I’ve neglected all of my blogging for quite some time, for very personal reasons. It’s time now to brush off the dust and get these blogs shining again. I’m ready.

I considered changing the focus of this blog but I have to admit I really enjoyed writing about such a wide variety of websites. I know a narrower niche would be better for SEO and marketing but my heart just isn’t into narrowing my focus here. I will be adding a few topics, though, that I hadn’t covered in the past. We’ll see how that goes.

So stayed tuned for new website reviews. They’re coming soon.

When I start a new blog I tend to tell my friends about it before I get it developed. Imagine my surprise when one of my friends told me about her new blog that had already been launched. Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

If you love fashion, style, makeup and all things luxourious, then you’re going to love Want 2 Be Barbie. If anyone enjoys Girly stuff more than I do, it’s my friend Cass. Whether it’s shoes or makeup or bling or just looking your best, Cass has it covered. With categories like Hi Tech Barbie and Middle Age Barbie, you know you’ll find something to amuse and enlighten you at this great fashion blog.

I’ve just found a great line of Squalane products, thanks to Want 2 Be Barbie and learned a little about how cheese helps when trying to lose weight. (Who knew?) Now I’m going to keep checking back for diet tips, too and hope that there’s a reveiw of various diets or products like orovo. I mean, if Barbie recommends it, it must be good, right?

Here come the holidays! Are you ready? Have you started your Christmas shopping? Well, if you’re looking to make some easy purchases, I’ve got some great ideas for you.

I’m not one of those people who make a point of getting to the stores on Black Friday although I do love the great deals on Cyber Monday. In fact, I’d rather click my way through my shopping list than stand in lines waiting for doors to open and then wrestling for a favorite item. I guess I’m lazy that way.

Anyway, one gift that works well for a lot of different people is a magazine subscription. If you know someone well enough to know the things they enjoy, then you can almost always find a magazine that they’d enjoy. And here’s the best part – Low Price Subs has great magazine titles for really low prices.

You can find many popular magazines, search by topic or even by price. Hard to believe but some of these magazine subscriptions are as low as $2.00 per year! That’s less than one issue of most magazines.

Go ahead over and check out the magazines. Order a few for yourself, too. After all, you’re going to finish your holiday shopping in record time, right? You’ll have loads of time to sit around reading your magazines!

Most of the sites I blog about here have the potential to appeal to a wide audience. I’ve only occasionally mentioned any type of spiritual site. Although I have a spiritual blog for those who are interested in my meditations, it isn’t really a “review” site. I mention this so that if spirituality with a Christian or Catholic bent offends you, just skip this post.

My grandmother said the Rosary every day. My dad keeps his Rosary near his bed; he can’t remember all the prayers to say it anymore. I’ve always loved saying the Rosary but I can never remember the mysteries for each decade. The Virtual Rosary has solved that problem for me.

There are two important parts to the Virtual Rosary site. First, the Virtual Rosary is a free computer program that runs on Windows, from 95 to Vista and Palm. (Mac and Pocket PC versions are not yet available.) The software detects the day of the week and walks you through the Rosary with the appropriate Mysteries for that day. It even includes the Luminous mysteries, which I just love. The site also offers additional modules so you can use other meditations, change the graphics or install other languages.

The other part of the Virtual Rosary site is integrated into the VR software. Prayercast is where you can enter your prayer request so that others praying the Rosary can add your intentions to their own prayers that day. At the bottom of the Virtual Rosary software, you’ll see a new prayer request for each Hail Mary.

If you’re like me, you have parents who don’t really need anything for birthdays or Christmas. I’m always trying to find something to give them. Oh, sure, I’ve bought pretty picture frames and filled them with pictures of the family as a gift. I’ve picked up a special book here and there or a favorite movie that one of them would like to see again. This year I’m installing the Virtual Rosary on their computer so that my dad can read the prayers that he no longer remembers. In fact, I think I’ll make a point of saying the Rosary with him at least once every week, too.

Prayer is powerful.

With winter just around the corner, cold weather lovers are probably looking forward to that first snowflake. (The rest of us are still dreaming of swimming pools and sunny days.) My kids, especially, love this time of year. When they were younger and fall lingered too long, they’d sit around cutting out paper snowflakes.

