How Nerdy are You Baked Goods

We all have a little nerd inside of us, making us squeal at the mention of vintage of video games and computer technology. Some of us show it off on websites, T shirts, or baked goods.

The Task of Finding the Best Web Hosting

When you decide to open a website and you are not willing to use a free blogging platform, one of the biggest decisions you will make is who to purchase your web hosting from. There are many web hosting companies out there now and they are all eager to take your money, but you must look at what they are providing and then compare that to the other companies out there who want your business. While many opt to purchase from a well-known company, a lot of people are more interested in saving money, especially considering that not all people are in the position to add yet another expense to their lives.

The task of finding the best web hosting as gotten easier over time and now there is a website completely dedicated to rating hosting providers.

Web Hosting Rating is an upcoming website that will focus on the many web hosting companies there are out there, compare them to others and rate them, making the task of finding the right web hosting for you a lot easier. Until their site officially launches, they have compiled a series of articles for potential hosting clients to peruse and ultimately make the right decision for themselves. Their web hosting articles are an in depth review of the most common questions and concerns that those looking for web hosting are faced with; their articles section has a great deal to offer those who are looking to find more information on the topic and is definitely worth checking out.

Woman Tribune’s Magazine Makeover

Woman Tribune was recently made over into what this site’s first aspirations were–A magazine!

Every category is represented, the most recent post from every category is listed under ‘Other Recent Articles.’ You can also see our latest book review and recipe in the sidebar. In addition to our makeover and our ideas on an expansion of the site to let our readers be a bigger part of the site and be a little more hands on as we expand into a community, we have also added a poll for all of our readers to take part in; that being Would you be interested in participating in a monthly book club?

That’s right, one book a month with a private forum for all members to discuss the monthly book in. If you are interested, please vote yes in the poll and also leave a comment here with a valid email address and if we have enough people who want to take part in a book club, I will email you all personally with details on how to sign up and give you access to the forum.

Hope everyone likes the new magazine layout, leave your feedback in the comments!

Google PageRank Updates

Late last night Google nearly gave me a heart attack. Because I’m a little crazy when it comes to website stats I have a Google PageRank toolbar attached to my Firefox and while simply going through new comments and checking out some random websites I noticed my toolbar go up to a number…and stay there. To make sure I wasn’t officially going insane, I closed out my entire browser and restarted it just to make sure that the toolbar wasn’t stuck at a number from a previous website I had been on. To my very (pleasantly) surprised eyes, I was right–Google PageRank had updated!

After doing some surfing around I noticed that Google has given quite a bit of people higher PageRank. Are they suddenly becoming a little more lenient or are they getting all of our hopes up in order to smash us back down to 0 by next update?

Whatever the case, congratulations to everyone whose PageRank went up–Woman Tribune has went from PR 2 to PR 4, so we’re quite happy around these parts.

To get the Live PageRank Firefox addon and become a little schizo when it comes to checking PR, click here.

Tackling Comment Spam–For Good

Blogs are everywhere today; just about everyone has one and because so many people of various backgrounds, cultures and personal interests are involved with the caring and keeping of personal or entertainment websites, they have easily become the leading form of web media when it comes to attracting spam.

Web publishers need to constantly be on top of their comments, checking for spam and getting rid of it promptly before viewers see them and suddenly think we condone the buying and selling of illegal pharmaceuticals or we are unnaturally concerned about their personal and intimate relationships. Spam comments are equally bad for everyone involved in a particular website. They are irritating for the webmaster, having to check sometimes daily or even multiple times a day for comments that are inappropriate for the website and are offensive to readers and it also shows readers that a website may not be as professional as it would like to be seen. If a website fails to look the part of a multi-faceted, entertaining and above all, polished and mastered website, it does not matter how well your website does stat-wise, your viewers will not be interested and potential-advertisers will not take you seriously.

Dealing with spam comments can quickly become a second job for a webmaster, especially since the bigger a website gets, the more spam it attracts. The secret is to finding an efficient and user-friendly spam comment program to help eliminate the worry of unprofessional and inappropriate spam. If you are running Wordpress, you are most likely still running the spam monitoring system Akismet that came with your original Wordpress install; however, there are other programs out there, for Wordpress in particular, that I have found to work much better than Akismet.

Defensio is a comment spam monitor and eliminator whose entire mission is based off of outsmarting evil spam, which it does miraculously. In my opinion, you cannot get any better than Defensio for taking the edge off when you’re thinking about how your website is doing and if any spam is leaking through.

With its innovative technology, Defensio actually adapts to the content you post and is proven not to work in the exact same manner for two different bloggers; instead, it adapts to the webmaster’s specific way of managing their comments and follow suite. Every comment that is posted on your website is given a level of “spamminess” and is determined whether or not the level it is given is low enough to be posted. On a personal level, I have seen comments with a spamminess level as low as 20% be held for moderation, just to make sure that it wasn’t someone trying to plug their site or a company looking for some shameless exposure.

With 99.77% accuracy, Defensio definitely gives you the security you need to be a successful, professional and efficient webmaster with absolutely no worry about back doors being left open for spam comments to get away with accessing your content. It tackles comment spam for several different user interfaces such as Wordpress, PixelPost, Mephisto, Text Pattern, Movable Type and Drupal. It is also supported by several different web developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Java, Perl, PHP (4 and 5) and Python; all of which can be downloaded here.