Cookie travels

I know, I’ve been ‘sleeping’…I always woke up guilty of not posting much (really sad face). So sorry to my dear readers. I hope you are still lurking around.

It’s good to be back and start a post with an award. I’m soooo happy to receive an award for this blog.

Moms are really moms. They make your heart jump with their praise and appreciation. Even in blogging, a mom can say ‘I love your blog’ despite its shortcomings. Thanks a lot mom811 (of ‘The Lighter Side’) for this first ever award.

What to do:
1. The winner can put the logo on his/her blog;
2. Link the person you received your award from;
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs;
4. Put links of those blogs on yours; and
5. Leave a message on the blogs that you’ve nominated.

It’s difficult to nominate only 7 persons. Only??? And did the rule say you can’t nominate the person who has already received this award? Nope, yeah. Oh gee, who cares if they’ll get the same award. I know his award has been roaming the blogosphere for some time now so I’ll hope that the persons I’ll mention here won’t get bored of this award, if ever.

Here are the seven nominees randomly picked from my commenter and visitors:
1. Thailand Land of Smiles
2. RennyBA’s Terella
3. Prague connection
4. iWalk, u2?
5. Beyond Taiwan
6. Good Life Review
7. A Taste of Both Worlds

So there you are. Now, don’t ever forget me guys. Hehe.

What’s up? Tinkering with my new computer. Now I have a better machine to work with. No more sudden shut down nor freezing screen. Also joined MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Add with it my journey to get rid of spam in my blog’s ‘Comments’ section.

As I was blog hopping, I noticed that some bloggers are using Akismet to catch spam as shown in the Akismet counter they placed on their template which displays how much spam Akismet has caught.

So I did my research about Akismet. I found out that it’s totally free for personal use. And it’s also one of the default plugins if you are using WordPress. You only need to activate it and enter your WordPress API key. Since I’m using WordPress, I tried activating Akismet the other week. It did wonders in removing spam. You also have the option to de-spam comments caught by Akismet which you think are real comments.

However, there are still some few comments that are left untouched in my ‘Comments’ section prior to activating Akismet. They are awaiting moderation. Here are few of these comments said to come from hotels, casinos, forex. I’ll post them here for my remembrance…hehe…

These comments are familiar. I’ve received them before.
-my kid would find it stupid
-i’m not really sure it’s the right kind of stuff 4 my grandpa
-A mate of mine sent me a link to this story and I told him I really loved it. Great work - keep it up!!! 

There are also nice comments….
-What an exceptional blog.
-That’s an ultra gorgeous article, thank u for sharing your idea!!

So if you’re an experienced blogger what do you think of these? Approve or delete?

Anyway, for those WordPress users experiencing so much spam in their comments, activate Akismet now. It saves a lot of your time deleting all the spam you receive.

Update on my Akismet spam catch: 95 spam caught since I first installed Akismet on 5th Sep.

The travel blogger thinks she’ll take a rest from blogging today. Reason, internet connectivity is really slow. She has not finished dropping some Entrecards. Did it take two to three minutes for one website to open? She didn’t time it but it seems like forever. Updating the post also took time. The travel blogger can’t work properly. Even though the laptop has been giving technical problems lately but at least yesterday it was cooperating with the travel blogger.

The travel blogger is me. Ow, hubby gave a call as I was typing this. You know, I complained to him earlier that internet connection is slow, and blah blah. So hubby called in to say that they are having the same problem in his office. Isn’t that nice of him? He received a notice that internet connection is slower than normal. Thanks for passing on the notice. So I will just shut down my laptop for a while and do other important things, besides today is little boy’s birthday.

I’ll be back as soon as our connection is normalized. Have a nice day to all…

sgd. the travel blogger

It’s not about the Beijing Olympics. It’s not an Olympic Game record. Definitely not. But I want to consider it my Olympic record having coincided with Beijing Olympics.

I just got back in to blogging from sick mode. But before I got sick, I was Entrecard traveling again.

