So its time, like I promised, to announce the winners of my first blog contest.

The contest was announced on 1st December on my new blog Knayam in association with wordpressland.

And here are the winners:

1st prize of Content Press – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $75 (sponsored by wordpressland.com): David

2nd prize of Magazine News – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $49 (sponsored by wordpressland.com): Topen

3rd prize: $5 cash via Paypal (sponsored by Knayam) : Rahul (prize given)

4th prize: 1000 EC credits (sponsored by Knayam): Rahul

5th  prize: 500 EC credits (sponsored by Knayam): Sherry (prize given)

Here is the video I made of the draw: For some weird reason,im unable to upload the video on any video sharing site. You can download the video from here and see it.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Winners will be contacted via email (by which they subscribed) soon and they will have 7 days to claim the prizes they have won.

Thank you all for participating.

A very very happy and prosperous new year to everyone who is reading this message.

May we have economic stability and peace in 2009.

Google gave me  a good new year gift, a PR. Google updated its PR in last days of December 2008. Knayam got a Page Rank of 2! Surprisingly,a few internal pages also got PR’s. I dint see that coming. Though I was expecting a PR of 3 for my homepage here. But I dint do any updates in December so I guess I missed the chance of getting a higher PR which seems like a tough job in this PR update process.

Well I have to say this PR update seems a little weird to me. Many good old blogs dropped their PR. Many blogs which have many back links, are stuck at 2. So from that perspective, a PR of 2 for my 2 odd month old blog is satisfactory.

My other main blog still remains  to be black listed in Google’s eyes. I wish I got a PR on that.

Knayam has just started and to give it a kick start we have decided to host a contest in association with Wordpressland where in you can win great prizes worth more than $130.

Here is the prize list:

1st prize:

An elegant, fresh and beautiful premium wordpress theme: “Content Press – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $75 (sponsored by wordpressland.com).

The theme is well coded and 100% Valid XHTML/CSS and is ready for easy modification. Theme is also plugin and widget ready. The Content Press premium Wordpress theme also includes a fully prepared theme for bbPress, a forum that ties into Wordpress. (DEMO)

2nd prize:

An elegant, fresh and beautiful premium wordpress theme: “Magazine News – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $49 (sponsored by wordpressland.com).

The theme is well coded and 100% Valid XHTML/CSS and is ready for easy modification. Theme is also plugin and widget ready. (DEMO)

3rd prize:

$5 cash via Paypal (sponsored by Knayam)

4th prize:

1000 Entrecard credits (sponsored by Knayam)

5th prize:

500 Entrecard credits (sponsored by Knayam)

All you have to do to enter the contest is:

1. Make a 40-50 word blog post about this contest at Knayam while also giving a link (no “no-follow” tags allowed) to wordpressland.com.(worth 2 points) Also, talk about wordpressthemes market is getting into the premium Wordpress themes market in Japan with the site wordpressland.com (worth 2 points)

2. Subscribe to the feeds by email.(1 point)

3. Leave a message here (1 point)

So you can earn upto 2+2+1+1=6 points.

You can just leave a message here in this post to be eligible for the contest but that will fetch you just one point. Earn more points for better chances of winning.
Winners will be chosen by a draw by me and the video of the same will be put up on the blog.

P.S. The themes will be the english versions,the same as the demo links and not the Japanese versions.

The contests ends 10 Jan 2009 31 Jan 2009 at 23:59 IST.

P.S. All your links should be “no-follow” free.

Good luck!

EDIT: Contest close date shifted to 31 January 2009 due to really less entries so far.

[click pictures to enlarge]

India’s 1st lunar probe,Chandrayaan-I is well on its journey to moon. It has started sending pictures from space. ISRO recently recieved pictures taken by Chandrayaan-I on 29 October, a week after Chandrayaan-I took off from Srikarikota.The pictures were taken from the on board Terrain Mapping Camera or TMC. The first picture(image 1) taken from an altitude of 9,000 km shows the Northern coast of Australia while the other (image 2) taken from a height of 70,000 km shows Australia’s Southern Coast. As you can see the resolutions of the images is good,even from an altitude of 9,000 km or 70,000 kms. I cant wait to see the images it clicks of the moon from the height of 100km. Surely they will provide very detailed view of moon’s surface. There are talks that the high resolution 3D pics taken by Chandrayaan-I will put to rest to the conspiracies and theories about whether or not US made or faked the landing on the moon.