If your little one isn’t quite ready for scissors or you just want to avoid the mess right now, you can still have snowflake fun with the Make-A-Flake site. Just click on Make Your Snowflake and when you see the scissors, place them over the paper. The center of the scissors will turn green and then you start cutting.

You can undo a cut or redo one. You can preview your flake and save it or go back and cut some more. You can save it as a jpg or download the eps file. And if you click on Gallery, you can see your flake online.

As you prepare for your holiday celebrations, dishing up holiday appetizers and wrapping gifts, bring up Make-A-Flake site to keep the kids busy. They have a blast creating unique designs and you won’t have any little pieces of paper to clean up when they’re done!

Everyone knows that Google set out to create digital copies of every book for searching or whatever. And then there was some (expected) uproar over copyright. Laws are laws, you know. But did you know that there are websites that offer the full text of many books and that it’s perfectly legal? Once such site is The Literary Network.

This site offers the full text of over 1900 classic books and over 3000 short stories and poems. Its database of Quotations numbers over 8500. You can find more than 250 authors listed here, each with a bio page and a searchable collection of works.

I know some people would rather fill their hard drive with music or video; I prefer books. With the Literary Network, I don’t have to download a thing since it’s all right there, completely searchable. When I find sites like this, I can’t help but think how useful this would have been when I was in school, back in the dark ages. I imagine any student or teacher would love to bookmark this for future reference. As a parent, I know I’ll be hanging on to this site for the kids.

I have teens. Mostly, my teens hang out online to talk to their friends. I’ve tried to encourage them to blog but they usually look at me as if my lips are moving but no sound is coming out. Kids can make you question your sanity, you know.

And yet, I still love finding sites for my teens. I love being able to say, “Hey, look at this great site I found for you” even though I know they’ll roll their eyes. I love even more when they check out the site and realize that maybe – just maybe – mom is really on to something. Such is the case with Teen Freeway.

This site is jam-packed with free stuff for teens. Yes, I said free. From cool pens to blemish acne cream to mascara to magazines to phones to…. well, you get the idea. Free stuff. For teens. It’s magic!

If you have teens, pass this one on to them. It’ll keep them busy for hours as they sign up for all the stuff that’s offered here. In fact, even if you don’t have teens you might find something that appeals to you. So sign up and get some free stuff!

You would think that knowing what I do about computers, and considering how many I fix, I’d surely know to check to see how bloated my hard drive is. You’d think. You’d be wrong.

I’ve been growing more and more frustrated with this laptop and now I realize it’s because I’ve neglected to clean up my hard drive. I know it’s filled with junk that I don’t need but going through my files and streamlining my drive takes time. I don’t have time right now. I want to be able to push a button or click an icon and have my hard drive lean and mean. I guess I’m looking for a software Leptovox solution, to burn the fat from my hard drive and get it running like new. Or close to new.

Okay, so there’s no easy solution. Looks like I’ll be doing some digital cleaning this week.

On the one hand, the computer replacing my fried Windows 98 machine has a faster processor, a bigger hard drive and a newer OS. On the other hand, I’d upgraded the old machine and it did have 1GB RAM while this XP machine has only 512MB. I think that should be enough for what I want to do with it, but I’m still considering a system memory upgrade later this year. Maybe.

Most important, I’m going to be able to move a lot of stuff from my laptop and onto this spare XP machine. That should speed up my laptop. I really didn’t want to add more than the 1GB that it currently has. It’s just that running a local version of WordPress on my laptop (thanks to the excellent instructions at the old Geeks Are Sexy blog) really bogged down my laptop. It’s old and needs replaced but until I can afford that, it’s going to have to do.

So now that WordPress is on this old XP desktop, it’s time to clean up the laptop. Wonder what interesting files I’ll find stashed away on it. I’m such a digital pack rat, you know.

My sister gave my parents a really nice gift for their anniversary this past year. She had all their old 8mm movies put on DVD for them. It was really nice, watching hours and hours of film, spliced together and playing on the TV.

Of course, there was no sound on those old films so my sister added music to them. We sat around and discussed who was who and what year it might have been. Trouble was, my dad couldn’t hear our discussion since he has so much hearing loss. I was thinking how great it would be if we could have subtitling done to those movies. It would be more of a way for my dad to read each person’s name as they appeared. I think he’d like that.