Housekeeping

I mentioned when I played with geotagging that I really needed to update my blog because the template I was using was not functioning well. I have visions of how I'd like my space here to appear, I love the look of some of the magazine style formats that I've seen and I seriously thought about buying one. In the end I decided that I should stick with something within my personal ability so as not to have problems again down the road. My ability confidence level is such that this is what I came up with. Yes, I do know that all of my blogs are starting to look alike. Perhaps I'll learn more and build my skills to come up with something more attractive and distinctive later in the year. Please bear with me as I continue to move things around and add and delete things. If you find something that is not working or simply looks wrong please let me know.

I used to link to all of my family history posts that appeared on my first blog, The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree. I've decided that they really belong here at Apple's Tree so I will be republishing them here, one each Sunday until they're done. Some will appear just as they did the first time and others I plan to update so they may not appear in the same order they originally did. I apologize to those of you that already read them way back when and I hope that those of you that just recently started reading here will enjoy them. All of the posts that now appear as Family History Links are links to other sites with shared ancestry, such as Bill West's great series on Levi Ames, a very distant cousin that I would never have spent much time on myself. I hope to find and add many more such links in the coming year. Once I have finished moving them all I will be adding a list of my personal favorites, many of which are from those early posts.

I also used to have link lists to various sites that I found helpful. Two were lost in the move so right now only one remains. (I do have backups of the "lost" ones.) The one that remains is a disorganized mess so I will be creating new pages in some (hopefully) organized manner and burying them in the archives and then I'll create a link list to these pages. I did loose some of my bookmarks when my computer died so I hope to keep all of my bookmarks here in addition to on my browser. I need to learn how to use Diigo!

I spent a good amount of time this morning trying, unsuccessfully, to reorganize my reader. As I keep working on it you will notice changes to the blog link widgets. There are so many good, new blogs while some of my old friends rarely publish anything anymore. Perhaps I'll switch to some other feed based widget.

As I went through my reader I tried to follow several blogs but blogger is being a poop this morning and the link for "follow this blog" doesn't seem to be showing up on any blogs. I added several through my dashboard and I'll add more as I come across them.

I'm still working on one of John's computers and since I have little hope of getting mine fixed in the foreseeable future, I'm slowly making it my own. I have added Family Tree Maker 2008 and it is taking me way too long to learn how use it efficiently. If it crashes one more time I'll probably go hunt up FTM 2005! This computer has Internet Explorer and we are not playing nicely with each other so I will add FireFox and some extensions that I miss later today.

Well I just created a very big to-do list so I best get at it! Maybe I'll even have a little time to write or dig up something new.