Sleepless Night

Last night was one of the those nights were sleep just seemed to escape me. I managed to get in about an hour and a half of sleep before I was awakened by our daughter. She was having a rough night (I think her leg was hurting) and had trouble getting back to sleep. Finally after some Tylenol she was able to make it back to dream of her new Pooh bear toy. Unfortunately, by this time I was wide awake. I fought it for a little while but finally decided to give up.

After doing some brainstorming and putting some thoughts down on paper (of the electronic variety), I headed over to my favorite photo site - Flickr. I enjoy flipping through and looking at the variety of pictures. Typically, I look for pictures to use as backgrounds for songs for our worship services at our church. It kind of serves two purposes: our church gets some cool new backgrounds and I get to browse through lots of photos - something I enjoy doing. If you run across any cool images, let me know.

Here's one I like:

Email updates

We've set up a GoogleGroup for those that are interested in being notified by email when a new posting is made to our blog.

Instructions: (this will take 1-2 minutes)
Visit our group's webpage.
Click on "Join this group"
Login to your Google account (gmail, calendar, etc.) - if you don't have a google login, you'll need to create one.
Decide on what format you would like to receive the email in (digest, full, or abridged).

That's it. You're all done!

By the way, I've changed the settings so that you don't have to login to blogger to post a comment to our blog (sorry to all those who attempted to do this in the past - it should be easier now).

the new blogger

We recently switched over to the new beta blogger (operated by Google). Not too much different - a few changes here and there, but it is easier to add different elements now (such as tags, links, etc.). You'll probably need to update our address in your feed reader - the addresses are below. By the way, if you're looking for a good feed reader, I'd recommend Sage. It's a plug-in for Firefox and integrates really well.

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:

When you click on the icon for Sage, it pops up a sidebar that shows the blogs you subscribe to on the top with the individual postings below. When you click on the refresh icon (located at the top of the sage bar), it checks for any blog updates and lets you know it's new by bolding the text. Also, the magnifying glass next to the refresh icon searches a site for a new feed. So, if you are visiting our site (mike-tina.blogspot.com), you can click on the magnifying glass and it will automatically grab our feed so that you can subscribe to it. It makes life much simpler.

New Feeds for Mike & Tina (either of these will work):
http://mike-tina.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://mike-tina.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss