Life is designed in such a way that an individual always grows with each passing day. We are confronted with obstacles, tasks, and problems, and no matter how we choose to overcome it, no matter if we win or not, we still learn and grow from it.

“Everyday conquered is equivalent to a day of growth”, as I always say.

PinoyBlogero wasn’t the only blog that I have wasted time on. Over the past years I have created and maintained a number of blogs that didn’t even come close to being known. Now, they are either shut down or left to rot beyond the shadows of other blogs.

“Mr. Licudine, are you listening?”

In spite of this, they were the ones that taught me a lot of things in blogging. They have taught me the dos and don’ts, what mistakes to avoid, and what to do when spam finally found your way onto your comments. I made use of these lessons as the foundation for building PinoyBlogero.

Now that my blog has officially launched, I look back to my past blogs and recall the lessons that they have taught me.

Who knows, maybe you too could learn from my mistakes?

Ice-Tubig (http://namre.s5.com)
Formerly known as Namre Datkom, this is my first personal website which featured all my artworks and my daily journal. It went online at the year of 2003 and was abandoned on 2005. The site was hosted on a free webhosting site and was built using basic HTML. It still can be visited through the url, http://namre.s5.com.

There wasn’t really anything of interest on my site, just a couple of drawings and some rants about them. I left Ice-Tubig because of the very low visit rate of the site. The site had an average of 3 hits per month, most of it came from my own computer.

I have always thought that the moment you set your site on the internet, visitors would start pouring in. With the millions of people on the net, there’s got to be someone who could stumble upon it by chance, right? I was wrong. Having a successful site involves more work than just building it and waiting to see if people would drop by.

Lessons Learned:

1. Creating a website is hard as hell especially if you start it from scratch and build it using HTML. Groan. If only I have already heard of Wordpress at that time.
2. Once you have finished creating your site, the work doesn’t end there. You need to publicize it and promote it to other people.
3. People really don’t care about artworks and stuffs, especially at that time.
4. If you see that you site counter increased by one, don’t celebrate just yet. It was only you.
5. TagBoards are only useful if you have someone to talk to other than yourself.
6. There is no such thing as free webhosting. If it is free, expect to have banner ads.
7. The longer you make use of a free webhosting service, the more ads will appear on your site.
8. Foreigners don’t know what an “Ice-Tubig” is.

On my next post, I will be posting about the next blog that I have made and the lessons that I have learned from it.

What can you say about Ice-Tubig? Have you experienced making a site out of HTML alone? Why not share your experience with your own past blogs? Feel free to comment below and don’t forget to subscribe to my feeds!