Life is not the same anymore, after my brother Bobbo (Bob, as we lovingly called him) passed away in May 2008.

Bob, I miss you all the time, but today being Raksha Bandhan, I miss you more. Be happy wherever you are. You are not there with us physically, but your love will always remain with us and for us, you will always be living in our memories.

I was thinking of writing a long blog post about my sweet brother, but I find it tough now. Instead I would like to share this beautiful article on relationships.

A philosophy professor stood before his class and had some items in front of him.  When class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with rocks right to the top, rocks about 2″ diameter.  He then asked the students if the jar was full?  They agreed that it was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them in to the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open areas between the rocks. The students laughed.  He asked his students again if the jar was full? They agreed that yes, it was.

The professor then picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.  Of course, the sand filled up everything else.  He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was. He proceeded to pour a cup of wine into the jar and shook it as the wine slipped between all the sand.

“Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this is your life.  The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - anything that is so important to you that if it were lost, you would be nearly destroyed.

The pebbles are the other things in life that matter, but on a smaller scale. The pebbles represent things like your job, your house, your car.

The sand is everything else, the small stuff.  If you put the sand or the pebbles into the jar first, there is no room for the rocks. The same goes for your life.  If you spend all your energy and time on the small stuff, material things, you will never have room for the things that are truly most important.  Pay attention to the things that are critical in your life.  Play with your children. Take your partner out dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a dinner party and fix the disposal.”

Take care of the rocks first - the things that really matter.  Set your priorities.

The rest is just pebbles and sand.

And remember, there is always room for wine

Today was a hectic day for me. Had some pending work since last few days and wanted to finish them all today. Yesterday also, though it was weekend, my day was fully packed. We went to Urjit’s school to attend his students led conference. There was a long to-do list in Urjit’s plan for his mom and dad. He wanted us to see his activity book, the IB book, his best dance, he wanted to draw something for us, wanted to show us his singing talent and at the same time, he was eager to show us his skills on computer as well. And I had already a meeting scheduled at 11.45 am and the guy was waiting for us.  Finally I had to convince my son that we will make it next time and then after leaving him at my sister-in-laws place we headed for the meeting to meet a logistics guy who was interested in getting an application done for Logistics.

Later in day, Ajay visited us from Delhi to discuss about his website. After dropping him at station, we headed to my mom’s place for dinner. I had planned to work on the database for this new site called Gigabo. But it was quiet late so thought of doing it today. There are more than 2 million records which needs to be properly imported in respective tables with their constraints properly in place, so this morning after a quick b’fast of one mango milkshake, I started my work. I was uisng the Import Export wizard but the task was taking ages to complete… I just kept on waiting to let it finish, but it never finished. In the meantime, I was trying to entertain my son as well… as he gets very upset if I don’t spend time with him and don’t pay attention to him. So we logged onto youtube and he wanted to see his favorite song for TZP, bam bam bole and while the song was playing, he was doing lip-sync and was busy dancing and enacting. See the cute video here.

While the query was running on the remote computer, I also finished transferring one of the blogs we worked on earlier. It was a long pending task. The client had requested me to do it in Feb and I was so busy, but he kept waiting for me. So finally I had to agree and accepted the work. Sometimes you have to accept some work just because of your relationship with the client and the trust they show to you.

I am also happy that I was able to go though all the emails for the KidsandBibs.com photo contest entries, resize the images, upload them and update the contest blog. There were more than 80 entries this month. The site and the free contest is becoming more popular day by day. How all of us love FREE stuffs Though I feel, close up shots are more appropriate for contest, today while resizing the images, I loved this photo of Veronica. I was thinking if I was sitting in her place. The place looked so nice and calm. See the photo.

If you love looking at cute baby photos, like me, then do check out this lovely baby photo gallery.

That’s all for now. Have a great week ahead!

