Review Me Today!

Do you ever imagine yourself blogging away in a trendy internet cafe, watching the people come and go while you share your thoughts with the world? NO? Maybe it is just me, but that is what comes to mind for me.  The reality is my laptop with power cord and case is over 10 pounds and it turns out it is just too bulky to carry to the internet cafe to blog while sipping a latte.  So I do most of my blogging in my little home office with a cute little cockatiel to keep me company.

But I have just found  a great deal for bloggers who want to blog on the go. I had to wait until I got mine before I was willing to let you all in on the deal.   Buy.com is selling a refurbished Asus  Eee 900 netbook computer for just $179 with free shipping. About the size of a large paperback, and weighing just over 2 pounds, this is a  great little computer if you want something small and light that you can carry around with you and use to get on the internet.  It  is not a great computer if you want it to play games that are heavy on the graphics, or if you have the need for a huge amount of speed or data storage.

I can’t wait for mine to arrive.  Blogging with a latte seems like heaven to me! I hope my cockatiel doesn’t miss me.

I have been staring at this picture for about 5 minutes now, waiting for great inspiration to come to me. So far, what I have come up with is, that mouse looks mad, not at all cute. Then I wonder why the mouse is mad? So, no great inspiration today, you will just have to put up with a rather ordinary review.

Thankfully Mad Mouse is not an ordinary blog. The first thing I noticed about the blog is that is a very nice looking blog. The color scheme of tans and browns is quite pleasing, and the blog is very well laid out and organized. You will have no problem finding where you want to go. You do have a rather mad mouse glaring at you, but other than that it is all rather calming.

The subject of the blog is Ethical Blogging tips. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with mice, mad or otherwise. The blog has posts on SEO, blogging, making money and a few free Wordpress themes. The author (Squeaky) is expanding beyond blogging and also has posts on Entrepreneurship and Personal Development. The posts are informative, but most of the information is pretty basic. This is a good site for those who are just getting started blogging.

Now take another look at that picture at the top of this post. Does that look like a Squeaky to you?

For those who might not know, a URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it is the address of any page on the internet. Some URL’s are quite short. One I visit frequently is ATT.com. Other URLs are very, very long. Like the path to the free eBook I will be linking to in the next few days. (Sorry, I just don’t have time to get that all set up tonight!)
Not only is the URL long, there are lots of reasons why I don’t want the world to know the path structure of my blogs, so for this link I am going to be using TinyURL.

At TinyURL., you put your long URL in a textbox, push a button, and out comes a short URL. The short URL will start with TinyURL.com, but will link to your page with the long URL.
One thing that makes TinyURL. very useful is that you can specify what you want your tinyurl to be, after the /. So you could have a url that reads tinyurl.com/myfantasticwebpage, as long as no one else is using that particular tiny url.

The two main reasons to use tinyurl, is if you want to hide your link. If like me, you don’t want to show the long path, or maybe you want to hide an affiliate link. The other reason is so you can have a shorter, easier to remember web address. Just think if you are trying to give someone a webaddress over the phone. Would you like to be saying, “dub, dub,dub, dot, reviewme dot today dot com forwardslash uploads forwardslash ebooks forwardslash coolstuff forwardslash free forwardslash finallywerehere.” Or would you rather be saying “dub, dub,dub,dot tinyurl dot com forwardslash myfantasticwebpage.”
(Either way they are going to ask you which one is the forwardslash!”)

Now whatever you don’t, don’t go using tinyurl for spam. That is against the rules, plus nobody likes it.

Don’t forget to check back over the next few days for a free ebook and to see tinyurl.com in action.