First of all I want to introduce my sister to the blogging world! She asked if I could set her up with something and I was more than happy to do so. I need everyone to go over and say hello and get her really pumped up, so that she will be a consistent blogger. So go now to www.simplehippie.com and introduce yourselves. If you feel like telling her something wonderful about me…feel free to do so! Don’t forget to blogroll her!

Second, I wanted to make everyone aware of a couple useful blogging tools. What, you did not ask for my advice? Well too bad, cause you are getting it!

The first is Pingomatic. I don’t know about you guys, but when I go to my blogroll (when I actually have a minute of time to myself) I have a few that I go see religiously everyday, then I go to whoever I see has updated. A lot of people do not ping their sites when they update, so I will go a week thinking the person has not updated, then pop in and see that they have updated like four times. You can go to Pingomatic and ping your site, so that it will show up as updated on everyone’s blogroll. You can also do this through blogrolling’s site, but Pingomatic covers more ground! So please ping people, so I know your alive!

The next one is Gravatar. A lot of people use Gravatar plugins in their comments on their blogs - those are those little pictures you see associated with someone’s comment. If you do not have one listed with Gravatar’s website, then you won’t have a picture in people’s comments. So make yourself a pretty little 80 pixel x 80 pixel picture that fits your style and go to that website and register with the email address that you always comment with (cause that is how they associate the picture with you) and upload your picture. If you are not sure how to create one, send me the picture you want to use and I will help you out! **In singing voice…“Cause that’s what friends are for…”

Okay, that is all for now. I really need to get some work done now!