Thanks for visiting Palm Discovery

BIG THANKS again to Sammy at Palm Addicts for the quick mention and well wishes for Palm Discovery’s first year anniversary! Welcome all Palm Addict readers! Hope you enjoy this site if it’s your first visit. And those returning visitors, welcome back!

CONTEST DETAILS BELOW!

The contest is now over. Thanks to everyone for their participation. The winners were announced in this posting. Please still continue to submit your entries, tips, stories, Explorer Profiles as they will be entered in the next and all future contests.

Wow! It’s been one year! Can’t believe how time flies! Little did I know how a little (and I’m still little by most standards) blog has turned into something bigger in a little over a year. Originally, I started out thinking that it was going to be a little project or idea where I would be posting some of my thoughts and helpful tips and ideas down. I had no idea that this was going to turn out into a much longer term project. At the time, I started out with Blogger and have it hosted at Blogspot (as I’m sure a lot of beginner bloggers and those new to blogging usually start). For a beginner blogger, it’s a great way to start out. It’s free and it seems quite easy to use, which is probably its main appeal. You can set up an account in minutes and just start writing and get published online practically in minutes. But, as time went on, I was starting to wonder whether I was happy or satisfied with Blogger. At the time, I was starting to get annoyed by the frequent problems at Blogger not saving my posts, as well as the frequent “maintenance” times when I didn’t have access to my blog. Since it’s quite important for me to have access to my blog at any time as I tend to want to jot or write down whenever I get inspiration or ideas, not having access to it was something I wasn’t happy with.

So, when the opportunity came where I could get a domain name with a host server for a good promotional cost, I jumped at the idea. The funny thing was that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. I knew nothing about configuring host accounts, domains, etc, but obviously, I had to learn since I’ve paid for it. I practically plunged into this by the lure of having my own domain and getting much more freedom with this type of setup. I did try for a short while with the free Wordpress hosting before getting the domain and although I was somewhat happy with it, I thought that the best way was to get my own host server and domain. I was hoping that it would mean a better control of the blog.

One of the *interesting* parts I encountered was to move my blog material over to the new domain and server from Blogger. That was quite a bit of a challenge, as I couldn’t seem to get it working even after reading on how most people did it. I’m sure that a lot of people got it to work fine, but it didn’t work out for me. Something got screwed in the process when I tried to import my Blogger archives. So, the moving ended up taking a chunk of time as I did a lot of copy and paste of all my postings. By the time I started this new domain and host server, I was already accumulating quite a number of blog posts. If anyone could figure out, originally, I was writing and pushing my blog postings as an extremely feverish pace, trying to post one a day. But since my posts tend to be quite detailed, doing so was quite a challenge. After a while, I knew I couldn’t keep this feverish pace up or I’d burn out so then I started decreasing the blog post frequency. Eventually, I settled on a main blog post a week and now I do some smaller postings during the week. It now looks like I push out about 4 posts a week.

I still have the old Blogger account active at maceyr.blogspot.com, although I no longer update it. And it’s a nice back up if and when my Palm Discovery blog is down, which does happen with Netfirms from time to time.

I really love Wordpress because of the features and functions that the plugins can provide. They really help make a blog quite unique and personal and without them, this blog would be so “nothing”. Looking back, I’m quite happy that I decided to take the plunge into having my own host and domain (although it isn’t free) as it allows me a lot of flexibility and credibility that I may not have with a Blogger account. Of course, moving the stuff from Blogger took up quite a huge chunk of time (not to mention a lot of grief as I was trying to still keep up with the posts while doing the move). I’m just glad that things are working fine now. For a while there, Wordpress with its auto WYSIWYG script was driving me nuts as I tend to type everything including the formatting by hand and most times, the WYSIWYG would screw things up by adding duplicate formatting codes and doing a bunch of stuff that I didn’t want. It was frustrating and I wasted a lot of time trying to clean up the posts. I finally recently figured out to “uncheck” the WYSIWYG feature that drove me bonkers for months. Now, things are the way I wanted. No extra insertions of code or formatting. Thank goodness.

Word of thanks to all blogs that linked to mine

Before I go into details (yeah, I know you guys just want the details on the contest), I just want to take a moment to thank the various blogs that have mentioned and linked to Palm Discovery either in their blogroll or via a posting or links through the first year (and it’s not complete I’m sure):

Please let me know if I have omitted your blog or link (I just did a quick search in technorati) and I’ll add you here. The list covers any blog (not necessarily Palm related) that provided a link to my site so you may discover something quite different amongst the links. Thanks again everyone! It’s the least I can do to thank you all for the support.

Palm Addicts, Treobits, TreoToday, Tecnochica, PDA Mexico, Palm-Mac, Palm-Mac (old site), ProBlogger.net, Dental Technology blog, yinpong’s blog, Canuck PDA, Blogging Blog. 52 reviews, ThisNext, PeterDavis.net, the duke blog, Leslie Franke, One in The Hand, Kristonia Ink!, Digital Art in Hong Kong, Toronto Palm OS User Group, Tuxpost blog (German), The Palmdoc Chronicles (old blogspot site), The Palmdoc Chronicles (new site), The Blog Herald, JAVOEdge Blog, The Blog Review, Forty Faces, Primary Teacher UK, “They Shine in Darkness”, PDA Women, PDA women yahoo group, Palm Z22 Yahoo group, Thoracic.org.

