A new ratings site (call it Kazakhstan’s Alexisa) has sprung up: Whois1in.kz. Basically it tracks traffic to websites in the Kaznet web-space. However, I’m not sure how they limit that. They were kind enough to send me an invitation. So apparently blogging in English doesn’t really matter as long as your site is related to Kazakhstan in someway.

So down at the bottom of my site you will notice a new badge that looks like this:

I took this screenshot in better days when my overall ranking was 29th of all the sites registered. On that day I had 57 page views and 33 visitors. Checking now, I’ve only had 42 views from 22 visitors so far, and I am ranked a dismal 98th. But I am the 6th most popular blog and considering that among my competitors are a blog service and a blog compiler that takes entries from different blogs and republishes them, I feel pretty good about that.

If you want to register, you can go here. They have a variety of badges to choose from and they all look pretty slick. I also noticed that the badges by default point to the homepage of Whois1in.kz so I advise modifying it to point to your own site’s statistics by replacing the link in the code. Also the link opens in the same page, so I would change the target to “_blank” or “new”.

As is usual, I’ve become busy particular as school has started. This year, I’m working very closely with a school and I have all sorts of interesting experiences to relate and some observations but I prefer to let a little time and distance pass before blogging about them so that they are less recognizable. And so I have some distance on them before unleashing my first, possibly wrong, impression.

In the meantime, I haven’t had much free time to blog even as a bill to make Nazarbayev President-for-life is in the works and Vinokourov made a failed bid to become manager of Team Astana instead of a rider (I thought he spent two years dying to get back on his bike). Not to mention alien hiergoglyphs left in South Kazakhstan. Hopefully I’ll get some time to cover these issues in detail.

What I have been doing in my free time is working with a few teachers to develop a Jeopardy html program! I introduced the idea of playing Jeopardy (or Своя Игра) in the class, to review for tests or just for fun. The teachers were amazed and we improvised a basic method of drawing the board on the whiteboard and then typing up the questions on paper. We discussed whether to write the questions on the board or to do it orally. Now my school is equipped with smartboards or interactive boards and so we have computers with the images projected to the front of the class. And we can use a pen-like thing as a mouse to click on stuff. One teacher and I decided it would be a lot of fun to design an interactive Jeopardy board. We decided to use html because 1) I know enough html to pull it off and 2) we figured every classroom with a computer has an internet browser. However we didn’t want to put it online because not every classroom has internet access and because teachers should be able to change the questions!

Since a lot of ESL teachers coming to KZ get on this blog, I figured I’d post our files here. This particular game is designed to test Unit One of Straightforward Elementary. But it should be easy to change the questions (if slightly painstaking). If you want to check it out, just download the link below. Board.html is the Jeopardy Board. Clicking on each dollar amount brings up the question. There is then a link to the answer. On the answer page, there’s a link back to the board and that dollar amount has disappeared.

If you want to edit it, open Board in Notebook or a text editor and find the categories. Change those to whatever you want. To change the questions, go to the subfolders 1,2,3,4 and 5. Each numbered folder corresponds to a category. In each folder is the question file named 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500. And the answer files, named 100a, 200a, 300a, 400a and 500a. So use a text editor to replace my questions and answers with your own.

There is also a Final Jeopardy game. If you go to the board and scroll down, you’ll see the final jeopardy picture. Click on it to bring up instructions (this file is located in the fj folder, fj.html) and give the students time to decide how much to bet. Then click on question, which takes you to the file fjq.html. The Jeopardy theme may or may not play depending on your browser, but in a ideal world it will play 4 times, or for 2 minutes. Get around this by simply playing it in your computer’s audio player. fja is of course the answer page.
Here are the files. It should be good to go. Just download it, save it to your computer, open the folder and open board.html.

Jeopardy.zip

If there are any computer geeks hanging around who want to improve it, I’d love to see:

*reliable MP3 playing (preferably with a loop of 4 times) so the theme will play in all browsers
*automated score keeping would be awesome, a separate screen maybe with points that are automatically added
*A wizard program that would let teachers change questions and answers easily. I imagine something like you start a setup program and it asks you to enter your categories, then enter each question and answer, then save it all.
*Animations or some kind of fun transitions.

But I would like to ideally keep it lightweight and also able to run on any normal computer (so some teacher in a village can run it without installing the latest Shockwave plug-in and so on.

The fact that I don’t post very often and that most of my visitors seem to come from search engines looking for very specific information–what Kazakh people do for jobs, freestailo translation, Mark Seidenfeld, Borat’s national anthem, etc. — led me to consider doing a more magazine/newspaper layout (as I notice Registan has done recently. Unforunately, while blogsome is a great host, it doesn’t use the usual Word Press code meaning templates are more severely limited. So this is my mock up attempt at a magazine format at my Test Site. Basically I used an RSS feedreader to create feeds on my site of each category. The advantage is it looks pretty good and I have full css control. The minuses are the service adds ads, limits the description length (although it isn’t supposed to) and the link to the rest of the article is the title, but I can’t put a link at the end of the excerpt, which would be nice.