I was also busy travelling right from the month of Feb. In feb we visited Chandigarh to meet hubby’s cousin and his wife and son whom we did not meet after our marriage. He had come for our marriage though And now we were meeting him after six long years that too with our kids so it was a good bonding time for everyone. We had been to Delhi after that for Urjit’s Canada visa as they wanted to have a personal interview and the interview went smoothly, and while coming back from Delhi, we nearly missed our flight. We were in Noida staying with a friend and while coming back to Delhi, to goto the airport, we missed the exit on the Noida expressway going to Greater Noida and we ended up driving till Greater Noida. All thanks to my dear brother Ajay(now a hero in Tamil movies),who managed to drive us to the airport just before the flight was to take off.I will do a post on this as well

In March, we travelled to Manipur for Urjit’s churakaran  ceremony. Check out my cute son in his new cool look here. In April we had been to Mumbai for Urjit’s US visa. When the visa officer asked Urjit, what he would like to see in US, pat came the reply SNOW!! And the lady gave a smile. And then we travelled to Belgaum for my sister’s engagement. I enjoyed the drive from Pune to Belgaum.I think Karnataka is more green compared to Maharashtra. I miss the Bengaluru weather especially these days,when Pune’s temperature is going above 40 degree celcius.

On April 13th, we celebrated Manipuri New Year called cheiraoba.

So here’s wishing a very happy new year to all the friends and visitors whose new year starts in the month of April. I think many communities in India have their new year celebration in April month.

I did a post about my good earning in January month and how Google Adsense income was increasing for me with each passing month and I did also mention about the Kontera ads not working as good as I had expected. There was also one comment from a Kontera employee, working as Publisher Services Manager and as per his instructions I did write to Kontera about the optimization part and in reply to my email , the Support person wrote to me

“As for your account settings, I have adjusted them to allow increased ContentLink density; however, I need to impress upon you that Kontera’s ContentLinks and Google Adsense are not proportional streams of ad revenue.  Kontera is meant to complement your ad revenue, not to supplement it.  Of course, we will do everything in our power to generate the highest revenues possible for your site, but the revenue generated by ContentLinks is in no way meant to replace or rival your other ad sources.”

I was really happy to read their reply and how they have categorically mentioned that

• Kontera is to compliment the revenue and not to supplement.
• Kontera’s ContentLinks and Google Adsense are not proportional stremas of ad revenue.
• Kontera ContentLinks is in no way meant to replace or rival other ad revenues.

So for thsoe people who are thinking of replacing Google Adsense with Kontera ContentLinks, make sure that you are aware of these points.
as I had expected. There was also one comment from a Kontera employee, working as Publisher Services Manager and as per his instructions I did write to Kontera about the

Yesterday, while updating one of my new sites, I saw a faint glimpse of that green bar on my toolbar and I was like.. Oh, so this one got a PR now, it was just 1 so as I said, it was not really visible And then I went onto check all my other sites and see what is the outcome of the recent update. As predicted most of the had lost its earlier high PR and lost 1 or 2 rank. It ddin’t really bother me also as I am seeing so much increase in my traffic and earnings. So the PR update was not really something I was looking forward to and was not too keen about getting high values.

I do agree, having a high PR certainly helps when you are selling ad space and trying to sell your website, but as we all know, PR is most importantly dependent on web page linking and with website owners buying links on high PR sites and making sure that they have links from all corners, the real authenticity and the importance of GOOGLE PR (as it used to be) is somewhat compromised these days. If you have money to spend on buying links, you certainly can get high PR. So my main aim is to work on the rankings of my keywords rather than getting high PR. I hope it does not become like the Alexa Rank, which you can increase double fold in just 1-2 days

January 2008 was the best month for me in terms of Google Adsense earnings. It was my highest so far and I also did break the record of highest earnings on a single day.I am seeing that my keywords are getting more paid compartively, the CPC has increased and also the CTR has increased.

It is amazing to note that how a slight change in your ad placement can do the trick. The same ad unit was getting clicked 5 times more, soon after it’s position was changed. I must start writing a book on Money Making using Google Adsense, but this book of mine will be different from all the other books I have come across. Well it’s just a thought and I don’t see the possibility of turning it into a reality atleast in the near future. At the moment, I don’t have time to implement my own findings in the other pages of the same website and also on other sites as I am so busy and tied up with projects and office work.

Oh yes, in January I finally… yes finally reached the 100USD benchmark in Kontera after 4 months. I had written to Kontera earlier how their ads are not helping much and that I am getting much more clicks in Google Adsense comparatively. They had written to me that they will optmize the keywords for my sites, but it never helped me. Well I like Google Adsense because, you yourself can optimize your keywords, your sites and try to get the desired ads you want and you can place it on any website you own, provided you know that you are following their Terms and Conditions. I will check out Kontera for another month or so and see if there is any difference. Else it will be more beneficial for me to sell my ad spots and links to other sponsors.