I mentioned that I got an Alright! last time I was dropping Entrecards. This time I got Wicked!. Just how wicked could I be, huh 150 Entrecards dropped. I didn’t stop. I continued dropping cards until the widget changed to Yeehah! I dropped 200 Entrecards. Still I continued. And so did I get Awesome!, reaching a number of 250 Entrecards dropped that day. What an awesome day. That’s my record so far, my Beijing 2008 record. I wonder if I will ever get that awesome sign again.

Following day I got sick. LOL! (not because of that…?)

I made some changes in my travel blog again for the good of Cookietravels..hehe. The bold text that you can see from few of my posts every now and then is one of them. Reason? I still need to ask the expert. The other one is the Entrecard widget which as I have mentioned in my previous post “Entrecard Traveling” had been a quite an addicting experience for me. The Entrecard was started few weeks ago but as I have observed, it has greatly increased the number of site visitors. And I’m so happy about it… way to go Cookietravels.com

Earlier this year, i was inspired to start out my own travel blog. It was not difficult materializing this idea coz my techie bro was there to help me out with the domain name registration, hosting and setting up.

Wanna have one? If you want to have your own travel blog or any kind of website, then you need to look into web hosting services which as you may know are widely available online. To narrow down your search, here is one website I suggest you start with for your new website journey: Web Hosting Geeks. They provide Web Hosting Review and Rating Resource for your convenience. You can select from their list of Top 10 Web Hosting - Best Web Hosts 2008 which can be easily spotted as you open their website. A quick look of the top 10 web hosting providers will tell you which ones would be appropriate to host you website. The top 10’s are diversely classified and you can easily take your pick to suit your need: Business Web Hosting, Editor’s Choice Hosting, Cheap Reliable Hosting, Trusted Web Hosting, Cheap Unix Hosting, Cheap Shared Hosting, Reliable Web Hosting, and Cheap Web Hosting.

You can also compare the web hosting provider’s:
- space/traffic and price
- bonus features like: Free Domain Name or Free Domain Forever, Host Unlimited Sites or only a number of websites, and a Yahoo Credit or Google Credit
- rating

If interested, read more from the detailed review courtesy of webmasters and a number of customers who have used the web hosting service. The review also includes Web Hosting Awards such as Best Budget Hosting, Best Blog Hosting, and a lot more. With all these factors taken into account, I’m sure you can have a better idea of which web hosting provider you should get. After you obtained one, don’t forget that at Web Hosting Geeks, you can review and rate your hosting provider! Inform me of your new travel website soon and how you rate it….

Entrecard dropping can be quite addicting. I just realized. After starting with card dropping few weeks ago, I’m surprised to have dropped more than 100 Entrecards this afternoon.

From the usual ‘Thanks’ message I would get on the Entrecard widget after I have dropped a card, it changed to ‘Go!Go!’. Young sis told me ‘Go!Go!’ signifies you have dropped 50 and above Entrecards in a day. Then, as I continued dropping (coz I can’t help putting off till tomorrow members who have dropped today and those I haven’t dropped back yet so I dropped them a visit as well), the message changed to ‘Alright!’… I really got hooked up here. But I think this will be enough for today. I still have to load our travel photos which have now grown in number coz of our trip to Olkiluoto Visitor’s Center in Rauma, Finland this morning…

Young sis already left Finland. We send her off yesterday. She spent 40 days here with us?! How time flies. Well, you can read a summary of her travels and trips here in Finland in her post Näkemiin Finland!. I’m glad she enjoyed her cold summer with us doing her happy steps. As for my back logs, I will slowly get back to them. Hopefully, no more trips this time. I need to start organizing and uploading our travel photos, work on my posts, and most especially continue my Satakunta Museum post.

You may be aware that I was away from my blog for some time. Naturally, I have a lot of back logs in my posts. Well, those trips I had will be published sooner or later. I choose later to be safe.. . But at the moment, I and young sis are preparing to go the Satakunta Museum here in Pori, Finland. So for now I bid my blog a short ‘nakemiin’ (bye in Finnish), then I’ll be right back to echo what’s inside the museum.

I’ve been thinking many times…well, it didn’t take a hundred times or more to wake me up with a light bulb shining brightly over my head telling me that ‘hey why not use title case in all your titles?’ Oh yeah, why not. They are titles of my posts. So here goes my Tittle Case. I have started it in fact in my previous post. Have a good day…