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I was told today that the term USA is out of date. Maybe where they come from but not where I come from.  Some people from around the world do not understand our passion for patriotism and all that goes with it.  Flag waving, honoring the military, getting all sentimental when we see beautiful pictures of the USA, and celebrating our freedom is all a part of living here.  Also a tolerance and an acceptance of people who still arrive here from other countries is a huge part of living in the USA.  While some people are quick to point out what is wrong with the USA, we still see young men and women sacrificing their time and “freedom” to join the military and serve in foreign wars.  They give so we may continue all that we take for granted living here in the USA.

I love this video from Ray Charles and am going to share it for you to see in case you have not had that opportunity yet.

It seems that I am caught up in the world of social networking right now.  Sites like this at Today.com have a community type of atmosphere if you have teh time to take advantage of it and see who you will meet.

How should you best spend your time on social sites?  Are they necessary?  Lets see I will answer the last first.  Yes I believe that the social sites are necessary for a few reasons, and that will take me to the first question.

Determine why you are on the social site.  You are pubishing content and you want it to be seen.  The social site will let you announce what you do to people who might be interested in seeing your content.

Suppose you write about quilt patterns.  Do you think that someone who is into knitting, crocheting, and sewing might be interested in seeing your content?  What about interior decorators, or home owners.  Maybe they are interested to see what you are doing.

You would want to find other quilters, too.  Where you visit leave comments and ask that they stop by and look at what you are doing, too.  Over time you will form a friendship and that is always fun.

You can choose to stick with your niche to start, or visit something of interest.  Where ever you visit, leave a comment.  Bloggers thrive on comments.  We love to get them.  Remember to leave them, too!  Be open, be honest, be friendly.  Do not leave a comment selling though.  That is considered spam and will most likely get rejected.

I cannot believe how time is flying.  I have been consumed with visiting some Social Networking sites.  I have visited seveal for years now off and on, not really finding what is working for me. 

I found some good communities if you would enjoy testing them out.  I will continually post and review them.  If you are looking for a way to make some friends online then this is worth checking out.

I do not endorse using these sorts of sites if you are looking for a romantic relationship.  Maybe they do work for some people but I had to give my opinion on that matter.  Be careful who you exchange personal information with and parents please do monitor what your children are doing when they are on the internet.

There that being said, on with the show.  I am a part of the ZenZuu Community.  Right  now it is free to join and I think it might be going to a paid community.  They are going to have a launch in August or September of this year.  It is definitely an international community.

The exciting thing about ZenZuu is that it is going to pay members for just being there.  So if you want to check it out you should do so before they change the way they do business.  They are still in Beta Testing so it can run slow and have some bugs.  It is safe browsing though.

A lot of people want to sell you things on that site.  You make friends and then see what they are about and then decided if you want to remain friends or not.  You can always delete your “friends”.

Try out ZenZuu by clicking on the Banner. Look for me when you do: Rocque

I have found other great sites, too, and will add them. However ZenZuu is one that pays you to belong (or will pay you in the future…not yet).

Did you hear that Word Press celebrated their 5th birthday? Thank you Word Press for all the blogs you have let me create and all the fun I have using your blogs, not to mention a few extra dollars I have made from the blogs.

I have recently been upgrading some of my older blogs to the WP 2.5.1  and I hope they do not throw out another upgrade in the near future or I will be sad.  However I have learned a whole lot with this recent upgrade.

For some reason my FTP client was running way too slow.  I just thought I had a lot of data since I posted a lot to that blog.  Wow, was I wrong.  I had so many problems with that update.  The template kept reverting back to the Kubrick template, and that did not work with all my widgets.  It was a mess.  Plus some of my posts that used php were showing errors.  This was a bloggers nightmare.

Luckily I have friends who know way more about behind the scenes technical blogging than I know right now, and they gave me some pointers.  I deleted everything but my content folder after making a backup of my database and my blog.  I just finished re-installing the blog with the Word Press 2.5.1 version and am taking a break to post this before I go finish the process.

In my next post I will tell you about a friend of mine who is a blogging genius, and who helps me a lot.  However for now if you want to go check to see what is happening with the Word Press birthday party then go to this site.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/05/birthday-party/

It was in San Francisco and it must have been fun.  One day when I am independently wealthy I will go attend one.  Maybe the 10th birthday party.

It is only Thursday, but it feels like Friday.  Somehow short weeks mean you have less time to get more done.  Am I the only one who feels that way?  Well the sooner I can reduce my life to only one job then the better things might be.

I am a teacher by day and a blogger, MLM hostess, and affiliate marketer whenever I am not teaching or doing other teacher related stuff.  Well now I have that well earned break, and more time to spend blogging and doing what I enjoy doing.