So the year 2008 was a good start for me. I hope it continues and by the end of this year, I do break some more records of mine. Yes I always compete with myself

As I mentioned earlier in some of my posts, there is a designer in me, who is always trying to learn and acquire new design skills so it’s tough fight between my mind and my heart.. my mind is technical and my heart is artistic.

In any designing project, proper usage of fonts plays a great role and I do have a vast collection of fonts. I often use this helpful site called what the font, if I am looking for any specific font and I am not able to find the name of the font,  just point the URL of the desired image or just upload the image with the font text and they will show you all matching font results. Like for instance I have to redo my KidsandBibs logo and I am not able to recall the font used as it has been so long and my desktop and laptop got formatted n number of times.So as usual, the best place for me was to goto whatthefont, and I have found something very close to it.

I thought of sharing this piece of information with you all, so that next time if you want to find out that cute or artistic font and want to use it in your project, you know where to check it out.

It is written that, the Editor reviews are provided by professional editors who evaluate a blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. I personally feel that I could have got more points iff ( yes if and only if), I was more punctual in posting. I have been so busy in promoting my website and my office work, that I am not getting time to do regular blog posts.

However after seeing such feedback and reviews, I plan to write daily and then some more pressing work is there, and the blog takes a back seat. These days I am also busy doing wordpress custom theme designs and I simply love it. I am a programmer by profession, but I love designing and have an eye for detail and I can spend hours working on photoshop and designing stuff and most of the time, I am busy doing that only. So guys, if you are looking for a sleek and clean looking wordpress blog, you can write to me.

Well here is the screenshot from the blogged.com website

In our school, we used to have Sanskrit as a subject and I was really good in that. Infact I remember, most of the Sanskrit teachers used to praise me and they used to say “Asha belongs to far north east then also her diction and pronunciation is so good”.

This famous incident happened when I was in 9th grade,when we had a new Sanskrit teacher. I still remember Mam S. She was very different from other Sanskrit teachers we had in the school. Most of the teachers used to translate Sanskrit into Hindi and teach, whereas Mam S, always used to use English for translation and she was quite good looking too.

So the first day when she came to class, there was no formal introduction with the students and somehow she just started calling me Ms. Thapa. In our class there was one girl, whose name was Ms. V Thapa and she was a mix of Mahastrian mother  and a Nepali father, and though she got the surname from her father, she had more of her mother’s genes so she looked more like a Maharashtrian girl. And this sanskrit mam, assuming that there was one girl from Nepal, assumed that it must be me.. because of our asian looks and from day one she started calling me Ms. Thapa.. she used to point towards me and say.. yes Ms. thapa, read that sholoka or translate that sentence, and days passed with her calling me Ms. Thapa all the time.

Let me also add to the fact that this Ms. Thapa was actually our senior who had failed in her class and got demoted and came in our class, whereas I was the bright student in the class, always used to come 1st in my section. So a few days after we had our first unit test and that day I remember, Mam S, came to the class and she was very very upset. As soon as she entered the class, she said.. “Ms. Thapa, I thought you were a very good student and you used to do so nicely in the class and in the written test, you have done so badly, you scored so less.. and she kept looking at me and saying that” and then she added.. ” Well there is one more girl, Asha, she has done really well in the test and she got the highest marks” and she was then distibuting the test paper and was calling out the names of the students, for the first time. So when she called Asha, I went to collect my paper and Mam S was shocked.. she was like.. why are you coming… I replied, Mam’ I am only Asha. And she was like.. then who is this Thapa and that time the actual Ms. Thapa came and Mam S.. got very angry.. she was saying, why you people did not tell me earlier.. she said, I was always calling you Thapa, and you never said that it’s not you.. and I replied, M’am you never gave a chance. From day one, you just came in and assumed it was me.. and so I also kept quiet… and from that day she started calling me ‘ASHA’ !!

One of my resolutions for 2008 was to do regular posting on my blog and make it more popular. So here I am thinking what to write today. Today there is no post, just figures to look at and I am happy to look at these figures. My SEO knowledge and work on the site is paying now and with the start of 2008, I am seeing an increased traffic on my site and also an increase in the earnings. Check out the image which shows my baby site’s keyword activity for 3 hours. Most of my traffic is from organic search and returning visitors or visitors recommended by the parents who frequent the site so often. It seems the site is doing really really well in mos of the keywords I aimed for and they are all ranked on first page and most of them on 1st and 2nd position.