Welcome Back!

Not to you - to me!  Climbing out of my shell, maybe - just maybe - I will blog again.  Got another new template.  We'll see how it works - getting very rusty on my skills.  Basically, this post is a test to see how it looks.  Hopefully the next post will have something of substance.

Freshen Up!

Through one of my blogging buddies blogs (see the mini pics on the left), I found a contest to win a new Blogger Template!  I'm hoping to update my blog site to be a bit brighter and lighter and have some nice features.  Wish me luck - it's a random drawing, so I'm crossing my fingers.  Some of the templates I like are:

         

          

    

  What do you think?

Planting Seeds, Growing a Blog

As you can see in my sidebar, I'm trying a few new blogger promotion tools. If you click on the RSS button, you can subscribe in a feed reader which is super easy even if you don't know anything about it. There will be some choices like Yahoo, AOL, Google for your reader. For my visitors who are AOL users, just click there. If you have iGoogle (like me, which is fun!) you can add it to either your iGoogle page or your Goggle reader. If you have problems or questions, just leave me a comment. You can subscribe to anything - it's like having your own custom magazine on your computer.
I'm trying a couple of site-sharing tools that are designed to increase traffic. The first is Entrecard. They have a free ebook to explain the card system. You can link all your blogs, advertise on other blogs, drop cards and find a lot of interesting blogs that you might not run across in your everyday surfing. If you have a blog and want to join, it is a nice community - check out the forums. Lots of people are into money making for their blogs. There are also many casual bloggers like me just trying new things.
The other is BlogUpp, just about the opposite type of blog promoting tool. One page to start using it, nothing else to do, keep track of, participate in - I will not lift another finger, which is just my style. The two mini-pages in the sidebar are websites to visit provided by BlogUpp.
One more new tool I use is del.ico.us , a social bookmark site. Instead of filling my browser bookmarks with everthing I want to save, now I can post it to del.ico.us, add tags, share, search, find new links. You can try it by clicking the link at the left and adding this post!
StumbleUpon is a fun way to find and save sites. If you do searches, you can sometimes see the icon and rating next to some of the links in your search results list. My son mentioned StumbleUpon to me a long time ago - I should have checked it out sooner.
Hit me with an questions. I'm no expert, so any help won't be too technical!