Email Interview with eches[Owner & author of blog.eches.net]

My name is Azman, known as eches in the blogosphere and I’m from a lovely country called Malaysia. I loved to play computer games during the good old days but gradually my passion on games faded away. I haven’t played any PC games ever since my graduation.  I love to learn anything related to the computer, internet and I always keep myself updated with latest buzz in the blogosphere.  As I get myself involved in blogging, I started to develop my new hobby; tinkering with wordpress themes and later on I manage to create wordpress themes from the scratch for myself and successfully distributed them to the public.

Q) How did you start up with www.blog.eches.net. What was the initiation, any inspiration behind blogging?

I started blogging out of the blue, amidst the hectic time of my final year in Electrical & Electronic Engineering back in Belfast. I thought of making it as my personal blog but later changed my mind. The sudden change of direction was mainly due to my deep passion related to the technology stuffs and the aforementioned topics above. As a result more posts revolve around those topics. I just realized too, I’m not that kind of guy who loves to share his private life with the public. A glimpse look on my life is fine but not every minute of my life like some bloggers do.

Q) Right from October 2006, the time when you started blogging, how was your journey on the web, did you face any ups and downs?

I must admit there are always roller coaster changes in motivation level when it comes to blogging. The ups and downs very much depend on the goings-on at that particular time frame, things like starting new job, moving to new place etc. The hardest part is getting the momentum back up after short or long hiatus. Anyway, I always manage to get around the problem. It takes some time though to make my blog up and running again with fresh content.

Q) What do you see yourself doing in five years. What are your biggest dreams and any recent success you want to share with us.

Currently I’m expanding my online network; adding more blogs on different niches, more ebay stores and venturing into affiliate marketing. In 5 years’ time, I hope to see them mature and to be able to reap some benefits out of them (i.e. get stable multiple streams of income out of them). There are few achievements that I’m proud of pertaining my first blog; eches.net. Getting below 70k Alexa ranking, gaining PR 5, passing 1500 unique visitors/day (no stumbleupon) and used to be in top 500 Technorati (thanks to the distribution of wordpress themes) are the things that really synergize my motivation to keep moving forward with this blog.

Q)  What web and software applications do you use for blogging and other activities. Do share your favorite applications and why you use them in specific like, Web Browser, Operating system, web services,  wordpress plug-ins, blogging and other tools you want to share with us.

For blogging, Wordpress is always my first choice. One of the reasons is there are a lot of plugins out there that can be easily incorporated into Wordpress system to translate whatever ideas I have in mind into reality. For content aggregation I prefer to use Google reader. It’s light, fast and it got everything I need to manage all the subscriptions. For web analysis I use Google analytics. Even though there’s a slight delay and the stream of data is not in real time, Google analytics is still the best in providing the most comprehensive data collections.

When I write a post that’s worth for social bookmarking submission, I used socialmarker.com for submitting to up 40 social bookmarking sites. I usually use Firefox as my default browser but lately I start to use Opera more often because it doesn’t take much of the memory.

I always use Windows as the operating system but that doesn’t mean I like them much. It just because they are all very familiar to me and it helps in term of productivity. I run Ubuntu occasionally but it sure takes some time before I can get use to the whole new system.

Q) How do you organize your blog in general, how do you publicize and manage blog posts.

I subscribed to many sources of information and I keep aggregating new sources from time to time. As they grow in numbers, I make sure every single of them is sorted accordingly to suitable categories. Every morning I flip through those blogs and news portals to get to know the latest goings on. I usually write a post or two every day, depending on things that catch my attention. As I anticipate busy activities in the coming days, I prepare few posts in advance so that they can be automatically posted when the time come.

Q) With respect to your web activities do you work in a team or do you blog alone. Are there any friends helping you out.

Currently I operate my web activities all alone as everything seems to be manageable but as the network keeps expanding I start to occasionally hire designers and ghost writers for some of my online projects.  In the future I hope to do some sort of collaboration with other bloggers.

We sincerely thank eches for spending time in answering the above questions. We believe that your views will surely help our visitors.