Author: admin

The Petsumer Report Blog is an interesting blog. Prior to reading I felt it would be a site to complain about the pet food recalls, but after reading the blog the author actually presents “decent” information about the pet food that has and has not been recalled. The author Susan Thixton appears to know what she is talking about, but I am hesitant to take her words as the bible for I could not find any academic or educational training or background that would make me believe her words. For instance, anyone who reads the law and stays current with the law can tell and state their opinion about it, but if the same individual did not go to law school and pass a bar exam then that person is not considered a lawyer. If the person who just reads the law practices, they are considered practicing without a license.

This blog claims to put forward the truth about pet food and how the companies create such food, but I as an individual pet owner feel that some of the things she says hold no merit, especially without credentials to back up her statements. She states much coincidental evidence towards why certain foods are good or bad for your pets. For instance, she discusses a specific chemical that is harmful to animals and “has invoked cancer” in some animals, and claims in a negative tone that it is acceptable for pet food manufacturers to use this product. She proceeds on stating how this chemical should not be used in the foods, but, correct me if I am wrong, there are numerous products that are approved for use in human food that cause the same effects by themselves or in high doses. I think that her blog could be better if she stepped back from the problem, and working through both the good and bad effects of the food she is reviewing. If you start with a bad opinion of a product, a bad opinion is what you have in the end.

The design of the site is very simple; it did take a little longer to load. The site is still too new to say too much about. It began in May of 2007 and has a total of 7 articles on the whole site. It has a simple orange and white background with red and black text. Each article is backed by a light shade of blue for easy distinguishing of what is the blog and what is extra. I feel the blog does have potential.

I would make the following recommendations. If Susan does have credentials to support analyzing chemistry or psychology, she should post her credentials to the site. She does state that she has created a video for how home owners can train their dogs. This does not make you a subject matter expert in how a dog thinks or how food is produced. The next thing is cite your sources better so that readers can hold the claims at a higher standard than just, “I said so!” If this is going to hit 20/20 or Good Morning America I feel these credentials need to be met. Plus it will make your argument stronger. Keep up the good work and continue on your quest to find out the truth. Just do me a favor and prove it rather than state a hypothesis with the appearance of truth.
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I read a lot of blogs. More recently they have been of the businesses from home type. So I knew what I was looking for when I visited Work At Home Options.

The first thing I noticed was that this site was promoting feedburner a lot. And not just feedburner, but any and all RSS feeds. This was made apparent by the large text box that said add my feed and listed a bunch.

The site is very simple. A bunch of reviews about a bunch of different products. All of which are of course on some form of an affiliate program. Once I realized this, I found the reviews to be a bit on the false side. I mean seriously, what are the odds that someone has used a drop shipping program before?

Then I started to wonder where the archives were and of course there wasn’t a link to them. At the very bottom of the page there is a link to a blogspot blog. I visited there and it was all the same information however this time there was a design that I know I have seen someplace else.

This site was designed with one purpose. To make money. I am sure the author is doing that, however I really hate blogs where it is so painfully obvious that the author doesn’t care about the subject matter and is only in it to win it so to speak. For that I give this site a 2 out of 5. NULL

The nice part about people submitting a category with their blog is it really gives me an idea of what is going on. Especially when said category is Photography. There are a lot of photoblogs out there, and sites like Flickr have helped increase the number of them. With that said lets have some fun looking at pictures.

Before we get into the pictures themselves, lets talk about the design. The main content area has a black background which is great for helping to make pictures pop. The header has a picture of a camera, which of course fits, into the site. The site also has a basic two-column layout with information on the left and the pictures on the right.

One thing I have point out is the archive system. I really hate it when sites do not have archives in a chronological order and instead just give you the archives via categories. I have written numerous reviews on this issue and yet I still am faced with it. I don’t care if you have 4 categories or 40 categories, it is simple to do, all the major tools let you do this, so do it.

Ok with that out of the way lets talk about the pictures. A good friend of mine once said his photos were fantastic, and if you didn’t believe him, just look at how stunning his pictures look at 72 dpi instead of 300dpi. The same is true for this site. The pictures are vivid and interesting. Also it took me a couple minutes, but the photographer puts a nice colored matte around each picture. At first I thought there was a standard matte, but then I realized that each one is a different color based on the colors and composition of the photograph.

Overall this is a good site to look at. I have my issues with the archives, but I can get over that because this is a photography site. Tom knows what he is doing and I think everyone should take a look at his pictures.
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I’m a fan of a good photoblog. I would consider myself an amateur photographer (very amateur) and seeing the different aspects from other photographers, amateur or otherwise, always adds an additional bit of creativity or motivation. Tom Sheehan’s photoblog was no different at all.

The layout is fairly simple. It’s a two-column layout, like so many other weblogs of any kind. Each post has a photo taken by the author, which is big enough for readers to get a good view of the photo. The sidebar has several sections with the standard blogger components, including a section that lists the different cameras Tom uses.

Tom has a setting in place that allows him to reply to comments within his posts almost like a message board or like the comments through LiveJournal, with those familiar with that. He responds to his readers regularly, definitely giving this weblog a more personal and valuable touch.

Each post, as mentioned above, contains a picture, a brief description of where the photo was taken or what’s been captured in the photo, and some additional information about the camera used and other situational statistics – whether or not a tripod was used, for example. He keeps the descriptions to a paragraph or two and it’s obvious that the main focus of this site belongs to the photos.

The archives are a bit confusing and became my only complaint of the site. There’s a caveat on the sidebar explaining that some of the photos have been moved over to a different website, which makes it hard to determine when this blog began. The only way to navigate through the archives is a category-based list, which is great when looking for photos of a particular subject, but cumbersome when trying to scroll through by date.

With sites out there that just let anyone take pictures and post them online like Flickr or Fotki, it’s not often that readers can find someone who opts to use their own hosting, template, etc. Tom Sheehan’s photoblog is a nice read for anyone interested in something as simple as looking at original photos to getting ideas on what cameras would work better in particular situations.
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Link Building is a tricky name for a blog. I figured it was probably something to do with search engine optimization and not much else. And of course I was right.

The first thing I noticed was that the author linked to his main page when he submitted his site. Don’t worry I fixed the URL to his blog. If you want the main site, just remove the blog/ from the url.

The blog says it is powered by Submit Edge, but really its a word press blog. I know this because it is using a standard template that comes with word press.

The posts are all about SEO and what you can do and all that stuff. I say all that stuff because he even says in one of his posts that SEO work is for the professionals. So why even have a blog about how to do it?

The blog does have some good posts and tips on what to do so I can’t knock it. This blog is ok as far as SEO blogs go. There are far better SEO blogs out there, but then there are a lot of worse ones. I would look at the site and see what he says and take it with a grain of salt.NULL