Evolution of the Book Visualized

From Best Colleges Online. There is a larger graphic on their website.

Blog Award

I have mentioned before that I usually do not to participate in blog award chains but it is definitely super nice to be recognized for your efforts.  I appreciate each and every comment I receive, as I know its so much easier and quicker to read a blog post and then move on to the next. Just the fact that there is more than one person who even knows my blog exists is gratifying.  I blog because I have thoughts and opinions about books and if I do not put them into some concrete form they haunt me. I do not have many friends who have the same interests in books and reading as I do, so my blog and all the comments/feedback I receive is the substitute. I want to thank every individual who has ever left a comment at Obsessed With Books.

I also want to thank Mary Ann DeBorde at Mary Ann DeBorde Writes for her kindness in passing along this award.  This is an award to honor kindhearted bloggers, those certain individuals who leave the sweet comments that brighten our hearts and make blogging worthwhile.

AWOL at the Olympics

This Canuck was just at the Olympics in Vancouver!!!  We got lucky and were able to get tickets to a Germany-Belarus hockey game, Men's and Women's Curling in which we were able to see Canada play in both, the U.S.A.-Canada hockey game and the Ice Dance Free Dance.  We were quite bummed ar the loss to the U.S.A. in hockey but Monday night more than made up for the loss, with an incredible and historic golden win in Ice Dance. Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue were the youngest ever Ice Dance gold medal winners and the first time gold has been won in North America. Finally!  So glad to see that the waves Bourne and Kraatz made were enough to open the field for more Canadians. Too bad the Ice Dance rules were not changed years ago...

Vancouver was overflowing with Canadian patriotism and pride. An amazing once in a lifetime experience!

Tweaking My Blog

Most of us I know are addicted to our Feed Readers but if you click on this post link you will see my new tailor-made background that I designed using this BgPatterns tool.  Its been fun to tweak the color and design of my blog to give it a more personalized and sophisticated look.  I did have to enter the html code though to change the background...I would advise saving a copy of your template code in a safe place before you go making any changes.  I also used Photobucket to grab the image of the background from my computer (which I has downloaded from BgPatterns once I was happy with my creation) to create a link which I could then use in the html code in replace of Blogger's background image link.  The images are small gifs or jpegs which are then applied in a repeated pattern.

I recommend creating free accounts with both BgPatterns and Photobucket. In BgPatterns if you do not create an account you can only rely on your memory of the patterns you make but if you have an account you can save your patterns to My Favorites. Photobucket has come in useful many times for hosting images and gif slideshows in various blog posts and the tweaks I have made to my blog design.

I've said goodbye to blah brown and hello to glamourous grey and green. So what do you think of the new look?

Looking for more inspiration to beautify your blog? Here is a post at Mashable about how to Build A More Beautiful Blog. Good luck and have fun tinkering!