I love hosting parties, most specially parties with my closest girl friends. The get-togethers I have with them that last the whole weekends are the best. The fun, the people, getting together, it always gives me a warm feeling even while I put things away the morning after.

Altho I enjoy cooking and setting all the food, I have to admit that it’s really very tiring. There were times that the guests would be arriving and I wouldn’t be done cooking yet, not to mention not showering yet. There were some partie, too, that my husband and I had to wake up so early in the morning just to get a headstart with the cooking and the preparation. When you get to be that tired, you don’t get to savor these memorable moments with your friends to the fullest.

Enter Betterweekends.com (http://www.betterweekends.com/). Betterweekends.com, a UK-based company, are event organizers that can put a party together in any part of the world. They are one of the most trusted tour operators in the United Kingdom that specializes in party celebrations. They do hen parties. But aside from that they also do stags, birthdays, corporate events or just a get together with friends. Employing the betterweekend team saves you time which you can use to have a good time with family and friends.

Their website lets you book the event online. Once you’ve booked the occassion, a betterweekends representative will start preparing your event. Other than booking online, they also give you the option to book it over the phone. If you’re not satisfied with the packaged events on their site, they also let you tailor-make your party.

Since they have business relationships with their suppliers they can offer you their packages in very affordable prices. What else can you ask for? They save you not just on time but also on money. A really perfect time to spend with your girls.

So whether its a 2 nights in a Budget Blackpool hotel, or a Magaluf Party Weekend, or a Hen Weekend in Las Vegas, you and your Hen Weekends couldn’t be much more fun with the betterweekends.com staff.

(This is a sponsored post)

There’s a social networking site out there called the 3GB Community (http://www.3gb.biz). It’s a community website aimed for the members to meet new friends, search and reconnect with old friends they have not corresponded or connected with for awhile now. Members can also upload their photos, join smaller communit groups, blog and chat with other members. There’s also a page where you can listen to MP3s.

The site is basically functions just like other networking communities but the one thing that is good about this site is that it’s new and you can be one of the pioneers before they become huge. To date they have 645 members and 36 groups . It’s really new but with the links and features, there’s a potential for 3gb to be at par with the other social networking communities out there.

The developers of 3gb guarantee privacy of your personal information and would not share it with any third party.

The community also lets you create your own blog. You can also share your blog with the community and you can view the blog entries of the other members. Right now, there are about 52 blogs that you can read and enjoy.

You can also search for other members using their advanced search engine. You can search by state, by country, yahoo messenger or facebook id.

SO give 3gb a whirl and see why it’s a social networking site on the rise.

(This is a sponsored post)

According to Wikipedia, “Addiction was a term used to describe a devotion, attachment, dedication, inclination, etc. Nowadays, however, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life. The term is often reserved for drug addictions but it is sometimes applied to other compulsions, such as problem gambling, and compulsive overeating. Factors that have been suggested as causes of addiction include genetic, biological / pharmacological and social factors.”

Previously, addiction only pertained to the “drugs” kind. But now, addiction doesn’t just mean substance abuse. It also could be an addiction to gambling, alcohol, sex or the internet.

It isn’t easy dealing with an addiction - for the person and for his/her family. A lot of families or relationships break down because of one person’s addiction. A lot of time, professional help is really needed. There’s a lot of help centers out there but if you live in Florida or choose to be in Florida, you could look up C.A.R.E. Florida (http://www.careflorida.com).

C.A.R.E. Florida is a very good provider for holistic drug rehab and addiction treatment. They have a unique outlook on curing addictions and preventing relapses so that the patients can avoid going back to their old habits. They successfully use yoga exercises, therapeutic massages, other forms of exercises and group therapies as part of their program to get people well.

Drug Rehab is still hard work, and CARE lets their patients know that they will be working hard since their interdisciplinary treatment program includes really good individual therapy, psychiatric evaluation and treatment, a structured living environment and the alternative holistic treatments. Their patients will be involved with a lot of activities - physical, mental and spiritual.

The C.A.R.E. Florida website introduces to the visitors to their very competent staff from their executive director, Mitchell E. Wallick, to their nurses and therapists and counsellors and their methods of treatments for different kinds of addictions and eating disorders. The website also gives the patients instructions during their admissions to the center as well as show visitors the available ammenities at the center. A good bonus in the website is the explanation/definition of a lot of common terms related to addiction and it’s treatment. This is a big help to the people who want to learn more about their problems. Also, it features videos of rehabilitations.

So if you or a loved one is having a problem with addiction or some eating disorder, a visit to http://www.careflorida.com might be the answer to a lot of your questions.

(This is a sponsored post.)

