A Little Side Trip: Dinagyang Festival

I was quite busy last week and this is one of the reasons. Iloilo City, Philippines celebrated its yearly Dinagyang Festival which is held on the third week of January. A festival that Ilonggo's celebrates to show their appreciation and devotion to Senior Sto. Ninio(baby Jesus). Its a week long celebration, people from all over Panay Island and the rest of the Philippines gathered to celebrate this festival. Natives and tourist alike enjoy themselves with the native foods serve at the food festivals, listening to live concerts held every night while awaiting the two day finale which will feature several competing tribes in two categories. In this years festival 20 tribes have competed with each other to grab the championship trophy.

The tribes ready themselves and practice 2 months before the competition. They rigorously disciplined their tribe members, designed colorful custumes using native materials, compose unique music using drums, congas and other native instruments. Tribe members paint their whole body with black latex paint and prepare for the tidious street dancing around the city's five staging areas while the punishing heat of the tropical sun beats on them. This grueling activity demonstrates their devotion to their faith. Some can handle this while others succumb to the punishing heat, fatigue and dehydration. This festival was cited by the Philippine Department of Tourism as the best Tourism event in the country. Tourist would usually book their hotel reservation 1 month before the festival.

The Philippine Islands celebrates quite a lot of festivals, well known festivals in the Visayan Islands are usually celebrated during the months of November to January. Iloilo City is 6 hours drive away from Boracay Island( a white sand beach on the northern part of Panay Island), tourist would usually refresh themselves in the crystal clear water-powder white beach of boracay. Tourist also festival hop from island to island. They would usually start their festival hopping in Bacolod to attend the Maskara Festival, after which the Ati-Atihan of Kalibo will be celebrated followed by the Dinagyang festival then would end their journey in Boracay Island. This is a unique cultural event, a colorful celebration in which Ilonggos are proud of.

Fine Tuning

I was about to feature some blogs about SEO but i can't seem to find the site that i once visited and added to mybloglog community, i know it's there somewhere. Oh bugger! i should have subscribe or at least booked marked it . I know it was a great site, loads of tips and tutorials on how to fine tune your sites and blogs for greater visibility and encourage traffic, tricks on how to get your site in a search engines listing and searches. A great material worth keeping.

Whewwww after spending hours scanning through my communities jumping from one site to the another i finally found the sites i was looking for, well not all of them i guess. I found a couple of sites worth checking out. The first site is that of Graywolf a guy who sure is howling on his stuff and his good at it too. The other one is a site authored by two SEO junkies Chris and Tamar the site is 10e20, you can find loads of useful SEO stuff here and professionally done as well.

I have yet to find the other sites. I'll post an update once i found them, in the meantime you could recommend an SEO site on your comments. I'll post it in my update once i checked it and find the site worth Shouting Out.

Keep on Blogging

Blogging to Fame

My friend antman left a message at mybloglog community. He has made a Shout Out about a blogger by the name of Divya Uttam and her blog entitled Blogging to Fame. Curious, i checked it out and found myself stuck into it and amassing as much info as i could. Her blog gives an extra edge to fellow bloggers of the ins and outs of blogging, tips and tricks that could encourage extra traffic to your blogs and sites. A blog worth visiting, and highly recommended to beginners as well as experienced bloggers. If i were to compare her blog to a bar of chocolate hers has an extra gram, a sort of a bonus worth biting =).

If only i have visited this blog days before, but since my connection has failed me again! and bloggers homepage is loading up like a lazy snail i don't have a choice but to keep myself busy and try time and time again to log in to blogger so that i could Shout her blog Out. Finally this afternoon i have overcome my log in problem and i must say that i fell so good about it. I hope im not that late though, cause i know its worth Shouting it out.

Cheers also to the following bloggers who have accepted and used brother antman's megaphone with the hope to level the playing field of exposure. Watch out for them, they may be buzzing around your work checking it out if its worth Shouting Out.

- Sizzlemash and his blogs sizzlemash blog and sizzlemash forum
- Soho Cheerleader and her blog SoHo CheerLeader
- Casey and her blog Celebrating Holidays Everyday
- cctech and his blog SEO Web design and Technology News
- Feed The Bull and his site Feed the Bull

Keep on blogging guys!