I’d love to hear any comments, feedback, ideas for the new format. Thanks.

Due to popular request, I redesigned Dombro Hero. People who had bought the T-shirt asked the design to be moved up higher and the wording to be bigger. Once I did that, I thought it looked better a little more square, so I rotated the dombro and moved it to the other side.

The Original Dombro Hero T-shirt is still up for sale. And I am really grateful for the people who posted about it and all my buyers too. It’s never too late to get one–this site has even delivered to Tajikistan and Afghanistan so I think those of us in Kazakhstan will get our orders too!

Another T-shirt I designed is a heavily photoshopped (well, GIMPshopped but who’s keeping track?) photo of mine of Bayterek. I have been looking for a nice simple T-shirt of Bayterek, the symbol of Astana and I couldn’t find one that I liked. I also really like the neon-pastel color scheme of the official “Capital Day” posters so I used them as a background. Click on the photo of either T-shirt to get to the buying page. Each one is available in a variety of colors and styles including long-sleeve, fitted and V-neck.

End of commercial. We will soon return you to your regular KZBlog with some travel stories and photos as I’ve been on vacation the last few weeks and been doing some traveling (finally) around Kazakhstan. I’m going to try to give not only adventure/travelogue stories but also concrete info on how to get to these places and what to expect there. I hope readers will add their own advice and stories in the comments.

KZBlog was featured twice this past week. The first one I knew nothing about, but I was selected as the weekly pancake at at Uncle Shal’s Pancakes. The word Blin in Russian translates literally as pancake, but figuratively it means something like “darn”, a mild swear word. This site however uses it to refer to sites in the Kazakhstan Internet space (Kaznet) that attract his attention, for better or for worse! I was very pleased to be featured even if my main merits for Uncle Shal seem to be that I like living in Kazakhstan!

I was also interviewed a few months ago for Culture Shock, run by Kristie Dugan, an expat living in Norway. She’s done a series of interviews with expat bloggers focusing on what it’s like to live in another culture, how to adjust and practical advice for expats. Check out all the interviews here.

Some more photos of Astana on my redbubble. So far my best seller is Dombro hero but I’m proud of a lot of my pics. So check them out and if you like them, buy a print. The quality is really good and yes, they do deliver to Kazakshtan (as well as anywhere else in the world).

Statue near the Canal in Astana at sunset.

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A bit of shameless self-promotion. In addition to my photos up at Red Bubble, I designed a T-shirt. I’ve seen parodies of Guitar Hero for the cello and the accordion, but I thought “Dombra Hero” was a needed addition. Hope you like it and check out the site for the shirt where you can get a look at it in different colors and buy it in different styles.

By the way, one of the reasons I chose Redbubble is that they deliver anywhere in the world, including to Kazakhstan. So don’t be afraid to order. You’ll get it.

Font designed by Lettering Delights

Just to let everyone know, I’ve opened a POP friendly email account at kazakhblog [at] gmail.com. My old email, kzblog [at] yahoo.com, will no longer be monitored as frequently. Please send any emails to kazakhblog [at] gmail.com. And let me know if there are any links I forgot to change on this blog.

This post is only for people using Entrecard. If you aren’t a blogger, don’t read another word. If you are a blogger, I highly recommend that you check out Entrecard because it does increase traffic to your blog. But I won’t bore you by describing it in any detail here. Only Entrecarders should be reading past this point.

I suck at dropping cards; my day job keeps me way too busy to keep up with any but a handful of travel and ex-pat blogs on EC. So to try to keep people dropping on my site, I’ve added an RSS feed of the top 10 droppers on this site for the past 30 days. That’s right, all you have to do is drop on me a lot and you get free link love. Hope that provides some incentive and makes up for my laziness.

Sorry for the month long sabbatical but between work, family issues, and the laziness that comes to the whole nation in December due to the quadruple hit of holidays: Kurban Ait, Independence Day (16 Dec), New Years, and Orthodox Christmas (7 Jan) not to mention Expat Christmas (25 Dec), I didn’t spend a lot of time on teh Internets. But I am back to a more regular schedule on this blog though there may be some more dead time with all these days off from work.

Honestly, as anyone who browses this blog can see, I don’t have the time to devote to it that I would like. Therefore I am taking a step I never thought I would take. But I am inviting other bloggers to post on this site from time to time. You don’t have to make any definite commitments to post regularly. The topics would be limited to Kazakhstan or greater Central Asia but anything from politics to economics to travel stories to amusing stories or ‘news of the weird’ is fine. Posts can be cross-posted as well. I would like to chose only people who have some blogging experience. If you are interested send me an email at: Comments (6)