I realize it’s been a month since my last post here, and I do apologize to those of you who are kind enough to stop by and check in. I’ve been having some time management issues related to my basically being unable to manage everything I have to do all at once.

I’ve also been using this more as a test blog, trying out themes and changes and such. I’ve been so busy trying to get product reviews done that I haven’t even been paying attention to what is new in the technical side of blogging. But I will try to update more often, I promise.

Before I begin the technical part of this post, I want to say one thing-sometimes, I cannot believe that I even know how to do anything to change a blog theme. When I first switched to Wordpress in summer of 2006, I was scared out of my mind at the thought of having to find a theme for my new domain. When I looked at a Stylesheet back then, I might has well have been reading “Beowulf” in the original Old English.

Somehow, in the last few months, it’s like a door swung open in my mind, and suddenly I find myself pulling apart blog themes and customizing them. On MomReviews, I’m using a great theme called My April Reloaded, but I took the whole header apart and put in my own photos and banner image, which would have been completely unthinkable for me even a year ago. Go, ME!

So now, I’m working on Table for Five, and I wanted to share a site I found that helps with coordinating the colors used on a theme. Color Hunter creates custom color palettes using the colors found in an image, and it’s free. Upload your image, and the site will show you colors that coordinate with the image. I uploaded the banner image from Table for Five, and the site came up with these colors:

I would have never found those colors on my own. However, I replaced the background color of the sidebars with the color that is fourth from the left, #C2C4D3, and as you can see, the color in the palette is much lighter than what is in the sidebar. I don’t know why.

So now, I’m working on redesigning Table for Five (yes, AGAIN, because even when blog friends spend hours helping me tweak a theme, I am never satisfied. Sorry, Lisa!) And if you read this and thought you can’t possibly change a blog theme, take it from me-if I can change a blog theme, so can you!

My cell phone is driving me crazy. It’s only a little over a year old, but the reception is awful. I was at Best Buy the other day looking for a new one, but there are so many choices and they all look good! How do I know if I’d rather have a Samsung or a Motorola or an LG? Today I poked around iMobileplaza.com to see what some of the differences are between different phone.

As cool as it would be to have a smart phone like a Blackberry or an iPhone, I’m not sure I would use it enough to justify the extra monthly expense for the data plan. And then there’s that whole cost of several hundred dollars thing-on iMobileplaza.com, an 8 GB iPhone is $439.00. Ouch.

All I really need is a phone with clear reception, a good address book, decent texting, and a camera that takes photos that are recognizable in case I am out and really want to take a photo of something. Even though I’ll eventually buy a new phone at a store like Best Buy, I do like to do some comparisons on a phone site like iMobileplaza.com.

I believe it was last year that they claimed to have started a mail delivery service where they would print out your emails and then deliver them to you by snail mail-ha! This year, they have announced a new email service, “Custom Time”. I know it’s a joke, but it’s darn funny.

The idea behind “Custom Time” is that you can change the time on any email you send. Missed Grandma’s birthday? Roll back the time on the email so she thinks it arrived on time! It works by using an “e-flux capacitor”, obviously allowing for the Marty McFly principle to take effect-LMAO! And the best part? You only get to change the time on ten emails, because:

Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.”

Bwahahahaha!! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go over to the IZEA blog and read all about how “Sun microsystems wants to buy Social Spark”. April Fool’s Day is much more fun online, isn’t it?

If you are looking for tips on how to be a bigger/better/more successful blogger, reading blogs about blogging can be a great source of information. Those of us who have been at this for a while generally feel like others can benefit from our experiences. One such blog is Zero and Up, with the tagline “Learn to grow your earnings while watching me grow mine”, written by Alan. On just the main page alone, there are articles on the importance of setting goals for your blog, why bold fonts help your post content stand out, why you should be using Entrecard (which reminds me, I need one for this blog), and my favorite post which happens to be his most recent one, titled “Don’t Forget: Even Big Blogs Started Out Small“. It is nice to know that even Problogger and John Chow started out with small blogs that got few comments

Sharing our expertise and experiences as bloggers helps all of us. Everyone has their own perspective on what has and hasn’t worked for them as a blogger, and it’s good to find blogs to read that can offer a different look at the “science” of blogging. I recommend you check out Zero and Up for Alan’s take on how to be a successful blogger!