner. Check out the contest on their internet marketing blog and subscribe to the RSS feed. And be sure to check out Contest Blogger, the number one source for prizes and free samples. Contest ends December 18th.

Making Sales Making $100 Contest

Making Sales Making Money is blog is all about home based business opportunities and is running a contest where you can win $100. Check out Contest Blogger again for details about this contest as well as many other sweepstakes. Don’t forget to get an extra entry by subscribing to the blog offering the cash prize. This contest ends December 3 and don’t forget to leave a comment in the Contest Blogger post as well as subscribe to their RSS feed.

I hope I am not annoying you with these contest posts even though I try to keep it down to once in every 2 weeks. I see it as a two way street mentioning these here. This gives me a shot at winning some of these prizes as well as you get to learn about them.

Now, on with our regular programming!

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.