Femme Power

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Melissa of melissas jewelry and gems is having a contest in celebration of her upcoming 40th birthday this Aug. 8.  And she’s giving away this Hot Pink Tourmaline, with White Topaz ring.  It’s a sterling silver, 6 1/2 band ring. Each stone is around 3mm round, 10 points each, for a total of 1/3 of a karat.  Isn’t it pretty?  Melissa says it sits nice and low since it’s a band ring. You’ll be amazed, Melissa creates lots of lovely jewelry that you can find in her blog.

Anyway, the contest has started last July 15 but it’s still open until August 8th at 8 AM (US time). To be sure, join in before the last day.

Rules: Make a post about this contest on your blog then contact Melissa at melissaruede@yahoo.com. Attach to your email your post’s permanent URL.  Go to Melissa’s site and take the poll at the top of her blog and follow her blog too. Entries will be raffled off and the winner will be duly notified by Melissa.

I’m taking my chances.  Let’s join in!

(Open only to bloggers from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Philippines, or Australia)

Your computer holds files and data that you wouldn’t want hacked nor destroyed by viruses and worms.   You also want to have peace of mind that unwanted sites will not be accessed by your innocent kids, right?  We’re on the same boat. That’s why I protect my computer with an anti-virus software.    However, the one I’m currently using slows down my computer plus I find it a little complex to use.

So I’m really bent on replacing my current software with an anti virus that does all the job without affecting my computer’s speed.  Moreover, it should protect my computer from phishing, spams, spyware, adware, and rootkits, among others.   One software I found promises all these features.  And market leaders in online security, AV-Test, have verified that this anti spyware is 99.5% effective.  This software, zsecurity anti-virus, also promises accurate and speedy virus detection. I’m convinced they got all my needs covered.

In this era of technological advancements over the Web, internet security is must.

Surprise!  I wanna send out some EC credits to my friends in the blogosphere who regularly leave me comments all this time.  I didn’t announce that I’m gonna do this but I really feel it’s about time.

I gathered the data from July 1st until today and came up with this list:

3000 EC’s for Betchai ( thejoysofsimplelife.com )  15 comments

2000 EC’s for Leomar (leomarsden.com) 6 comments

1000 EC’s for Grampy (grampyandyou.com) 5 comments

500 EC’s each for melissasjewelryandgems.blogspot.com ,conversationswithmoms.com, and a linky love to poeticallyyours.blogspot.com (non-EC member) with 4 comments

Thank you also to Cherie de Castro for being one of the top commenters.  I wish I knew your URL so I could give you a linkback.  And to all of you who continuously visit my blog and leave comments despite my failure to reciprocate sometimes, my gratitude goes out to you.

UPDATE:

1000 EC’s for Cherie de Castro of blogdemanila.com for leaving 5 comments.

This is a quick post. I just wanna thank you all for visiting my blog and leaving comments. I’ve been having problems about poor internet connection for the past three days that’s why I’m finding it hard visiting other sites lately. The pages seem to take forever to load and most of the time, loading fails.

I’m having my connection checked today and I’m positive I can reciprocate your visits in a few hours.  Thanks again for visiting.

Look how many spam comments I’ve received and filtered since I installed Akismet plugin about 3-4 months ago.  If ever you had comments in the past that weren’t published, they might have been caught by Akismet as spam (mistakenly or otherwise).  Though most of the time I check the comments manually to see if there were valid comments that were mistaken as spam, there’ve been like two times when I deleted the spam comments instantly due to large volume of spammers I got in a day.   If I happened to delete your comment by mistake, I apologize.  This is a do-follow blog so maybe it’s one reason why spammers love bombarding it with spam comments.   Sigh.

If you’re using WordPress as platform and noticed that your incoming links have mysteriously gone for the last few weeks, check your dashboard now and see if they’re back.  Last June was a freaky month for me when I lost my incoming links,  or should I say I couldn’t find them on my dashboard. I always clicked on those links to visit those who were linking back to me so I was surprised when they suddenly disappeared.   Although Technorati could still detect those links, WP couldn’t, for reasons I’ve never known.

Incoming links are tools in generating more traffic to your site.  If your link is shown in another high-traffic site, there’s a big chance you get clicked on by that site’s visitors.  Incoming links affect a blog’s page rank and popularity.  They tell how many other blogs are “talking” about you or are linking back to your site presumably for reference or other reasons.  Hence, your incoming links show how popular you are in the blogosphere or maybe friendly (wink) or valuable, depending on the kinds of links you have generated.  If they’re relevant (related to your site’s theme/content) and numerous, then you have strong incoming links that could positively impact your page rank. However, if you really think about it, it should be your blog’s content that really gives more weight and not the page rank or popularity.    On the other hand, what good is your blog if no one knows it exists?  Hence, content and popularity both matter to me.

So going back to the mysterious links exodus, I learned by reading other blogs that I wasn’t the only one having the same  dilemma. Other bloggers have written posts too about losing their incoming links on WP even though they’re aware that there are other sites linking with them.  So why couldn’t WP detect those links?

However, this month, things have turned back to normal as if nothing happened.  My incoming links have suddenly popped back on my dashboard without me tweaking anything.

Whatever happened, I’m glad I got my links back.   Has this happened to you?

Femmepower is gratified to be given this Over The Top blog award by a fellow Filipino blogger, Leomar. Getting my blog visited and read by lots of bloggers everyday is good enough. But getting this kind of recognition is a plus.  So I think it’s fair enough to publish this tag as a sign of my gratitude.

Here’s how it works:

USE ONLY ONE WORD! It’s not as easy as you might think. Copy and change the answers to suit you and pass it on. It’s really hard to use only one-word answers.

1. Where is your cell phone? pocket
2. Your hair? silky (yay!)
3. Your mother? fantastic
4. Your father? supportive
5. Your favorite food? pastries
6. Your dream last night? dry? lol!
7. Your favorite drink? coffee!
8. Your dream/goal? contentment
9. What room are you in?  bedroom
10. Your hobby? blogging
11. Your fear? loss
12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? home
13. Where were you last night? office
14. Something that you aren’t? dumb
15. Muffins? sure
16. Wish list item? house
17. Where did you grow up? Davao
18. Last thing you did? worked
19. What are you wearing? pajamas
20. Your TV? flatscreen
21. Your pets? cat
22. Friends? hundreds
23. Your life? blessed! *wink*
24. Your mood? cheery
25. Missing someone? hmmmm…
26. Car? coming
27. Something you’re not wearing? perfume
28. Your favorite store? SM
29. Your favorite color? purple
30. When was the last time you laughed? today
31. Last time you cried? forgot
32. Your best friend? hubby
33. One place that I go to over and over? supermarket
34. One person who emails me regularly? jobstreet.com hahaha!
35. Favorite place to eat? home

I’m passing on this award to A Woman Remembers, The Frugal Housewife, and The Modern Mom.