Karen’s Opinion

I have been blogging for many years and some of those years were on free blogging sites. I loved changing the colors of my blog and fine tuning it to suit my tastes. I met many bloggers in those early days and many are still my friends to this day. Once I decided to become a serious blogger, meaning I started to post my opinions in addition to playing with memes, it was time to get my own domain and find good website hosting.

Thankfully, I had wonderful blogging friends who guided me to inexpensive web hosting sites and helped me figure out how to buy a domain name. I was in the dark and needed so much prodding. I am so glad that my friends didn’t give up on me. I think it made them feel good to help a lowly blogger like me. LOL

As the years passed, I found out what the difference was between a mediocre host and a good host. I had a less than mediocre host. I was getting tired of outages and weird messages when visitors came to my blog. I worked hard to get visitors and it frustrated me to think they were unable to read my posts. It was time to get quality web hosting. I hated to bug my blogging friends and was glad to know about Web Hosting Rating’s website.

I knew that my blogging buddies would help me but I was enjoying my new found freedom and decided to utilize the Web Hosting Rating website and let their expertise guide me. They have unbiased reviews of web hosting providers. I laughed when I saw my previous web hosting site listed as cheap. Cheap was a good word for them. I look for the words reliable when choosing a web host provider. I also read the reviews from actual users and see what they have to say about a hosting company’s technical support service. Let me tell you, technical support means the world to a blogger like me.

Whether you are a beginning blogger and need help choosing a free host so you can get your feet wet, or an ecommerce site that needs extra bandwidth, visitor trackers, and your own I.P. address, Web Hosting Rating has the information you need.

I am having issues with my blog. If you don’t mind clicking on the About tab, you will see my sidebar in the correct format. You will see my Entrecard box that way. Sorry for your trouble.

Once again, my friend Darren who blogs at ProBlogger.com has given insight on a question that has been bothering me for quite some time; “Why promote an RSS feed where you share the full posts of your blog when it means people don’t read your blog?”. Read his thoughts on this topic and let me know if you have implemented any of the tips he has given. Do you ask people to subscribe to your blog? Do RSS subscribers still count when looking at your statistics? Do you care?

Darren recently shared his thoughts on a messy sidebar. Is it time for me to change some things on this blog?

Once upon a time, the Internet was a safe and happy place. That changed when the vultures decided to use it for evil purposes. I don’t even want to go into how things are used to exploit others. I hope that the vultures are in the minority. I used to be afraid. I watermarked any photos of real live people that I posted on my blogs. I became lazy though and stopped watermarking. It was just another step in my already busy day. After reading about Danielle Smith’s family, I think watermarking is a step I will be perusing once again. Darn vultures.

Danielle has responded to her new found notoriety on her blog. She sounds like a good sport about the incident. Luckily, the photograph of her family was used in an advertisement and not on some porn site.

There are many great sites that enable you to watermark your photos. I use Picnik. It is free.