A few new on the "view halloo"

Let me just preface this by saying that this blog will always be, first and foremost, my personal blog.  My place to write about whatever, whenever.  I have no plans to buy a domain, to take on sponsors or anything fancy and commercial like that.  No thanks.

But, I am always looking for ways to keep things fresh and interesting here.  A lot of that has to do with the "gadgets" that are available on Blogger, which are often updated and improved.  Today, for the first time in ages, I was looking through the gadget options and decided to add a few and get rid of others.

New things:

• Options for subscribing: you can enter your email address and get notified when I add a new post, or you can have my blog posts sit directly on your My Yahoo page, if that happens to be your home page.
• New Blog Visitor statistics: Blogger now has a way to count visitors so that you don't have to get a counter from an outside site and guess which number to begin with.  I'm not in any direct competition as far as blog visitors, but it is interesting to see the traffic that comes through here.  As it turns out, I was 9,000 hits behind on my guess, which is why there is a sudden jump.  Kinda cool, but not a real focus for me.
• Currently reading:  And, not especially new, but I do always keep updated on the book I'm currently reading.  Today I'm starting a new one, The Aviary, by Katherine O'Dell.  Sometimes I read faster than other times, depending on the book and what I've got going on.  This week is going to have a lot of rain, so it might be a good week to dive into a book.

Anyway, just a few new things to share.  Happy Monday, everyone.