The Construct

This blog has over five hundred posts already – a collection of my more than five years in the blogosphere. I’ve grown quite content with its low-profile as it’s not really my intention to publicize nor monetize this.

Ever since I applied the premium WPUnlimited theme, however, my blog suddenly got some pretty good traffic from search engines mostly because of the out of the box search engine optimization that it provided.

I never really minded that until I swapped out the theme to Compositio. I like the design way better than WPUnlimited. Even though WPUnlimited is customizable, I just don’t have enough talent to make it look this awesome. Because of the swap, I lost all SEO functionalities and to what horror. My blog traffic from search engines has been quartered!

Just as an experiment, I toyed with SEO on this blog. Since Composition doesn’t have WPUnlimited’s superb SEO, I opted to slap on SEO Title Tag and Platinum SEO plug-ins. Combined, they pretty much cover the functionalities I needed.

I just finished customizing titles and slugs of various posts. I know I’m sacrificing the already-indexed pages by changing these details but what the heck. Let’s see how this changes things.

For the longest time, this blog has gone for that minimalist look. Even with the all-powerful WPUnlimited theme, I managed to strip it down to a plain white structure with orange accents. Maybe it’s about time I try to add a bit of dynamism in this blog’s spartan feel.

There are quite a lot of stunning themes out there but I’d say that this is the first time when a blog theme’s looks convinced me to switch themes. This lovely blue and white theme is called Compositio crafted by none other than blog design savant, Design Disease.

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April has been quite the month for Internet memes. Latest issue to hit my relevant sphere – the NIP cat killer.

Short version: A student at the NIP of UP Diliman murdered a sort of college pet cat all because he has a seething hatred for the species. Story leaked to the Internet. Kid even posted a nonchalant “confession” on his blog. He even says it’s not the first (and last!) time he’ll be murdering a cat. Now, everyone’s just out for his blood.

I first got the story from former student BA, an NIP student himself. You can check out these two Plurk threads from dementia (here and here) for the updates.

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Check out the sidebar of this blog and you’d see a message to the Grammar gestapo. Some do find it ironic that, despite being a lecturer with the English Department, I would avoid discussions of grammar correctness and go around prescribing that people read style manuals and grammar guides.

To explain that bit, I would tell people how I adhere to a descriptivism as far as linguistics and language studies are concerned. Even with Systemic-Functional Grammar and the Communicative Approach, I still even have my own arguments to raise on the issue of standards. As far as clear cut rules defining what is correct and incorrect use of the language, I’ve thrown that philosophy out the window years ago.

Oh how I remember the debates we’ve had in our classes regarding the descriptivism versus prescriptivism. Yoda, in a prescriptivist’s point of view, is but a bumbling midget who should be trapped in carbonite forever. To a descriptivist, he’s a Master Jedi of an unknown race. Who knows if English is but a foreign language to him? His grasp of the language could probably then be considered admirable.

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When I started out this blog, I searched the cheapest web hosting package available. Like most newbies on a budget, I was led to Philhosting who claims to be the number 1 hosting company in the country or something. I didn’t bother with that since everyone claims that they’re number 1 anyway. What caught my eye was the price they charge for what other hosts provide (domain, storage, and bandwidth) at twice the cost.

For nearly two years I endured constant downtimes and horrible technical support. For you guys hosted by Philhosting, I’m sure you know the horror stories of finding your site down without any prior notice when you most wanted to blog. Try contacting their technical support and they’d reply with technobabble that wouldn’t fix your problem. Try calling their number and they basically don’t answer. This list can just go on and on. I have another story about them but I’ll reserve that for another time.

Getting tired of their horrible service, I finally decided early this year to move this blog to a new host (MSWeb). They might charge around Php 500 more in a year for what I was getting with Philhosting but having great people to talk to and get warned days before server maintenance and downtime is enough for that added price, I believe. Amazingly, my uptime meter almost always at 100%. And by God, MSWeb did apologize once for not being able to fix thing on time even if it’s just a spillover of an hour or so! I remember Philhosting always acting high and mighty for failing to deliver just about every time. Good thing I now have the luxury of spending that additional Php 500 a year.

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