This blog is "burning"

Well I like many other bloggers have made the switch to the new Blogger and I have to say I really love how easy it is to use. The drag and drop features are a thing of beauty for someone like me who couldn't build a site if my life depended on it. My big pet peeve with Blogger is that they didn't introduce multi-profile blogs under one dash board with this upgrade. But I guess I can live with it.

I also joined the Google Co-op and started up the customized search engine Google for Gardeners. I hope to make it into a great resource for finding information by people who have sites/blogs/podcasts about gardening. I'm tired of looking for information and having most of my results being retail related. So I'm weeding out retail sites and keeping it mostly restricted to sites by the little guys. If you know of a site that fits that description feel free to contact me or leave me a message letting me know about them so I can add it. You can also feel free to link Google for Gardeners from your site/blog and encourage other people to use it.

But I think the best update I made was signing up with FeedBurner. If you're a blogger or podcaster or admin-you have to sign up. It's a free service that helps with the distribution of your content and collects info on your subscribers. I learned about it by seeing the chicklet on other blogs and got curious so I signed up. Seeing as how I'm not very tech-savvy I'm surprised with how painlessly I have been able to take advantage of the tools they provide. Today I was looking at the statistics on the FeedBurner dashboard and was noticing that I had visits to my humble gardening blog from Canada, the UK and Trinidad-Tobago. The other day I noticed that someone from Australia and India had been to my gardening blog and I was curious about how they got here. I was about to sign up with Bravenet to get some site statistics when I saw the update on a blog from a FeedBurner employee informing us that they were now going to offer stats for free.

This is probably starting to sound like a bad infomercial but it's not. If you're a blogger you need to get Feedburner. It's free and the info is easy to understand and the staff that I've seen answering questions on their help forum is always pleasant, plus I've noticed that some of them are from Chicago-so they can't be bad guys.

I hadn't noticed, really.

Parts of U.S. experience warm winter

By TARA BURGHART, Associated Press Writer Thu Jan 4, 6:24 PM ET

CHICAGO - Crocuses are pushing out of the ground in New Jersey. Ice fishing tournaments in Minnesota are being canceled for lack of ice. And golfers are hitting the links in Chicago in January. Much of the Midwest and the East Coast are going through a remarkably warm winter, with temperatures running 10 and 20 degrees higher than normal in many places.
(click the post title to read the whole story)