I have been trying to learn all that I can about web site hosting. I have recently acquired a few new sites, and I have a lot to learn. I have actually had my own hosting for several years, but, that is through a host that is what I call - a major hand-holder! I wouldn’t say I’ve really learned a whole lot of back end information from that account. I actually had it for several years before I even knew what an FTP program was!

But as I wander around the internet, trying to absorb as much information as I can, I find that I am getting lost in a sea of advice. I want to find the information that I actually need - not too technical, not too simple - so that I can do my work online, to the best of my ability.

I found a site today that seems to be offering me just that.
It is called Web Hosting Information and there
is a lot of great - and understandable - advice there.

They have a huge section of reviews, in which they review a ton of different hosting companies. And anyone who visits the site can vote on each company based on features, reliability, support, and price. And there is also a comment section under each review, so that if you have anything you want to share about a particular company, you can.

They have a weekly podcast, on which they answer questions that have come in. They’re very short, so they’re easy to listen to. And underneath each podcast, they list related resource articles. This is a great section! They are a month behind right now, though, so I’m hoping they’ll pick this one back up soon.

My favorite section is the News. They offer daily hosting industry news briefings. So you get a little bit of this or that, in relation to hosting. The last one talked about a Hosting Convention in Las Vegas that’s going on right now.

All in all, I think this is going to be a great site to help educate me about the in’s and out’s of web hosting and I’m glad to have found it!

There are two new people search engines on the web and one is looming way above the other in quality! They are both in beta, so there are room for improvements, but, my money is still on Peek You. The other one is called Spock.com. Just to start off with, let me show you the pages on me from the two sites.

This first image is all the information they have on me at Spock.com:

Now this second image is the information they have on me at PeekYou.com:
There is actually so much information on me at PeekYou that it wouldn’t all fit on the screen cap, but, you can click on the image to go to my page there.

When I first saw it, I had a bit of the ‘tummy nervousness’ - like a little jolt - eeks! Look at all that information on me! Yikes!

But then, I had to realize, that is all information that I myself have published on the web somewhere. The one thing that I did not like was having my town published on there - when friends told me about the site and told me that their locations were on their pages, I was a little irked. Upon finding my page, however, I found that they got my town wrong! That’s funny, and a bit odd, because, I never actually give out my actual town. I will, however, list a nearby larger town, or an even larger city. Neither of those two that I use is Cullman, though. And should my actual town ever get listed on the page, I can edit it to say the larger city. That is one of the cool features of PeekYou that Spock does not have. Anyone can edit listings, add to listings, or even add people to PeekYou.com that are not already listed. Conversely, on Spock.com, you can add information, but, in order to get information taken off, it must be voted off by users. Users can vote for each tidbit of info. that is listed for a person, and if enough users vote ‘no’, then the information is removed. Beyond that, if you find something you are uncomfortable with having listed there, you will have to contact them to get it removed.

Once I got over the shock of seeing all of ‘me’ on that page, I was actually quite pleased. Just yesterday, I started building a page about all of my web-presence, because, I’ve joined a new group online and wanted to share with them where all they could find me. I didn’t finish building that page, and now I don’t have to. I can just send them to my PeekYou.com profile. On this line of thinking, there is one feature of Spock.com that I would love to see on PeekYou. Spock has a widget that you can grab the code for, to put on your sites, or maybe even in forum signatures - so you can send people to your profile to learn more about you. That is a great feature.

I will not, however, be spending much time at all at Spock. And the real clincher that made me decide this is some of their tactics, which I perceive to be underhanded. Well, I guess you would call it, one of their tactics. They created an application for Facebook, which in and of itself, would be a good thing. However - the app was a ‘Mad Libs’ app - and people had fun with it. I love Mad Libs myself. The bad part is that they used the information in the Mad Libs to tag people on Spock.com. So if it said, “Lisa works in a strip club downtown and owns a vibrator” - some of those words would be used to tag me. So, in searching for those keywords - results would come up with my smiling mug! (Actually, there are not very many pictures on Spock - another negative!) They even had one poor guy tagged as a pedophile! He is a blogger who had blogged about Congressman Mark Foley and thinks the Spock search engine just goofed up. And, in their defense - upon being contacted, they did remove the tag. But - the Facebook application? That’s just not cool - and makes me not trust them!

I can definitely see PeekYou.com as being fun, and even quite useful - almost like a LinkedIn profile that I didn’t have to put together!

And - it’s a ton of fun - I have been searching all kinds of people on it all day! It can be quite addictive. If the people don’t have much of a web presence, though, you are not going to find much, if anything, about them. Most people have something online, though - and even those little nuggets can be helpful in hooking up with your best friend from high school, your first love, or even an old boss you’d love to go work for again!

And hey! PeekYou.com added three years to my life! I’m only 34 now! Yep - PeekYou definitely gets my vote!

Thoof is a very cool new site full of stories from around the web, that were submitted by users. Well, that sounds kind of familiar. It would be - if that were the whole story, but, it’s not. Thoof has its own “personalization algorithm” that figures out what kind of stories that I would like to read about, based on my activity on the site! That is so cool - my own personalized news! See, if I like a story that I’ve read, I do nothing - just leave it alone. If I don’t like a story or I’m just uninterested, after I’ve clicked through to the story, a new link appears under the title. That link says ‘not interesting’ and you just click on that and it drops the story off of your page and adds that into your algorithm. So then, I imagine, it won’t show you stories of a similar nature. I think it is kind of like Digg meets Wikipedia. You have the listing of stories there, like Digg, but, you can also make changes to the listing, like Wikipedia. You can suggest changes to the introductions to the stories and their tags. And then other users vote on your changes. You are also able to submit the stories - all of the stories are submitted by users. And they have just added a ThoofRank badge that you can add to the bottom of any blog posts that you’ve submitted, to show the popularity of the post on Thoof. It will show a percentage relative to other Thoof stories. I am definitely loving this site and can see myself wasting spending a lot of time there. Oops! I already have!

