John Ibanez

The following is a sponsored post, brought to you by Micaela Fransesca T. Rodriguez, by way of MICAMYX.com, a blog whose owner is desperate to win the PBA. The words and ideas below are mine. This is a paid post.

Of course, the paragraph above is just a lie, a second rate trying hard copycat lie.

This is a post to cast my vote for the 2009 Bloggers Choice Special award. By now, it’s pretty obvious who I’ll be voting for.

With all sincerety, I vote for Micamyx.com for the 2009 Bloggers’ Choice Award (National).

Micaela in my opinion deserves to receive the award because she’s going to pay me a lot of money and boxes of krispy kreme donuts after posting this vote. Haha! No, im just kidding. Seriously, Micaela blogs about things that just touches peoples hearts. Her simple but well written posts are priceless.

No, It’s not kissing your readers after leaving you a comment on your latest blog post. Neither is it a Dark Jedi Master Guide of kissing someone using the force. K.I.S.S. as defined by Wikipedia is “Keep it simple, stupid”. And further googling gave me another definition, “Keep it simple and straightforward”. K.I.S.S States that simplicity should be a key goal and unnecessary complexity avoided.

To us bloggers, writers, designers and almost everyone. Many of us are guilty of putting too much of unnecessary mess on our work. At times, we put too much emphasis on the complexity and we forget about the usability and outcome of our work. And after pulling it all together, you realize that its all cluttered and messy. Lets just put it this way, its like ordering your Venti Hot Caramel Macchiato at your local Starbucks coffee house. Now if the barista wasn’t trained and he wanted to please you (maybe for being a loyal customer). What he does is Put 5 Shots of espresso and 6 pumps of vanilla syrup on your Venti cup. Now would that please you? I guess not. Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s once said “It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

For blogging and design, what I notice these days is that people tend to put so much clutter on their site. Even I am guilty of this one, that is one of the reason why I took away most of the badges I have on my sidebar. Instead, I replaced them with google ads which I think would be the best way to give reference links to my visitors while monetizing my blog. If you may notice the 125×125 Ad Blocks on my sidebar, I’m not paid to post those ads and neither am I earning a percentage of every sale that my site leads. I have those as references to my readers. Moving forward, I want to show you some sites which practice K.I.S.S. knowingly and/or indirectly:

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You have your hands over the keyboard and you try your best to avoid looking at the blank page you have on your screen just to realize that you need to work on it because you have readers who are already having an idea that your blog is dead.

And you dont know where to start. You dont even know where you are. Aint that a bitch?

You are not sleepy neither tired of writing. You just find yourself wishing that everyone who wants you to publish something could go away on a vacation.

Well, not to worry. You’re just stuck. You have your goals figured out however, you cant seem to pull off a good starting point.

What could possibly work for you is that you must keep in mind  that what you’re writing is a draft. A rough, stinky and ugly draft. You wont pull off a perfect article the first time. Trust me. (Unless you’re Obama or something)

You can try a lot of things, some work best used in combination. Here are some approaches that I work with while writing articles;

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