Now that I’ve been bitten by the PQ bug, I was excited to know the five objects that we were supposed to photograph this month, making it my second month to participate in PhotoQuest (which is now in its 19th installment).

Flip of Heresomewhere added a few buildings to this month’s list and I gladly obliged since I love photographing architecture. To sum up,  the participants of the July 2005 PQ have to photograph a bank, a calendar, an instrument, a library and a mannequin.

One of the most aesthetically pleasing bank buildings I’ve ever seen in Ortigas is that of Banco De Oro, with its cube sculpture seemingly floating because of its tilted angle.

Banco De Oro along ADB Avenue

When we were told to photograph a calendar, I decided to photograph a calendar that we got from our parish church.

July 2005 calendar

During my Elementary days, I was part of the Drum and Lyre Club for our  school. The boys played the drums while the girl played the lyre, a percussion instrument with metal bars that you hit with a beater. It looks kindda run down already but I associate a lot of good memories with this lyre.

The lyre I played during my Elementary days

I’ve always been fascinated by libraries — I could spend a whole day in a library and not get bored (I could say the same thing for Internet cafes nowadays!). I like the public library of Manila because there’s no fee to be paid and they even have some rare books in their collection.

The Manila Public Library

The last item to be photographed for the July 2005 PhotoQuest was a mannequin and I found this to be the trickiest one to do. I didn’t want to be questioned when I photograph a store mannequin so I turned off the flash in my digital camera and walked away hurriedly after taking this picture.

Mannequin at a display window in a popular mall

Gimikera Is In has received 61 unique inbound links and has climbed up one notch in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem. I am now one of the Marauding Marsupials as of July 5. However, my figures dropped somewhat and I’m back to being a Flippery Fish.

I’ve added some other elements in my sidebar, which includes a new typelist called Shout it out! This contains my shoutbox powered by Saybox. I’ve also added a NeoCounter so I can see how many people are viewing my blog online and from which country they come from. This NeoCounter is powered by Neoworx.

The number of posts have increased from 90 to only 130 in a span of one month.

Yet another change to my sidebar is my choice of search engine. I previously used Google but it turns out that Google couldn’t spider my blog since I couldn’t add META tags (Technically, I could but I’d have to shell out around $100…yikes!). I then decided to change my search engine and I opted for the Technorati Searchlet.

Gimikera Is In had 20,000 unique visitors during the first week of July 2005, and the number of unique hits now (23,622 as of July 28, 10:30 AM)  is more than 5 times the number of unique visitors recorded a month ago by StatCounter. Of all of these unique visitors, 2,940 of them are returning visitors.

As for pageloads, this blog has hit the 30,000 mark, which is triple that of what StatCounter reported just a month ago. On the average, I get 381 visitors daily.

According to my Friendster/Typepad account, Gimikera Is In has used up only 33.3% (16.6  Mb of 50Mb) of its alloted diskspace and this is probably because I’ve been using Flickr to show my pictures instead of uploading in my account.

If you have any comments/suggestions for this blog, feel free to leave a comment or shout it out in my tagboard.

Until next time,

Jocie (a.k.a Gimikera)

Blogs display around 5-10 recent entries on the main page and the older ones are hidden in the archives. Some blogging software support
"Categories" and "Related Posts" but Google Blogger users are not that lucky.

Surfers want information quickly so adding a search box to your blog or website can be a great tool that will enhance the user’s experience while browsing through your blog.

Gimikera Is In used to have a Google search box in the sidebar but since I couldn’t add META tags to my pages, it wasn’t very helpful in searching my blog.

I read this article from Digital Inspiration and it listed the HTML codes of search engines that you can install in your blog for free. I opted for the Technorati Searchlet since it even lists how long ago the entry was posted to my blog.