nagueño.com, without the eñe

1. NAGUEÑO DOT COM. After nine emails with Ederic Eder, editor of Tinig.com which co-sponsored the highly successful Wika 2007 blog writing contest together with the Pinoy Bloggers Society (PBS), my own domain name -- www.nagueno.com -- is now up and running.

I would have preferred "nagueño.com" -- with an eñe -- but sadly, it is unrecognized in the English language. So, nagueno.com will have to do.

A one-year webhosting and domain registration was my consolation prize for participating in the contest through this entry. The other big winners can be found here.

Happy with my Blogger account, I asked Ederic to help fix some technical problems in redirecting that web address to this blog and he gladly obliged. I'm still thinking how to put to good use that Dreamhost account he set up for me. Any bright ideas?

2. WITHOUT THE DOT COM. Incidentally, Nagueño is also the title of a collection of short stories by fictionist Carlos Ojeda Aureus, who teaches at UP, which Kristian Cordero recently gave me as a gift.

Lynn rollicked with laughter when she went through some of Aureus's lighter short stories during the Peñafrancia fiesta break; she previously gave Kristian's prize-winning poems a try but eventually gave it up, finding his poetry too dark for her taste.

3. OTHER GOOD NEWS. Mango RED-Infinity wins as the 2007 WPPP (Wedding & Portrait Photographers of the Philippines) Rookie of the Year. Out of curiousity, I checked the winning Photographer of the Year, who also has a blog; I may be biased but I think Randall and company's fantastic imagery is simply better.

Ansel rattles off the numbers for the Naga city government website. The upside: At number 323, it still is the top LGU website in the country. The downside: newer, better and more appealing websites have come out over the years, dropping the website from its top 100 ranking several years back. Which means lots of work and long hours ahead for the staff-challenged Naga EDP.

Finally, my series on the Cyber Education Project was recently featured in Martin Perez's popular weblog Akomismo.