Our friends from WinVistaClub, in association with Windows Vista - The Official Magazine, are organizing a contest to recognize some of the best Windows Vista Blogs and Websites. If you run a blog or a website, which primarily focuses on Windows Vista you can submit your blog and participate. The blogs will be judged on the basis of quality of content, integrity, along with the frequency of updates. More details about prizes and how to submit your blog can be found here.

Recently, Microsoft launched the Engineering Windows 7 blog in which they want to start a two-way discussion about how their engineering team is working on Windows Vista's successor - Windows 7. I believe this is a nice start and, if they keep their word, Windows 7 is expected to be one of the most exciting Windows releases ever.

Considering the fact that Windows 7 will be built on the same core architecture as Windows Vista, a good start would be to fix the main issues in Windows Vista and refine some of its unpolished features.
In order to help out the Microsoft engineering team to deliver an even better operating system, I think it would be great to have our readers point out the areas which they believe to be necessarily improved in Windows 7, starting from the experience they're having on Windows Vista.

This is our chance to make our voices heard, so... let's take advantage of it. To kick off the discussions, I will start with some of the things I believe to be worth improving in Windows 7:

In the 4th episode of our series, I would like to present to you the Windows Vista Magazine website. As you can imagine, this is the official website of the magazine with the same name. Both the site and the magazine were launched shortly before Windows Vista was launched. Since then it has cumulated lots of contents, split into the following categories: Blogs, Windows Vista Help, Guides, Shop and Message Boards.

During the last few months we have been struggling with an increasing amount of spam. This caused a few problems including an important rise in resource consumption on our hosting server.
In order to tackle these problems, these days we made a few changes to our site. Except the usual Drupal engine upgrade and module update, we installed some new modules which prevent spam bots from accessing our site and verify messages to prevent spam. This led also to our Privacy Policy change.

I would like to continue our series with another very interesting site, called Simple Help. The site is owned by Ross McKillop and it was launched back in August of 2006. Since then, Ross has published approximately 600 tutorials split into several categories, one of them being Windows Vista. This site focuses mostly on beginner-to-intermediate computer users who want to learn how to do various things with their computers. As you will see for yourself, the quality of the articles is very good. This is why this site was already featured several times on important sites such as digg.com or LifeHacker.

As its name suggests, ITsVista.com is a web destination dedicated to Windows Vista. The website was started in December 2006, just a bit before we launched Windows Vista for Beginners. The person behind this website is Joseph Fieber, a very friendly computer enthusiast with whom we collaborated in a few occasions.

When browsing this website, you will find the following categories: Tips and Tricks, Windows Updates & Hotfixes (with complete descriptions and links for direct downloads), Knowledge Base Links to articles describing known Windows Vista errors, a complete list of Windows Vista Keyboard Shortcuts, information about Windows Vista's Services and Commands, a few Product Reviews, a Glossary of terms explaining many abbreviations you might encounter while working with Windows Vista and a collection of Videos and Web Links.

In case you were wondering how are we doing this year, here you have our site's traffic details for the period March 1st - May 31st. As you can see from the screenshots below, we had a total of 377400 visits and 892637 pageviews which means an average of 2.37 Pages/Visit. We were not very satisfied with the number of average pages per visit from our first months of existence so we made a number of tweaks which seem to have payed off. Also, we managed to increase the average time spent on site from 01:43 minutes to 02:22 minutes.

A while back, we decided to remove our Links section and start reviewing the best How-To destinations on the web. We thought this would bring more value to both our readers and the sites we choose for reviewing. I would like to initiate this series with one of the sites I read regularly via my RSS feed reader: the How-To Geek. On this site you will find plenty of tutorials, the blogs of the people who write most of the site content, a freshly started How-To Wiki and a pretty active forum.

One of the things we would like to improve this year is the number of articles published per week. Right now we are not posting more than 2-3 articles in a week and we want to do more. In order to achieve such a goal we definitely need more volunteers willing to write with us. So, if you wrote one useful tutorial, a nice review, etc and you want to have it published on our site, don't hesitate to contact us. We are very open to any type of collaboration.

Also, if you are a site administrator and you would like to get some link-love, you can publish an article on our site and also post some links back to your site(s).