Top Ten Pansitan.Net Subdomains

Pansitan.net enjoys very good web stats. Above, you can see the top ten most visited subdomains in the community. I guess, one of the reasons we get a lot of visitors is because of the variety of entries we offer our readers. The above statistics are ranked based on number of visitors. (Based on January 2008 webalizer)

If you maintain a website, and have a site counter tool installed on your site, you probably enjoy looking at your numbers growing month by month (depending if you diligently refresh your contents to entice your guests to come back). But what do those measures really mean? Here’s a bit of explanation for each of them:

Hits -A hit counts each file on a page. Look at a page on your site. Including the html file your visitor is looking at, a hit also counts if you have images, sound files, or whatever else you have on that page that’s being called. So if you have 2 images, 1 mp3 file streaming, 1 video file; a javascript exec, then a visit to this page would give you a total of 6. If you really think about it, a hit doesn’t really mean anything if you want to know how much traffic you get on your site.

Requests - Also called a “page request” or “page” , a request is basically the same as a hit.

Visitor - A visitor is one IP (internet protocol, each computer that connects to the internet has its own IP) that goes to your site in a 30-min period. So if this same visitor comes back to your site after 30 minutes, she would be counted as a different visitor.

Unique Visitor - Much like a visitor, but with a unique visitor, your visitor’s IP is just counted once.

Page View - Page views show you a count of the number of pages looked at, not counting the graphic or whatever else file you have on your page.

There’s a lot of things you can learn from your statistics. Altho they may not be taken as the “end all and be all” since there might be some other factors involved like page caching and visitors who go thru a router to go to the internet but there still are some useful information that can teach you how to improve your site’s popularity and “reader-reach”. Also together with your stats, you might also want to know how your visitors found your site and which pages they go to and which they don’t look at.

Basically, when you study your website stats, consider your number of visitors, the pages they frequent, what link/site referred them to your site, and what are the normal keywords they used that landed them to your site. Site referrers could be your ad campaigns, or if you own a blog, a reciprocal link or search engine referral. Keywords are a very invaluable source of information for you. Your website counter will actually tell you which keywords you used you scored high on. Using these keywords you could try to optimize on those words a lot.

Another thing that you’d also like to look at is your daily visits per day. For Pansitan.net, the days with the highest visits among the members happen every Mondays and Wednesdays, with Tuesdays and Thursdays close seconds. The least day we get visitors is on Sunday (2 out of 25 websites). Knowing the day of the week your visitors come more often, would at least give you an insight on when you should normally update your site. If they come most often on a Tuesday, have your entry up and running by Monday night. This would at least give you a chance to set your visitors’ visiting habits to your site.

So how do you increase web traffic to your site?  That’s something we’ll be talking about next time… For now, do visit our sites in the community and be entertained no end with what we offer you

There’s a cool web-surfing tool I’m addicted to right now - StumbleUpon.  It’s an engine that shows you websites recommended by other surfers with the same interests as you do.   It uses ratings to form opinions on the quality of a website.  So you get to view websites that other surfers rated as high-quality.

I actually like it because I get to find websites that I wouldn’t know with an ordinary search engine.  Altho, I will still be an avid Google’r, but StumbleUpon is a fun way to while away the time on the ‘net.

StumbleUpon is also a cool way to add more visitors to your site.  If your visitors tag your sites as a favorite, it gets added to the roster of stumbled sites and there’s a better chance that other surfers will “stumble upon” your pages.  But this doesn’t happen without some social networking.  If you want to get stumbled, you should also stumble some pages.   Tit for tat, as they say.

But even just for surfing StumbleUpon really is cool.  If not for them, I wouldn’t have discovered these pages (may they be awesome, hilarious, weird, whatever…):

Creative Photos by Chema Madoz
Children’s Letters to George W. Bush

Starry Night

Rubik’s Cube Solution

Palani Mohan

There’s so much more…

MY family enjoys a good bottle of wine once in a while. I’ve always wanted a house where I can store a few bottles of good wine saved for those special family gatherings. Wine Racks are actually the best ways to store your wines - aside from the fact that they should be stored in a cool places away from the sun.

The Vine Store (http://www.thevinestore.com/) offers the highest quality wine racks that can be shipped nationwide. They have wine racks made from wood and metal. Their racks can be hanging or wall mounted. They offer racks for both residential and commercial wine storages.

When you visit their website (http://www.thevinestore.com/), they categorize their website either by function or by price. Which really helps a lot when you’re shopping and trying to decide what kind of rack you want to buy. But just in case, it wasn’t the one you wanted, they also offer a 100% money-back guarantee on their wine racks, should you be unhappy with the item you purchase.

Purchasing with the Vine Store online is secured. They are hosted on Yahoo! Store’s servers and your orders are processed using Yahoo’s shopping cart which protects your personal information - your name, address and credit card. You’ll be assured that Yahoo usies SSL encryption to ensure privacy and security. Also, once ordered, your purchases are shipped with 100% satisfaction guaranteed.

Aside from Wine Racks , they also sell whisperkool and humidity control instruments for your wine cellars as well as Wine Labels, Wine Charms, Wine Corkskrews, Wine Bags and Wine Guides. They also have Wine Tasting Tables, Wine Coolers, and really cool Wine Glasses.

(This is a sponsored post.) 

So after reading a lot of blogs out there on the world wide web about anything and everything you can think of, you’re thinking that you might want to have your own blog site, too! Sure! Come on and join the wonderful world of blogosphere!

