It’s really important once you get online to get website hosting and have your own self-hosted blog or website. It will give you more control over your own content. I, personally, really love blogger so I am still over here blogging on several blogs while I also have hosted sites. I know I should probably give Blogger up, but, I just can’t seem to completely walk away. Silly, I know.

I know some people buy their domains and still use Blogger as their CMS. I don’t really know, though, if that really puts you in the driver seat or not. I suppose if you are making regular backups, you would still be safe. But owning the whole site, kit and caboodle, is the best way to go.

For my hosted sites, I actually have three different hosts. My favorite website host, though, is HostGator. You can read all about them, along with some reviews, at that link.

It can be so hard when you are going into something new, so it really helps to have a ratings and review site, where you can get stats on the different companies and impressions from real people on their experiences.

I’ve spent the last hour on a new site that is in beta and I’m having so much fun! The site is called Rankrz and it is all about user-generated rankings. Rankings on what? you ask… Rankings on all kinds of things – anything and everything! That is one of the things that is so cool about it, because, you can build a ranking list for a very focused niche, if you want to. There are other ranking-type sites out there, but, none for very focused niches. And what happens is I start a ranking list, and then others start ranking lists on the same topic (or keyword) and then those lists are aggregated. The first thought that came to my mind was that my friend, Loretta, could start some kind of cross-stitch ranking list. And then others could come in and do the same thing. And you wind up with all the separate lists, and the big, combined list.

I made a list for some of my favorite movies:

It is really helpful if you enter a description for each one of your selections. Thinking of one of the ways that it is helpful to do so, brings me to another really cool thing about Rankrz. You can make money by participating in this fun, new ranking site. You can do so through Amazon and Google Adsense. You just enter your ID’s for both of those sites in your profile, and you will be able to participate in revenue sharing on the site. And one girl’s list of stuff she liked, I noticed Amazon text links were showing up in her descriptions! So describing your entries can definitely be helpful!

So come on over, and rank stuff with me – this could be fun! I’m serious! (Or I’m just an internet nerd!) 😉

Devil Boy Amy
Originally uploaded by patsmomlisa

My friend, Amy, showed me a really cool new Firefox Addon. Do you see how pretty I was able to make her? Heehee!

My friends and I always try to keep each other up to date on the newest Addons available through Firefox. We are diehard Firefox fans! (Uh-oh, except for Suni, who seems to have defected on us last week. Oh, for shame!)

This addon is called Picnik and their main website is here: Picnik. I have been using Jing from Techsmith for a while now, so it will be interesting to see how this compares. So far, I’m completely thrilled with it. I even see something in there for a post that’s been brewing in my head all morning. So Picnik is on the same page with me – that’s a plus, for sure!

I was checking my stats this evening, and I noticed that someone visited this blog today from Singapore – and they came from Backlink Watch, which I thought was rather odd. So I went to Backlink Watch to investigate and see if I could find out how that happened.

And I’ve now wasted a good chunk of my life checking backlinks on all my sites and it’s all your fault, Singapore!

It’s just so addicting – I couldn’t stop watching all those sweet linky’s showing up on the page bit by bit! I think I could watch all night.

I absolutely love watching my stats – seeing where people are coming from, and what they did while they were here. And I most especially love seeing how long they stayed. It’s market research for my blog!

I’m about to switch Statistics software to one that came highly recommended by John over at One Man’s Blog. He even used video to demonstrate the ultra-coolness of this software.

So I can’t wait to get it and fuel my stats sickness even more!

I wonder – if my blog readers are voyeurs (of the blog) and I’m a voyeur of my voyeurs – wonder what that makes me?

(Yes, I should totally have linked you to John’s post about the stats software, I’m in the middle of too many things right now – I’ll try to do it tomorrow. You could just search, you know.)

(No, I don’t actually have anything against Singapore – that was just the ‘name’ I used for my blog voyeur.)

I’ve been reading over a very ‘aesthetically pleasing to me’ website that is a classified ads and community website for people in London. It’s called Gumtree and I just really love the look of the site! Of course, it is rather ‘hippie-ish’ in appearance, so I imagine I would love it! It is arranged rather like Craigslist, in the way that the categories are set up. So that much is familiar, but, it is pretty. It has a lovely, light yellow background and a …. you guessed it – a gumtree in the upper left hand corner!

You can find all kinds of things on Gumtree.com – from a nanny for your kids, to a date for Saturday night, to an old guitar, so you can rock out! And one thing that Gumtree has a lot of – is listings for jobs in London! The jobs listed cover all kinds of categories. I found a great one for a couple – they are looking for someone to come live on-site in a little bungalow and help with gardening, housework, grounds upkeep, and childcare. Sounds like a great gig for a young couple – I would have loved something like that prior to having children.

One thing that is a big plus for me is that they have a lot of very active forums – I am such a forum junkie, it’s not even funny!

They also have been growing and are now in quite a few countries, and in many cities. They even have three cities in the United States covered. That’s cool – maybe they will expand here in the US, because I really like their site! I just had to show you their logo – isn’t it cute?

Truly and utterly devastating! I am a complete internet failure!

How do I know? Well, thanks to my friend, Cat, that’s how!

Hey Cat –

I’m so depressed – I got 55%!!

Online Dating from Mingle²

Isn’t it awful? Can someone please pass a tissue?

Ya’ll go take it, too – and come back here and report, so maybe I’ll have some company in my ultimate failure!

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!