Aaron Ewer

Back in the early days of the internet, it was an adventure finding email providers and deciding which email to use. Sometimes you would have two or three emails from different providers. I lost a couple of good ones, for various reasons, but usually because if you changed your internet service provider you would lose the associated email address.

Now every seems to be getting blogs and personal web sites. Although the kids or interested in the social networking sites, the adults seem more interested in something a little more sophisticated and don’t seem to mind paying a small reasonable fee for hosting services. There are a lot of affordable hosting services, and each one has different features or advantages.

To find your way through the maze of web hosting services, I found a site that reviews and rates the different sites. They have a list of the top hosting sites, in a chart format that shows different rates and features. A nice added touch is that site reviews and that users can add their own ratings. I like the way the users themselves can write the web hosting rating, not a paid promotional item. This gives you a little better insight into the good and the bad.

My sister’s websites have been down all morning and I got the call from her around 10 this morning. She had already waited over an hour to call me, so she was pretty upset that she had to call again. This is the third time this month that the web host she’s using has had server issues and has dropped her websites and blog. So we agreed to look around and find another hosting service, with reliability a key issue.

About a month ago I had come across a website that lists most of the top hosting companies and lists the key information on each one. So I went back today with a purpose - to find a better web host for my sister’s web sites and blog. Of course, the monthly cost is important when it’s just personal web sites and you aren’t making money from them, but even so, you want them to be accessible 24/7 when you are paying for that service.

I found two that sound like what she needs and we’ll talk it over tonight after dinner when I have a little more time to explain it to her.

We want to get a laptop for our daughter and have talking about it for a couple months now. I’m not really happy about her having unlimited and unsupervised access to the internet. If she uses a desktop then she is planted in her room and we can drop by any time to check on her. But if we give her a laptop she can go anywhere and do who knows what. However, as the wife pointed out, she has a cellphone and has been completely responsible about it’s use. And she insists that if we’ve raised her right we don’t have to over-worry, just be vigilant.

then there’s the issue of cost. Most good laptops are still around $1,500 and I’m not real happy about spending that much money on something that she could easily drop or leave sitting someplace and end up with it stolen. The wife wants to check into the new mini-laptops that have a 7″ screen and are only for checking emails, blogging and surfing the internet - not a gaming machine or something to do high level mathematical functions. So I’ll be shopping the mini’s today and seeing if they are reasonably priced and equipped for her basic needs.

When I was just a kid I learned a powerful lesson in a podunk courtroom: don’t ever go to court without an attorney. No matter how smart you THINK you are, no matter how innocent you think you are, no matter how obviously you’ve been wronged getting that ticket or charge, if you’ve been charged with a crime do NOT go to court without a good attorney.

Thank goodness the internet can help people find a good attorney much easier than the old days of asking friends or reading through all the expensive ad in the phone book, especially if you have trouble in a part of the country where you don’t already know any good attorneys. In the “old days” people actually had “my attorney” along with “my banker” and “my accountant.” I wonder how many in today’s world could actually name those life partners and have their phone numbers at hand in case of a problem?

Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorneys | California Felony and Misdemeanor Defense Lawyers

People in Southern California have a top notch firm to help with any criminal charges. Just reading the website of Kestenbaum, Eisner & Gorin is a handbook on legal tips and advice. This firm’s senior partners are all former prosecutors and they have a reputation for aggressively fighting for their client. Their success list is really impressive, and I like reading their blog - it was full of insights into fighting the system. So if you’ve wanted to have “my attorney” you should bookmark their page and put their phone number into your cell phone’s address book because you can call them 24/7 if you are ever in trouble in Southern California. This is Dimitry Gorin, one of the partners who does the heavy duty criminal defense cases:

This blog adventure just started for me in January of this year and I’ve learned so much already about getting a domain and web host, and then I found WordPress to use for the blogging and it’s been quite a trip. You might have noticed that I haven’t changed the theme of the blog yet, I’m still learning my way around that and I think I found something that I like but I just haven’t gotten around to downloading it yet.

Some of the other fun things I’ve had to learn involve getting the Google toolbar and learning about how they assign their values to the different websites, called page rank. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that the Google page rank system is a lot like the Neilson Ratings that the TV networks use to charge the advertisers for commercials. The radio stations use Arbitron ratings to charge for commercials. And the internet uses Google’s page ranks to charge for online ads.

So everyone with a web site needs to worry about their Google page rank and also the way that the search engines look at your web site. There are ways to make your web site more important than your competition’s website and the biggest tool for that is called search engine optimization or SEO.

If you are putting up a new web site you have to be concerned with SEO, which has its own rules and tips and tricks. Our webmaster was telling me that a big part of SEO is how many links do you have on your web site and how many back links do you have. Plus, the rank of the other sites that are linking to you can affect your rank. One of the tips he mentioned involves buying some of the valuable links to give your site a jumpstart. So, anyone can improve their natural search results with text links form sites like EDUtextlink.com.

You can play ball with the big leagues if you learn all these SEO tips and tricks. Being a webmaster means so much more than learning how to code html. A good webmaster will know about SEO and will get their company’s web site lots of traffic and links. If you are interested in giving your web site a boost with links, you can read up on it at this web site and buy links from them while you populate your site with startegically written pages.