There are a couple of ways to have your own blogs. Some buy their own domains, most of them use free blog sites. There are a lot of popular ones but one blogsite that you’d probably want to try is thoughts.com n(http://www.thoughts.com/free-blog)

Thoughts.com is a free online Blog community that offers more features than other free blogs. Aside from the free blogspace, they offer their bloggers unlimited bandwidth, photo, video and podcast sharing. They also have a community forum so that you can interact with other Thoughts.com bloggers and you can also read and participate in the live news discussions.

Your blogs at Thoughts.com is interactive - your fellow thoughts.com bloggers can rate each of your blog posts, photos, podcasts and video blogs. IF you receive high average user ratings, you’ll be eligible to win a retreat to a new location - all expenses paid! Last 2007, the winner went to Las Vegas.

Aside from the all-expense paid trip, if you refer a friend to become an active member, Thoughts.com will give away a free 6-month Netflix membership. Cool, right?

But more than the perks, with Thoughts.com, their members get an instant audience from the thoughts.com community. Every post on your Blog will be displayed throughout the site and they can easily be found by other members - if you decide to make your entry private.

So if you’re looking for a unique place to house your blog, visit http://www.thoughts.com/free-blog and experience those cool features yourself!

(This is a sponsored post)

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

Weddings are romantic events not just for the marrying couples but for most people celebrating the moment with the couple. Planning a wedding should be exciting and not hectic. Altho most brides (and grooms) have a tendency to feel really panicky about every detail of their wedding, there are some agencies that could help make the wedding planning as happily memorable at the wedding day itself. I know that wedding planners can sometimes be very expensive but couples on a budget shouldn’t really worry too much. They can go to the internet and there would be websites that can show them tips and tricks on how to plan out their dream wedding.

The Wedding Museum (http://www.weddingmuseum.com) is a wedding website where couples can look up ideas and use their tools to plan out their big day - for free. They have articles on what to do when hiring wedding professions. They also have a wide variety of suggested music for the reception for the party dancing and formal dances. They also provide wedding timelines to be able to schedule all the activities coming up to the main event.

One of the wedding planning tool the Wedding Museum has is an interactive web pages created to plan and share your wedding information with your friends and everyone in your guest list. It also features an RSVP tracking and wedding notepad plus a budget calculator and reception worksheet. These tools will help the couples make sure that they’re right on track and on budget. The free wedding site also provides a webspace for couples to show off their wedding pictures in their online wedding album. There’s also a guestbook that lets the guests leave their heartfelt comments and well wishes for the couple.

The Wedding Museum (http://www.weddingmuseum.com) offers a lot of other ideas, tools and pages that will surely make the bride and groom’s planning phase less stressful.

(This is a sponsored post)

Just some of the more recent goings-on around pansitan.net:

… Tunyfishbowl quips about pimples

… Tissuepaperworld announces some of her friend’s stuff on sale

… Roguereborn shouts to the world her father’s homecoming to the motherland

… Psych0sis recaps her previous activities

… Pondahan talks about her soon-to-leave boss

… Milkolate announces a unique Creative Advocacy Campaign

… Haringliwanag discusses parenting pointers

… Dejabrew writes an entry about her dear brother

… Darvin shows off a photo he took in Japan

… Coatablecoats lends some tips for bad credit scores

… Blackbaies talks about Midnight Wanderers

… Balikbayanbox raves about the best things about being Pinoy

… Ala-ism tells us why she’s been busy lately

It’s a busy week around pansitan.net

I admit, I have this habit of looking people up on the internet.  I look up old classmates, old crushes, ex-boyfriends, neighbors, relatives.  When I suddenly remember a person and have this big curiosity on knowing where and how they are or what they might be into or how they look like, I use the internet to search for them. 

There are a lot of people searches on the ‘net.  One of them is Spock People Search (http://www.spock.com). 

You can type in a name, an email address or a “tag”.  A “tag” information could be anything that could describe the person, i.e, doctor, teacher, black hair, programmer, father, sister, etc.  The tags could have been thought about by a user or other Spock members. 

If you want to find old friends, old classmates on the web, Spock.com (http://www.spock.com) could be the search engine for you.  Your results will show you some information about whoever you are looking for.  Once you register, you can connect with trusted contacts (people you know) and search within their networks. 

A company started in 2006,  Spock.com has the technology to organize their search results.  They go thru biography pages,  other social websites, blogs, directories, news pages.  If the person you’re looking for is on the internet, one way or another, Spock will find the person.  It will also show you if the person is in MySpace, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, any blog or any other social network on the net.

Spock was selected Best of Show at the Web 2.0 conference and one of the “Top 25 Websites to Watch” according to PC Magazine in 2007. 

Co-founders Jaideep Singh and Jay Bhatti envision Spock to be a very excellent people search where everyone in the world had a unique search result.  They’ve already managed to have over 300 million unique people search results and maintain about 3 billion people data records.  You can view pictures, data, tags, quotes and news.   Like what they really strive to be - Spock.com - the best for people search