SwissPinoy.com
This morning, I received an email from Dani Kuettel who created the SwissPinoy.com website. I visited the site and found it very interesting. I checked the domain name and learned that it was registered on April 30, 2006.
According to Dani Kuettel:
I created a web site at www.SwissPinoy.com to improve my technical skills and learn more about Filipinos in Switzerland. The idea behind SwissPinoy.com is simply to list everything about Filipinos in Switzerland and Swiss in the Philippines.
I feel honored that my personal blog, Simply Sofie - Heart and Wisdom + Smiles and Laughters at SofieHofmann.com is listed at the main page of the site through blog feed. As of today, it is listed at the main page together with X-Pat Files - Online Chronicles of a Filipino Expat in Switzerland, and Carissa )i( - Que viva la locura! Step into my organized chaos.
He wrote because he discovered that I have another blog, my web design blog, this Sehdi.com Blog, where once in a while, I write about some technical topics on the net. He asked me if someday, I could provide him the rss feed merging all my blogs into one feed. He thought that my technical blog would give readers a nice different view of Pinoys in Switzerland. Unfortunately, I have no intention to do that at the moment although it’s one of my plans, I just couldn’t do it right now nor next month. I still have some pending hobby projects.
SwissPinoy.com is still quite new but it is really such a good project. It’s a sort of a directory about Filipinos in Switzerland as well as Swiss in the Philippines. It will serve as a means for others to know more about the Filipinos in Switzerland.
I am Sofie Hofmann and I have been designing websites since 1999. My background is in training, sales and marketing before venturing into web design and development but merely as a hobby.
June 27th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
I added the Sehdi.com blog to the main page too, along with “My personal blog”, which is a blog by a Swiss-Pinay who was inspired by Sofie.
In order to fit all of these blog feeds onto the main page, I limited all but the “X-Pat Files” to the latest 3 entries. This should work for now, but I’ll run into trouble if more Swiss-Pinoys make blogs. My own blog is at http://swisspinoytech.blogspot.com/, but it is more of a personal technical reference. I was thinking of aggregating Sophie’s blogs into one, but I still have to much work to do with SwissPinoy.com, such as collecting, arranging and updating data. Over the weekend, I made some modifications to discourage data redundancy and I’ll soon need to either find some freeware or make my own applet which validates the links to other sites. It was not my intent to create a Swiss-Pinoy directory because I don’t like the idea of having a bunch of links which may become invalid at any point. Yet, collecting links is one of the quickest ways to create something from nothing. Hopefully, in the future I’ll be able to invent something which could become more useful to others.
June 28th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Hello Dani… thanks for the updates. I always visit your site and see what have been changed and updated. You are right , sooner or later, you will really run out of space at the main page just because of blogs. It was actually a good move to add another link “Blogs” to differ from the others. It’s not easy maintaining a directory, especially if it’s a human-edited directory. You will need a lot of patience then. I could see that it’s not what you really have in mind that was why I just said “sort of a directory”. I know that SwissPinoy.com is going to be more than just a directory. I admire your perseverance for doing such a good project.
Oh, so, I’m inspiring other Swiss Pinoys now. I’m flattered.
Thank you everyone. Keep on going!
Let us be proud of being a Filipino, a Filipina, a Swiss Pinoy, a Swiss Pinay, Filipinos living in Switzerland.
June 29th, 2006 at 7:07 am
It didn’t take me long to find more blogs. Now, there are 8 blogs (or 9 including mine). My wife created a blog called “Anything Pinay” and I found the “Ugnayang Bayan: Blog” and “HCR Pinoys’ Blog” which are two Pinoy blogs in Geneva. In order to list all of these blogs on the main page, I found BlogDigger, which seems to do a pretty good job of aggregating them all together, as seen here: http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=3062. I’m a bit disappointed that the blog title is not listed next to each listing, to know from which blog the listing comes from, and the tooltips don’t always appear well. But I’m not sure if that problem is caused by blogspot, the SharePoint RSS/ATOM reader or BlogDigger.
June 30th, 2006 at 6:52 am
Blogdigger doesn’t seem to refresh often enough, so I switched to lazytom’s FeedJumbler @ http://feedjumbler.com/users/SwissPinoy/SwissPinoyBlogs/, but I had to temporarily remove carissa’s blog from it since she has blog posts with no title, causing xml code to appear in FeedJumbler feed.
June 30th, 2006 at 9:57 am
Hi Dani, you’ll definitely find more Swiss Pinoy Blogs everyday. I check your site almost everyday so I know which one was updated and with that, I don’t have to visit all the blogs, only when they’re updated. Though of course, there’s a way of doing that on my part but I’ll just make use of your site.
Thanks for aggregating the Swiss Filipino Blogs. It seems like FeedJumbler is better, huh?
By the way, I read your wife’s blog too. I just didn’t leave a message, maybe next time.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Hello Dani, why not try http://bloglines.com. I’ve been reading about it for quite some time now though I haven’t tried it myself, so I can’t really tell if it’s good or not.
July 4th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Hi Sofie,
Thanks
You are more than welcome to use anything that you like about my site on your site(s), such as using the blogs that I found to create your own aggregation of blogs on your site. FeedJumbler seems to work pretty well. I subscribed to bloglines today, so I’ll have a look at what it does. I have been having some problems with the “On-Cue” blog and attempted to use it through blogdigger and then feedjumbler, but that failed. Maybe if I create a feed to it using feedburner, then it might work right. One of these days, I think I’ll create my own webpart to customize it better for SwissPinoy.
July 6th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Thanks Dani! I’ll just visit your site for blog updates and other site updates.
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Hi Danny and Sofie,
I maintain the website of the “Steering Committee” of the Filipinos in Geneva and am honored that you have noticed us. Through the Ugnayang Bayan website and blog, we try to link, coordinate, and inform the “Swiss-Pinoys” in Geneva and Lausanne. I would like your permission to link your website to ours. In addition, there is another website which I created recently concerning FCCG: Filipino Catholic Community of Geneva. You may want to check at http://fccg.wan.io. Thanks for the two of you for uplifting the Philippine image and culture.
Rudy
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Hi Rudy,
Thanks for visiting the site, and yes, you can link my sites to your sites. I will link your sites too from my sites. It makes me proud that we are slowly creating our own identity as a swiss filipino web community on the net.
Thanks to Dani too! He’s really doing a good job with SwissPinoy.com, a great project about Swiss Pinoys.
I linked the Ugnayang Bayan Blog at http://www.sehdi.com/blog/links/ and Ugnayang Bayan site at http://www.sehdi.com/links/02/. Regarding FCCG, can’t find the links page. I also noticed something at the FCCG site, can’t scroll down. Kindly let me know if everything is ok.
Sofie