tek-works.com

DreamHost is a Disappointment, yes I finally said it. I guess I should explain, their super cheap plan is a disappointment. At 8.00 a month or 96.00 a year, I pay that same amount for the hosting that tek-works is on, true I don’t get close to as much space but who really uses all that 180 gig anyway?
The host I use for Tek-works has always helped me when needed and most the time bent over backwards to help. Their uptime is great and I hardly ever see slow page loads, but the sites I have at dreamhost.com are slow every hour of the day, even when you check site stats it says their server is under extreme strain.
So why is everyone rushing to dreamhost and why is everyone giving it a good word? Money! dreamhost will pay me 96.00 for every new account I get to sign up, yes they lose the first years pay, but how many people know how to move a domain or want to go through the trouble, so they make their money after the first year. So everyone and their brother is listening to top bloggers or friends that say sign up, more people on the servers and more people that want to make their 96.00.
I hate to do it and it’s a pain, but I will start moving my domains to another host soon, probably arteryplanet.net (where tek-works is now)

don’t believe me?

sites on arteryplanet..

curbob.com
cmudfly.com

sites on dreamworks

seo-marketingreview.com
freegamesandscreensavers

and you can’t argue it’s the webpage, I use the same wordpress on each and postnuke on one of them.

To protect your online reputation, you need to know what’s being said about yourself, your company and your websites. The easiest way to do this is to use Google Alerts. With Google Alerts, it’s as easy as putting in your “search term”, like your name, your company or website, then add your email address and how often you’d like an email (take my advice and make it once a day, because at the beginning you’ll get a ton of emails if they don’t combine them into one email a day). Click Create Alert and your finished. Now each time your search term is written about in the news, blogs or other websites, you’ll get an email with a brief excerpt from the page and a link to it. By keeping track of yourself online you can easily stop negative post about you, thank people that praise you or just watch those that would talk bad about you.

That title should make your ears (or eyes) pop up, it did mine, but this doesn’t look to be something bad. One company (which should be watched, I think) but one company is teaming up with most of the large ISP’s including AOL, Comcast, Cox and others. They will be charging 1/4 of a penny for each email to safely make that email go through spam filters. The good part is all these companies will be checked and if one does get through that is spamming, they will be taken off the list.
I hope this works and doesn’t end up being no matter what the email is, if you pay you can be in the “group”

Read the entire story here

Be careful what you wish for, remember hearing that growing up, well, it’s true.

Two months ago, I took a small trip back home to Peoria, Illinois to visit friends and family. While there I was talking to my best friend Scott of Scott’s Blog Experience about one of our local bar hangouts and how they were getting ready to host a Karaoke Contest, it being their 4th year, what could they do to boost attendance and contestants. Scott thought a wesite would help them so we began to brain storm. For those that may not know, “Brain Storming” for us is to sit at a computer for about 1 hours, get 3 ideas, give up and hit the bar. The Bar! a magical place.. it’s the bar were 10-20 ideas come up, not always good ones or even legal but it’s a start.
Continue Reading…

For those that use Wordpress a must to fight spam on their blog is to enable the Akismet plugin. But all Akismet does is hold all the spam and allow you to delete it, it doesn’t help you fight spam. A new plugin that has been released now will help you fight it, by finding the worst offenders listed in Akismet, it will then ban those ip addresses that the spam is coming from. Using this plugin should cut down your spam by large amounts, but like all anti-spam software, always watch it closely the first few months, you may be stopping or deleting an important message.

grab the AkismetWorst Offenders Plugin at http://boakes.org/akismet-worst-offenders

I’m been away for a month, Why? well I’m in the process of buying a house, creating 4 websites and I’m reworking tek-works. While getting my bearings in Atlanta I’ve slowly started getting jobs doing websites. I’ve been coding HTML for years but only for my own sites and have always seen it as a hobby, but as I’m getting deeper and deeper into it, I’m finding that I like it.
The rework of Tek-works is to add pages to the site showing off some of the sites I’ve recently done. I will save anyone from seeing the sites that I did in 1997, way before anything fancy was done on the web, but the new sites have DHTML, java, flash and PHP. Not only will I have a page showing off my sites, but I’ll also have any other services I offer, prices and tips and tricks through my blog post, allowing anyone to learn or argue anything I say.