Thanks to all the blogs (please let me know if I have mistakenly omitted anyone) that have linked to Palm Discovery and help make it through the first year.

Palm Discovery 1st anniversary contest

In celebration of Palm Discovery’s first anniversary, we are holding a contest.

The Prizes:

1 copy of Binary Clock offered by Tamoggemon Software

1 copy of Astraware Sudoku offered by Astraware

1 copy of My Little Tank offered by Astraware

1 copy of Crazy Daisy offered by Astraware

2 copies of Resco Photo Viewer offered by Resco

2 copies of Resco Explorer offered by Resco

2 copies of Resco Sudoku offered by Resco

2 copies of Resco Backup offered by Resco

Thanks again to all the sponsors for their generous donation of prizes. Please check them out and support them for their generosity.

The rules:

1 - The contest starts on October 1st, 2006 and ends at midnight on October 16th, 2006 (PST) and is open to everyone all over the world..

2 - From amongst all the entries (only one entry per person), a random drawing for all prizes will be made shortly after the contest closing. The winners’ names will be posted on the blog in a future posting thereafter and emails will be sent to the winners. Those who have previously submitted their Explorer Profiles are automatically entered for the draw.

3 - Prizes are awarded as drawn.

4 - Select from one of the following choices and send off your contest entries to “nameofthisblog (put it together as one word and don’t put in “nameofthisblog” but the actual name of this blog instead) gmail com” (rememeber to remove the “”, put in the @ and the . to make it a valid email address (meant to thwart spam bots) ). Be sure to have the subject title to CONTEST (BIG CAPITAL LETTERS as shown). I will be filtering the emails so anyone who doesn’t have the CONTEST in the subject line will likely not be included in the contest. And anyone who submits their contest submissions to my other email addresses will not be entered in the draw. This is because it will be so much more difficult to keep track of all the entries and for the prize draw. So PLEASE FOLLOW THE RULES.

It seems that some of you have submitted your entries and I do not seem to be getting them. I will now be replying back to all entries with a number. If you’ve submitted an entry and didn’t receive a reply from me, then it’s likely I did not receive it. Please re-send your entries back. (I wouldn’t want anyone left out).

It’s important that you include a valid email address (I will not spam you or sell it) so that I can contact you regarding device information for the software prizes. So please check your emails. I will also post the winners in a future posting so check to see if you’re a winner. Anyone that I can’t contact or responds within a week after the contest is over won’t be able to claim their prize and I will draw another winner. Sorry.

Choice 1: Submit a Palm Explorer Profile with your name, your device and some details about you and how you use your device and/or how it helps you in a similar Question & Answer format to previous Palm Explorer Profiles (click on the link for the format). Even as basic of a profile with your name, your device and just a short bit about how you use it is fine. This should probably be the easiest one to do. By providing the Palm Explorer Profile, you are agreeing to allow me to post your information in a future Palm Discovery Explorer Profile posting.

Here’s the usual Palm Explorer Q & A format (but you can opt to answer or pose your own question):

Your name:

etc (anything else you wish to disclose or share like tips, ideas, etc):

Again, you can choose to answer or not answer these questions but the main question is simply your name (First name is fine), your device and anything you wish to disclose about you and your Palm.

Choice 2: Submit some Palm tips or tricks that has not yet been discussed at Palm Discovery that may help and benefit Palm users. Please be specific about the tips especially if it only works on specific devices (ie. LifeDrive, Treo 600, etc). The tips will be posted in a future Palm Discovery How To Series posting with credits to you and any links to your site (if provided).

Choice 3: Submit your own personal thoughts and stories on your Palm device. It could be about a special time when your Palm has helped you in any way, like it got you out of a sticky or problematic situation, or what you do with it during the day, or emergency accounts when you used it, or handy moments when it’s helped you, etc, anything that is involved with your Palm device. The story can be just a short one about one particular moment with your Palm device. You can even just describe what you did with it today or yesterday or in a typical day. I will most likely call it the Palm Explorer moment (but haven’t decided yet). Again, you are agreeing to allow me to post your submission in a future Palm Discovery posting.

Again, all these are mainly just little stories or anything that is related about your Palm device that would be great to share with the rest of the readers and to the Palm community. I personally love reading them as they offer quite an interesting view of how everyone uses it to get through their day.

5- PLEASE. ONLY ONE ENTRY per person. If you are submitting an entry for the tips, and another one for the Palm Explorer, only one entry will be counted for the draw. This is to make it fair for everyone, especially if someone decides to write 100 emails with 100 tips and thus gets more chances at the draw. I want to make it as fair as I can for everyone. The extra submissions are welcomed but to make it fair, only one entry will be entered in the draw.

6 - Depending on the content (and possible duplicate tips, etc), I can not guarantee that I will post all submissions on the blog although all valid submissions will be entered in the draw. I will try to post as many submissions as possible as this blog is meant to share everyone’s experiences and tips but sometimes certain submissions may not be suitable for posting.