I love to write.  Writing is more fun when you can write the random rambles, but I enjoy sharing what I learn about blogging, too.  I am hoping I can help some new bloggers to make some income from blogging, MLM. or affiliate marketing.  It would be awesome to teach people who really see the value in learning, and who want to learn.  It seems more and more this is the type of person we find using the computer, and searching for improved knowledge.

I will try to get back to posting about free blogs tomorrow, or Saturday at the latest.

Thanks for reading!

The question is the title of this post.  Should you choose Today.com or WordPress.com?  I should have included for your first blog, or even more for your first free blog that you do not have to host yourself.  Was that just a run-on sentence? 

I am a dye hard word press fan when it comes to blogs, but you know I am growing to like what I see here at Today.com.  Some of the Google Ads are a bit annoying, but hey they have to pay their bills somehow, right?  It is not that I mind the ads so much but it is the ad titles that sort of bother me because they don’t have anything to do with my topic.

Speaking of my topic, I guess I should get back to it.  I have been reading about editors you can download to make your blog posts look better.  I see this editor here for Today.com has all sorts of icons not found on the Word Press text editors.  Word Press blogs are pretty ho hum when it comes to text enhancements unless you can write your own code. Who has time for that, right?

Lets see some of the cool features for text with this blog. 

2008-05-27  I just did that date with the click of a button. Pretty cool.

I can imbed media links with the touch of a button too.  Nice.  I will use that in the future.   Tee hee, smiley guys.  They need more of those.

I can even change my font with the push of a button.  That is really nice.

Now look a different color.  Whee this is great!  Blog Posting will never be the same after this.  Too fun!

Once again you need to have an idea of the purpose for your blog.

I am going to have to visit some of the blogs here.  There are lots of categories to pick from.  I wonder if people are making blogs to sell anything from or if that is allowed here.  That is one thing I must be certain of.  Read the terms of service before you make a decision on any blogging choice.

One thing I always remember when choosing free blogs is that they are a great place to add your other blogs to the blogroll or links page.  You can never have too many links going to your site. 

Well if you read this please let me know you did.  Thanks I appreciate it. 

I have used Free Blogs such as wordpress.com, and I still do use them.  Plus I host some of my own blogs, too.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both and I will discuss some of them.  Right now I am trying today.com as you can see because you are reading this.  I am supposed to get paid for publishing daily.  Well I missed yesterday because it is after midnight.

I have spent the last 7 and 1/2 hours updating one of my hosted word press blogs.  Lets see what is taking so long.  FTP is!  Wow it is so slow when you have a big blog, and I really do not understand unless it is the plug ins that are slowing it down.  I saved my content file and am not transferring it back and forth.  I only saved a backup of it though.

Well to have a hosted blog you need things. You need to have a way to use FTP, File Transfer Protocol, and that is necessary.  I love Word Press but they update often, and that means backing up your blog files often (which should be done anyway), and then seeing what will work with the update and what won’t.

If you are completely new to this blogging stuff then let me tell you about Word Press.  Today.com uses the Word Press format. It is easy to use.  If you can send emails you can blog.  It is that simple.  Wordpress.org is the one for more advanced users and wordpress.com is for the free blogs.

Word Press offers a huge selection of templates and some modification is available on the blogs they host.  They give you enough free space that you can have fun for quite a long time.  They do all the upgrading for you so you do not have to worry about web hosting and ftp stuff.  They take all the worries out of your blogging.

Word Press is even making life easier by improving hosting of media on your blog.  I will add some to this one soon so you can see what I am talking about.

So if you are thinking of starting a blog get a free one first to test drive.  If you like it and want to get serious then come back here for more updates on Blog Tools.  I will be going in that direction to give more and more information about blog tools and where to get them.  If you are enjoying this blog please leave a comment or a suggestion.

First of all it is great to be accepted to Today.com.  It is also a thrill to see that they have chosen the Word Press format since I really use it for most of my blogging. When I filled out the form to be a Today.com blogger I wanted to share my knowledge of blogging with as many readers as possible.

I won’t say I am an expert at making blogs from the coding side of blogging.  There are so many great people out there who can make the widgets and the plugins, and beautiful blog templates.  However I feel qualified to write a blog about blog tools, and blogging in general.

I have been blogging for a few years now, and still have some of my original ones.  I have used a variety of blogging tools in the past.  Some were to help you get fast search engine rankings, and some were to help you get rss feeds onto your blogs to keep traffic fresh.

I will discuss how to promote your blogs, and different blog tools and techniques on this blog, so I hope you will return often to see what I am up to.