A few weeks ago, I received an email from a stranger who told me that he has added my blog to his online blog directory. He said that if I were to give him a reciprocal link, he would upgrade my listing and move it to the top of the page.

Out of curiosity, I went to his directory to check it out and saw that he has hundreds of links in there. I scanned though the whole list and used the search functions of my browser and his directory but could not find my blog listed.

Ahh.. he must be joking if he wrote to me to fish for a link back and why should I give i to him when he bluff me like that?

If he really did list my blog like he said, I would gladly link him up too but now, sorry! I even deleted his email already and I don’t even remember his directory address anymore! Bah!

Yesterday, I was chatting with my friend about my websites and he asked me how many websites I have. I said I have more than ten and he went, “Whoa! How can you afford them??” Seriously, Web Hosting is not that expensive if we know where to look. There are many hosting companies that offer free, cheap or at least affordable web hosting packages for personal or commercial use. Of course, to look for these free or discounted hosting, we need to put in some effort.

Take for example, Comfort Hosting, which has a website at http://www.comforthosting.com. They offer three different packages to cater to our hosting needs. There is the Basic Plan that costs US$50 only per month, the Second Plan that is US$70 per month and Business Plan at US$100 per month. All these plans come without additional set up charges and offer unlimited sub-domains, Pop3/IMAP accounts, FTP accounts, MySQL databases and mailing list.

If you are familiar with web hosting, you would know that some companies will charge an additional fee for the above. Therefore, it is important to find out before hand what exactly you are paying for and what will or will not be included in your plan.

As a webmaster with more than ten sites hosted on by four different companies, let me tell you that besides affordability, my other concerns are reliability with at least 99.99% up time and solid technical and customer support. I think these are what every webmaster look for in a web host.

I think most of us have never heard of Jaiku until Google took over it. Well, I don’t know what it means in Finnish but anything that ends with “KU” in my national language is not good, unless it is AKU which means ME.

Out of curiosity, I hopped over to Jaiku to see what it is all about. Hhmm I heard someone saying that it is like Twitter. Is it? I did not register with Twitter though I am tempted to mainly because it is supported by Fring and I have Fring installed on my mobile device. I do not see the logic in announcing to everyone what I am doing every minute of the day. Is that the purpose of Twitter or have the majority of the people misused it?

With Jaiku, I also did not have the intention to of joining, but it looks as if we could go mobile with Jaiku and I would like to try it since my Symbian S60 is supported. I am trying to maximize the use of my device but I do not wish to bust my postpaid mobile line.

Are you Jaiku-ing (new term coined by me!)?