Laingan.com

I started my Laingan.com personal Blog on 25 August 2008 and it’s one year already. Just how time flies? This “My Piece of Sky Blog” turns 1 year old today.

I have written 252 Blog posts including this one. It is not unexpected for me to have come this far in updating my WordPress Blog quite regularly. Thanks to my persistence 😛

This is my little piece of sky for myself to share my views, express my thoughts, record my daily activity, put my feelings into words and so on. The purpose is to amuse myself during leisure time. In fact, this is an entertainment for myself and I feel happy for being able to own this little piece of sky.

While most people enjoy watching TV programs, I would rather spend time doing my writing and reading. They might not understand the amount of joy that this Blog of mine has brought to me. I really enjoy the process of writing every single Blog post.

The enjoyment starts from preparing for the topic that I wanted to write about, organising my thoughts, designing the graphics, editing the photos, uploading the files to the server, publishing the Blog posts, reading my own posts and so on.

I might have come to a point for being long-winded at times because the writing juice will just flow as I write along. But this shows that I can really write 😛

I notice from the Cpanel that people from various countries are following my personal Blog quite regularly. If you are one of them, I thank you for visiting my Little Piece of Sky Blog. I appreciate it 🙂

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I was recently thinking about whether I should upgrade my Blog to the WordPress newer version 2.8.1 or not. Then, I happened to visit a Blog whose owner had just written a Blog post to inform his readers about the release of WordPress version 2.8.2.

Wow, I think this open source Blogging software is changing rather too frequently. I guess not many people are able to catch up with the changes. Furthermore, there is a risk of losing all your database or Blog posts if you didn’t do a proper backup should there be a mistake cropping up during the software upgrading.

Anyway, the reason for the new release of WordPress software 2.8.2 is that it has got a security update so anybody who is using WordPress 2.8 or 2.8.1 should upgrade to the latest version 2.8.2 as quickly as possible.

I understand that there are 10 files affected by the software upgrade and it doesn’t touch the database so the risk of losing your Blog posts, archives and so on is quite low. Alternatively, you can also use the auto-upgrade feature that is built into the WordPress software.

Click the link below to download the latest WordPress software :

Download ==> WordPress Version 2.8.2

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If you scroll down and look at the right-hand side of the sidebar of this “Laingan.com” Blog, you will notice that I have included a new feature called “Global Translator“. You can also find those tiny images showing the flags of 34 countries. 

This Global Translator is a free and open source WordPress Plugin which is created by “nothing2hide.net“. It has the capability to automatically translate your blog in 34 different languages, namely :

Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croat, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian,  Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

My “Laingan.com” Blog is written in English and the Global Translator is beneficial to those non-English readers if their preferred languages fall into the 33 different languages (excluding English) stated above.

Global Translator has the ability to provide the translations by using the 4 different Translation Engines, namely Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt and FreeTranslations.com. I’m using Google Translation Engine in this “Laingan.com” Blog to do the translation.

As for the quality of the translation, I would say it ranges from good to weird at times. Some of the words or phrases have different meaning once they are being translated from English to ,say, Chinese. It sounds funny and ridiculous at times.

Anyway, Global Translator is a good WordPress Plugin for you to install it to your Blog if you wish your non-English readers or visitors to understand what you have written in your Blog posts. Give it a try.

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I have been seeing a “listen now” icon showing up at the start of the posts of many Blog sites that I have visited. Then, I came to realise that this is a unique free service provided by Odiogo (pronounced as “Audio Go”). 

Odiogo — a service to voice your content :

What the Odiogo feature does is to convert text to speech. In other words, it can take Blog posts and create audio podcasts out of them. 

I think this text-to-speech feature is pretty interesting. It is going to help people with learning disabilities such as Dyslexia and visually impaired to know what is written in the Blog post by listening to the audio after clicking the “listen now” icon.

My 10 years old nephew is a Dyslexic person who has problem in recognising words. I’m sure this Odiogo feature is a great help to him if he visits my Blog and tries to understand what I have been writing in my Blog posts so far especially to find out whether I’m writing something good or something bad about him 🙂

Here is a guide to show you on how to install the WordPress plugin of the Odiogo Listen Button if you are using the WordPress platform for your Blog.

Instructions :

Have fun listening to my Blog posts!

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I have taken up a web-hosting plan and gotten a free domain name from BlueHost. Finally, my personal Blog is up and running. So, welcome to my Blog!

This is the first post of my personal Blog and I have been asking myself what I shall write about in this opening post. Well, after thinking for a while, I feel that it is better to make things natural by writing whatever is coming to my mind. After all, this is what Blogging is all about, isn’t it?

Actually, I have three Blogs altogether but this Blog is my first personal one. I have had taken up a WordPress Jumpstart short course that was set up by my friend and his business partners one year ago. That was the time that I got to know about using WordPress platform to start a Blog although I knew very little about Blogging.

I thought that Blogging is the toy of celebrities, teenagers, journalists, etc. in the past. However, I was wrong after joining the WordPress Jumpstart course because anybody can set up his or her own Blog quite easily by following what we have had learnt in the course.

Frankly speaking, I have to admit that setting up a WordPress Blog and get it hosted on a paid web hosting with a purchased domain name is not something that is easy to do if you don’t have the technical know-how.

It won’t be as easy as setting up a Blog on a free hosting such as the Blogger.com. Probably, this is the reason as to why some people still prefer to host their Blogs on Blogger.com, Multiply.com, WordPress.com, etc. to getting a paid one. But for me, I still prefer to get my Blog hosted on a paid web-hosting service to a free one so that I can have more control over my own Blog site and won’t have to worry about my Blog being shut down by the free web-hosting service provider without prior notice.

So, that is my web hosting preference. Now, you do know how I started my Blogging journey, don’t you?

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