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2008.04.19

PageRank 4

A long, long time ago, in a blog seldom visited by anybody but me (or so I thought), a girl named Geek posted on its chat box, congratulating the blog owner for reaching PR4. Had it been any other person, the blog owner would have jumped for joy and treated his friends and officemates at Dad's, Saisaki, Kamayan for an eat-all-you can dinner. Sadly, the name of the blog owner is Amiel (which is synonymous to kuripot). And one more thing, he does not know what PR4 means!

 

Then, one day...

 

Tama na! Hindi ko kayang panindigan yung fairy tale style of writing!

 

Anyway, all I am going to talk about in this post is the PR4 rank of this blog. Hehe. Well, I was once proud of it, thinking that rank 0 is the lowest and rank 5 is the highest. I thought my blog was ranking well, only to discover later that the highest is 10 and mine has not even reached the halfway mark!

 

But what is a PR ranking, and why is it so important that I'm so willing to dedicate a space for it here in my blog? Actually, the ranking is not so important to me. All it gives me is the chance to tease my friends because mine is higher than their blog's PR. Hehe. But the ranking seems important for those who are blogging for cash. Maybe, they use it as a gauge to know how popular their blog or website is.

 

PR stands for PageRank. And according to Wikipedia, it is a link analysis algorithm for measuring the relative importance of an element within a set. If that definition is too mathematical for you, allow me to try to explain it in a much easier way in the next paragraphs. But if you want to discover what kind of algorithm it is and how it is computed, you're welcome to search for it on Wikipedia. Your author here is not that good mathematically to understand all those notations posted on the site.

 

So, how does Google PageRank work for simple bloggers like you and me? According to the same Wikipedia page that I have been talking about, PageRank rates your site based on links. I don't know how it works exactly, but the number of links to your site makes your rank higher. Not only that, it also "weighs" the site that links to your site. If the site that links to yours is ranked as "important", then the value of the link also becomes higher.

 

So how did I get a PR4 while some of my blogger friends are cursing Google for getting a zero? I really don't know. Probably because of my friends' sites that have better rankings. Or maybe because of the links from Technorati, or from Blogspirit each time I update this blog. Or probably because I'm just plain good at this thing. Haha. Pakibasa naman hanggang matapos... huwag na mainis or magalit.

 

Is a higher PageRank important for your site? I really don't know. But just like a medal that you can display on your blog or website, it's better if you can have a rank that you can be proud of. It probably is important for people taking blogging seriously or as a source of income. But for this blog that contains nothing but rants and blabbing, it probably won't mean much. But I am still displaying it on my sidebar. It looks good, if you'll ask me. And should it drop down to a zero ranking later, I can just delete it :p

22:25 Posted in Bulletin Board | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: google, pagerank

2008.04.07

Failures

A day after the PhilNITS SW exam, here I am writing. And just like the first time (FE), I again failed. One thing different though is that this time, I was never really expecting to pass. Not before the exam, and not after it. I knew that I'll fail. And the exam is never really the reason why this post has such a title.

Well, maybe the exam is a part of it. A part so small. Probably analogous to a period in the end of a paragraph.

The title speaks about the first quarter of my year. Last January, I wrote my goals for the year in this blog, in the hope that if they're written for people to read, I'll be encouraged to do them. More than three months later, though, the goals I've written became what I didn't expect them to be... constant reminders that I am a failure. Well, at least for the first three months of the year.

In that post, I said I would be 10 pounds lighter by the end of March... I guess I'm 10 pounds (or more) heavier than I was in January. I also said that I'll save at least P3000 a month. I did, just to have it all gone by March-end.

Then, there were the goals regarding my job. 2 blog post per month for Dinozilla: I haven't written any. Zero lates for the whole year: I was doing fine until that 1 minute late at the end of March. Lastly, the customer rating thing of 6.5 up: my project is delayed BIG time, so I'm not in a position to expect anything higher than 5 (or maybe 4).

Then, there were the things that cannot be measured. Patience: I still hate long lines, jeepney drivers who wait for passengers who are still taking a bath, etc, etc. And as with my social life, I no longer spend all of my weekends at the apartment alone. Sometimes, I go to the office for overtime work! Great improvement, huh?!?

And to complete everything, there's the PhilNITS exam. With all the previous failures, the exam looked like an insignificant part. A small point, perhaps, to end a long paragraph.

Failures... somebody said they are inevitable. They are a part of life, so to speak. And in a statement that can allow you to let all the anger and frustration out, you can just shout "S**t happens!", then move on.

But that's the good thing about it. You can move on. I can move on. Or to restate it properly, I SHOULD move on. The PhilNITS exam may have ended the paragraph, but that was just the first. There are three quarters more left for my goals to find their end. Three more paragraphs to change the ambience set by the first. 9 more months to prove that the setbacks of the first three won't hinder the realization of my goals.

What's done has been done. There's nothing more that I can do about it. But there's a future ahead of me, and whether it would be bright or dull all depends on me. I know what I must do. I just hope that I have enough will and discipline to do it.

20:35 Posted in Reactions, Reflections, etc. | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this | Tags: failures, goals, moving on