Thais going Ba over Obama

I'm glad that Barack Obama has been elected as the US President. This makes Obama the first African-American US President!



I haven't been following much about the policies of John McCain or Obama but I just like Obama. I must say the foreign media has played a major role in influencing my decision. To me, McCain is like an old bad guy from the movies, but he is no doubt a war hero.

Soon we will be able to watch Hollywood blockbusters and action movies with a president who's Black. And if they make one of those terrorist films them we might get to see a face-off between Obama and Osama Bin Laden.

Thais are just going 'ba' (Thai: บ้า) over Obama.

In the past few days, Thai television and radio channels in Bangkok have been talking a lot about Obama and seem to have forgotten about PAD protesters. Every Thai person I know supports Obama and even the radio jockeys and news presenters love him. Soon we can expect Obama dolls and other goodies being sold on the Thai streets.

Barack Obama Doll might look like the one in the picture below



Actress Hayden Panettiere from the TV series Heroes has recently spoken about the importance of the youth vote in this year's US presidential elections and why she is backing Barack Obama.

Most expat bloggers in Bangkok are also happy that Obama has won.

Here is what some Bangkok bloggers have to say:

"We will FINALLY have a US President that we can be proud of. Bye bye Bush!" : Brit in Bangkok

"Never, ever, did I think I would live long enough to see a Black progressive elected president. He did it! He did it with integrity, honor, truthfulness and a commitment to a higher ideal. Congratulations, President Obama!" : Finding My Way Home

"Hail Obama" : GnarlyKitty

Absolutely Bangkok has lots of pictures from the celebrations of the mock US election at Bangkok Hyatt’s Ballroom which was packed with diplomats, Democrats & Republicans, journalists and hundreds of students. Some of them were seen sporting a Obama/Biden AND a McCain/Pailin button on their chest.


Change we need, indeed.

Featured Blog of the Day at FuelMyBlog!

My blog "HaPPi Like a HiPPo" has been featured as blog of the day at FuelMyBlog.com today!


The above picture I received from FuelMyBlog is my award award for the occasion :)

Blog of the day features a different blog every day, and today is my day.
If you liked my blog please vote for me by clicking on the image below:

Let this blog enjoy the limelight for today!



Below is a screenshot from FuelMyBlog with my blog displayed on the top left-hand corner under "Blog of the Day".

Google apologizes to bloggers for the S-word

Google had offered their sincere apologies last Friday, for locking down many blogs under the Blogger.com domain after mistakenly marking them as Spam.

Google's official blog Blogger Buzz had this to say in their post titled Spam Fridays,

"While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake.

We've noticed that a number of users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can't post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.

We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks."

The next day they offered another one You Are Not Spam

Google insists that the problem is purely due to their computer algorithm. They said they tracked down the problem to a bug in their data processing code that locked blogs even when their algorithms concluded they were not spam.

But it seems that bloggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run have had similar problems with their blogs being marked as Spam and their accounts temporarily frozen. Here's an article New York Sun Covers Shut-Down of Mitchell Langbert's Blog/Google Apologizes about it.

Wowzio Blog Widgets look pretty impressive!

Wowzio, a widgets platform that targets blogs and publishers, offers free customizable widgets that help blog readers easily navigate blogs. These widgets bubble up rich media content that includes text and images, which spices up a blog's content discovery process.



Wowzio widgets are based on open standards (javascript & css) as their creators claim, and supports all blogging platforms that allow javascript to be embedded. The creators of Wowzio also claim that "the architecture is designed for high performance and scale, from the ground up". Since they just launched their widgets in June this year, we will have to wait and watch if it is really going to perform well over time.

I've just added the Wowzio widget on my blog as I found the live traffic activity widget pretty impressive! It contains a post's title text along with an image that looks really nice and is completely customizable.

Wowzio offers 4 types of widgets seen in the pictures below:

Panoramic Slideshow Widget

Live Activity Widget


Feed Content Widget


Slideshow Widget


Click here if you want to add these widgets to your blog, no signup required!

Websites crash in Internet Explorer due to SiteMeter's tracking counter

Tens of thousands of websites and blogs are inaccessible after their pages load due to some issue in SiteMeter.


Anyone using Internet Explorer to visit a site which has SiteMeter's counter sees the page loading normally for a few seconds and then an error pops up with the message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://tekxplorer.blogspot.com Operation Aborted" and redirects to the "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" page.



This is been happening since 02 August, 2008 and is affecting Internet Explorer version 6 and 7 browsers only. Firefox users are not affected with this issue. I believe that all websites that use Sitemeter are currently down. A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the Sitemeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE. Apparently, Sitemeter is still able to log visits and the problem seems to occur just after the SiteMeter logo image loads.

You might find this information useful if you have a blog, since it may be affecting your blog too! SiteMeter, one of the most popular free web traffic counters on the internet, recently made some changes in their website traffic tracking code. The result is that this has been bringing down the internet. You can read more about this at Wired.com: Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer

Top 100 English Blogs in Thailand, I'm on!

My blog is featured in the Top 100 Thailand Blogs compiled by The Lost Boy, a blogger based in Phuket, Thailand. HaPPi like a HiPPo is currently ranked 59th in the list, which has grown upto 155 entries as of now. You can take a look at the list and vote for the Thailand blogs you like, but please don't forget to vote for my blog (listed as HaPPi Like a HiPPo) if you liked it, thanks in advance!



Kudos to Matt, The Lost Boy, as he has spent a long time compiling this list, searching for active Thailand blogs, and introduced the list on April 26, 2008. Most of the blogs are in English, although some of them are in French. An explanation of how the list was compiled is here, which is based on a combination of Google's Page Rank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank and user voting system.

The Top 10 blogs currently listed are:

1. New Mandala
2. 2Bangkok
3. Thailand Land of Smiles
4. Thailand Blogs
5. The FARANG Speaks 2 Much
6. Bangkok Pundit
7. Wise Kwais Thai Films
8. Bangkok Metblogs
9. Bisean
10. Absolutely Bangkok

I did have a look at some of the blogs in the list and found some interesting ones, which I think is a great way to explore what other bloggers from Thailand are saying.