I have been running my first website for quite a while now. I started my personalized letters for children business, My Very Own Mail, back in 2003. Online advertising and traffic generation can be overwhelming responsibilities, but, with all of these new consumer-generated advertising networks popping up, things are getting just a bit easier. See, I can purchase some advertising through one of these networks, and then some nice people, who are hopefully awesome bloggers, will get paid to blog about my website. And then I should gain some more traffic and maybe even a few sales from having my name out there more. And even if I don’t make sales from it right away, it’s still good, because, I’m building a name for myself on the web, and gaining some backlinks to my site.

I’m so excited about this promotion from Easy CGI - I just registered a new domain and hosting lickety split - for free! For a whole year! This ‘acquiring of domains and setting up new sites’ stuff can sure be addictive! But when offer a deal like that, who can pass it up? Their support sounds awesome, too - they offer 24/7 phone support - I sure need that from time to time! And they guarantee a minimum 99.9% uptime on all servers and systems. Here’s a big clincher for me - they offer easy, one-step installation of many popular scripts on the internet, such as blogs, forums, photo galleries, and more. I am, of course, most interested in the blogging platforms.

I’m just still so blown away that I got free web hosting for a whole year - that is so cool! And then when my payments start in 2008, it will only be $9.95 a month. And I’ll have SmarterStats website statistics, with detailed reports about my visitors and their activity on my site. And to get me up and going, they have setup tutorials, that show me how to do everything, they don’t just tell me. I am definitely a visual learner, so that is a big plus! They also have an extensive knowledgebase to help with questions you might have along the way.

I’m so excited - my domain and my site won’t be live for 24 hours, they say, so I can’t show it to you yet. I have known hosts to make that happen way before that 24-hour timeframe, though - so I might be showing you my new site later this evening! I can’t wait!

What a total bummer! I completely missed Colleenie Weenie and her sweet ass online radio show last night! We went out to eat Mexican food (it was sooo good!) and then when I got home, I busted my sweet ass to get finished up on a project before deadline. You can definitely bet your sweet ass that I will listen to it today! And you should, too! Colleen was made for this shit! I love listening to her! Oh yeah, Mr. Fab is made for this shit, too - he had a knockdown dragout with Doctor Mom on his show this week, which I also missed. Definitely gonna listen to that one today, too! I’m sure it will prove to be a riot!

Dudes! This is so completely and totally amazing! When I get some time next week, I’m going to try and do some research on it to see what else I can find out about it. You will be utterly amazed - and I am so not kidding!

I actually found this on One Man’s Blog - I find the coolest stuff over there! It’s a really fun and informative blog, because, like John says - Specialization is for Insects!

Now check out the video - you’ll love it!
Amazing Choreographed Samsung Stadium Dance

Add to My Profile | More Videos

There is a cool new site for us ladies and I’m having so much fun looking around on it! It’s called HerFabLife.com and signing up is so easy! It’s all about the latest and the greatest trends - in fashion, music, stores, restaurants, spas and hotels, and there is even a section called ‘Hot Guy of the Week’. I thoroughly enjoyed checking that section out! Just looking, everybody chill out!

It is great because it is user-generated content, so if you have just gone to the coolest new bar and you really want to let people know about it, you can! Just sign up and head to the ‘add to the site’ section and fill in all the information that you can about it! You can also vote on all of the content that people submitted. There was one entry about perfume, that the user just really made me think about perfume, and how cool it is, so I voted her five stars!

And you can bookmark the stuff that really interests you, and then you can also share your bookmarks with a badge on your blog or website. You will notice my badge in my right sidebar under “Cool Stuff”.

There is even a section full of the latest trends for the man in your life. It’s called ‘For Him Only‘.

I’m really interested in sites utilizing user-generated content and keeping up with what’s hip and cool is definitely a hot topic for the Web 2.0 crowd - it’ll be fun to watch the growth of this site!

Did that capture your attention? I imagine that the words ‘buy cheap viagra’ made a few people do a bit of a double take! And just what the heck does viagra have to do with SEO, anyway? Right? Well, John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog, is running a little experiment, prompted by a post by Aaron Wall. And the question that Aaron proposed is, “How Easily do Authoritative Sites Rank for New Keywords?” And he talked about Matt Cutts ranking pretty high for the words, ‘buy cheap viagra’, just by using the words in one post. And as John has a PR8, he is wanting to experiment and see just how quickly he ranks up high for those words, as well. There is one wild card to the experiment, though, and that is that Matt Cutt’s site has much more longevity than John’s site. In fact, John just celebrated his One Year Blogiversary! Happy Blogiversary, John! And I am interested to hear how this experiment turns out!

I just love my Punkymoms! I’ve been a part of their group for quite some time now, around four years. And they are some of the most amazing, loving, fighting for ya, giving, intelligent, inspiring women I’ve ever met! I love being a part of their group. And the group is getting not only pretty large, but, also pretty widespread. We’ve got mamas from all over! There is one amazing and pretty good size group in Orlando. They are one of our larger Punkymama clusters. And I know that I could go and stay with any one of them at any time. It is like I have my very own vacation home Orlando-style! It is a cool feeling to know that I could go visiting lots of different places and see my sweet and rockin’ peeps! There is a great group in New York that I’d like to hang with, as well as Minnesota! Punkymoms are just the best!