From The Manila Bulletin - May 3, 2005
Blog-o-Rama
ATE SIENNA, THE GODMOTHER OF PINOY BLOGGERS
By Annalyn S. Jusay (now blogging at www.annalyn.net)
2005-05-03 13:37:58
Ate Sienna is perhaps one of the nicest persons you can meet in the Pinoy blogosphere; a warm, vivacious lady who is fondly called “ninang” by her adoring contemporaries. Ever since she started blogging three years ago, this lovely thirty-something woman has gone out of her way to strengthen the presence of her beloved “kababayans” in the World Wide Web by offering free web designs and templates (which can be accessed at www.manilena.com) as well as being the driving force behind pansitan.net which presently hosts some of the most talented Filipino bloggers, including the noted APO member Jim Paredes.
Based in California where she works as a systems analyst, Ate Sienna has one good reason why she’s fully committed to showcase an all-Filipino blogging community: In my own little way, I want to show the world that Filipinos are made of things more positive than how we?re sometimes pictured on some internet sites.
Ate Sienna is currently in the Philippines on vacation and sat down with Blog-o-Rama to share her thoughts and tips on blogging. Those who want to know more about this godmother of Pinoy bloggers may access her site at http://atesienna.pansitan.net.
Q. Can you tell us more about yourself?
A. My real name is Gigi Manaloto. I’m kooky and I’m very bakla but I can also be very serious about some topics that are close to my heart - like child-abuse, nationalism, women-abuse.
I migrated to Canada in 1996. A year after, I met the love of my life, Andy, and began moving to the US. I am now in California and have been living and working here for the past two years. My mom and dad are in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and I have 2 sisters, Gretch and Pia, and 1 brother, Smokey. I have a pretty niece, and 3 cute nephews and 1 more nephew coming soon - all from my sisters. Kami na lang ng brother ko ang hindi pa married.
I love photography and web design. That’s my therapy. I like designing websites for friends, for free lang siempre. I will charge them when am super-good at it already,hahaha.
Q. You are known for creating some of the most eye-catching designs and templates that could be found in Pinoy sites. How long does it take you to do it and how is the process?
A. It takes me about half the day to a whole day to come up with a new design, depending on how complicated the codes might be. I usually create a design in Adobe Photoshop. The selection of the right graphics, fonts, titles and color schemes and putting them all together are the fun part of the process for me. Once I’m done with that, I slice the images using Adobe ImageReady. I do the HTML and CSS codes on a software called NoteTab. I’m an old-school designer. I shy away from web-designing softwares because they tend to put in extra codes you don’t need. That’s why I still do my own coding.
Q. What are your blogging habits? Where does it figure in your life?
A. I try to write once a week, sometimes more often, when my schedules and activities permit. I blog mostly about my family, about Andy and what I come across in the internet. I think being away from home, it makes you long for your loved ones, and when this happens, I blog about it. I usually write at the very early hours of the morning, when I wake up. I get up around 5 a.m., while Andy still sleeps. This is my ?alone? time. Most of my creative juices flow during the first few hours of that day.
Q. Now on to your baby, pansitan.net. Can you enlighten us more about it?
A. Pansitan is a community of Filipino bloggers from all over the world. It’s a hodge-podge of people living in different countries, of varied ages, professions, and writing styles. May mga students, may mga artists, mothers, husband, teachers, writers, singers and that’s why just reading our blogs gives you so many different views in life. Parang pansit - iba’t-ibang sahog kaya masarap sya.
Q. How did you come up with the idea of spearheading Pansitan?
A. I got the idea of a blogging community from a my blogger friend, Ibalik of www.dekarabaw.com. He was (and still is) sharing his webspace with some other bloggers - for free. I figured, this is a good idea. Webspace was becoming dirt cheap and with so much server space allotted to you, you really won’t be able to use it up yourself. That’s when I decided I’d like to do what Ibalik did. I’d give people free server space, without the bothering pop-up ads or the slow server speed of the other blogging sites. They can put up their own designs and not have to save their images to another website.
So in January 2004, about two years since I’ve been blogging on the old pansitan.com, www.pansitan.net was born! I started off with just a few bloggers at first and now I have about 29 weblogs and 25 bloggers in the Pansitan community.
Q. You recruited a fresh batch of bloggers for your site recently. Do you have a set criteria for recruiting?
A. I recruited them based on the content of their site and how they could maintain their uniqueness with the other Pansitan members. I was also looking for sites that have been up for at least six months, and are being updated by the bloggers on a very regular basis. That means, masipag silang mag-sulat and that they’re dedicated to blogging. I also needed them to have their own PC and internet connection. Not for anything else but only because having their own PC means that they’d be able to receive messages from me fast and with other softwares that they might need to upload to the their sites. Otherwise, they won’t be able to do it from an internet cafe.
Q. How is the hosting process like?
A. Once bloggers were configured on the Pansitan server space, they run smoothly and don’t need a lot of user maintenance. The only important maintenance I do right now is to monitor the monthly bandwidth limits. Server hosts usually allot a certain amount of bandwidth every month for their subscribers. For some server hosts, once you’ve exceeded your bandwidth, they disable your site until the start of the next month or they charge you for the excess bandwidth everyday until the next month. I have to make sure that we don’t exceed ours, although we’ve had already in the past, by reminding the members to check the sizes of their images, or if they use streaming audios, to disable them for awhile. Not exceeding your bandwidth limit is very important. First, going off the air disables visitors to view your site. Plus, if your website is enjoying good Google results, you might lose that positioning if Google’s search bot always finds you offline.
Q. Pansitan was hacked last December. What lessons have you learned from that incident?
A. As long as there will be new technology for the web, there will always be people who will try to hack sites. That’s like some people with no other purpose in their internet life but to come up with new viruses to plague the web. What’s more important though is to make sure that you have a good host that will be able to protect you against hackers. And if you do get hacked, you’re sure that they’d be able to respond on this as soon as possible. On the current host I have, their support is quick and they’re very responsive to all the questions and problems of their subscribers. It also helps to make sure that whatever softwares you install on your web, they should be hack-safe. I had an inkling my hacker went through the backdoor through a guestbook software I installed. That’s why I don’t install guestbooks anymore! And always, always - have a backup of your site on your local drive.
MORE BLOGGING TIPS FROM ATE SIENNA:
1. Try to make your site as user-friendly as possible. That means, the entries can be read without any problems. Avoid too many unnecessary graphics. They are good if you use them wisely. Too much graphics mean a longer download time for your visitors. With the attention span of the net surfer being just about 5 seconds on the first visit, make sure that your site loads fast enough for them not to get bored and go somewhere else.
2. The average graphic size should only be about 30kb at the most. If you have large graphics, you should cut them up in smaller pieces and put them together using CSS or tables when you do your html codes. A clean layout is still the best layout.
3. Write from the heart. It is only then that you can make an honest-to-goodness entry. More than an eye-candy website, what counts more for people visiting your site and coming back often is the content of your blog.
4. Always, always?re-read what you write, whether they be your entries , comments to other people?s blogs or email reactions to other entries. The written word can be very misleading because it lacks a human?s inflection of speech. Make sure you review everything before you publish, especially when you?re very emotional about something.
5. Respect other people and their blogs. Treat each site with as much respect as if you?re entering his home.
(For comments and inquiries, email annalyn.jusay@gmail.com)
