Snoskred – Life in the Country

Happy Australia Day!

Check out this interview with Darren Rowse from Problogger on the Aussie Bloggers Blog.

For the last couple of weeks I have been involved in a project to launch a new blog and a set of forums with a group of other Aussie Bloggers – most of us have been bursting to post about it but we wanted to get everything perfect first.

Today the Aussie Bloggers forums are officially open, so why not drop by and sign up?

You don’t have to be an Aussie to join the forums, all nationalities are welcome. Unlike other forums out there on the web, questions are welcome and you will find lots of friendly Aussies willing to help. Helping out mates is part of the Aussie way, after all.

Squadron made us this fantastic launch video – check it out!

The blog launches on the 21st of January but you can see it now – Aussie Bloggers – another Freedom Green redesign, and I made that header graphic, do you like it?

Thanks to my fellow forum Administrators – Meg and AndrewBoyd – and a huge good on ya mate to the Forum Moderators many of whom are bravely moderating a forum for the first time ever – Cellobella, ChristineParfitt, Jaycee, John Lampard, Kelley, LaniGiesen, Lightening, Martin Neumann, miscmum, servantofchaos, squadron, StephenCronin, Sueblimely and trib.

Also a special thanks to Sephyroth for dropping by and scattering links to his wonderful how to posts through the forums. He writes a fantastic how to, people. Even though he’s not an Aussie but an Aussie In Training.

I’ve put in some scroll bars on my links lists. You might want to do this as well. The code is fairly simple – <div style="overflow: auto; height: 200px">PUT LIST OF LINKS HERE</div> – you can change the height of the box to suit yourself as well, just change 200px to whatever amount of pixels high you would like the box to be. Thanks go to Sephy who figured out how to do this.

I’m going to set myself the challenge of visiting all the blogs in the blogging chicks network, and commenting on as many as I can. I recently joined the network and I can’t wait to get into reading through the blogs on it. You can see the list of blogs in my sidebar. If you’re a chick you should join.

Also, I’ve finally finished adding the blogs I read in google reader to my sidebar. This means I now have some organisation going on here people! And one of the new things I am implementing is a “new blogz” folder in google reader. When I find a new blog I like, I’m adding it to that section and commenting to people that I’ve added them to my google reader. Hopefully depending on the amount of time I have, once a month or so I will go through and add them all to my sidebar.

It might seem like I’m a slave to reading blogs if you look at the amount of blogs there. The truth is quite different. I’m a really fast reader. I always have been. On average it takes me 2 hours to read a book of average size. So when it comes to blog reading, I turn up here with my coffee in the morning and I whiz through 100+ blog posts in the space of half an hour. Any ones I want to comment on (and this is becoming more and more lately) I open them in a new tab. Once I’m done with coffee, I spend a little time commenting, then it’s off to other tasks for the day. From time to time during the day when I have completed a task, I reward myself by checking in on any new blog posts. Not all of the people on the list blog daily, some of the people on the list blog once or twice a month.

The best new thing I’ve been involved with recently has been the Australian Blog Community. I love the RSS feed because it gives you the first 250 characters of a post and if that interests me, I right click and read the rest. I am really enjoying it, and I also am reading the US Blog Community which was set up by Sephy. If you’re in either of these countries and you have a blog, why not join the communities? If you’re elsewhere, why not make one for your country?