August 18, 2006

New world of gardening blogs

I'm new to blogging and it has apparently become a very, very big thing since my 4-year hiatus from the internet. See: "Ah! The luxuries of life" in my July Archives. It's not that I didn't have any internet access, I just didn't have convenient access resulting in very short trips to the internet cafes with no time to surf.

In my recent searches for information on tropical gardening (not 'growing tropical plants in non-tropical areas' which is most of what I found), I have run across some great gardening blogs. That's what inspired me to become a blogger. Some of my favorite blogs are those of gardeners who are struggling like I am to figure out what they are doing, rather than those of the experts, although those are great, too. We all need experts.

Gardener in Mexico is one of my favorites because the author is an American trying to learn about gardening and the life in Central America, as I am. Yucatan Living is another site that tells of the life in Mexico, which in some respects is similar to Honduras.

I'm enjoying a new blog called Garden Rant, where they are "uprooting the garden world" and are bored with perfect magazine gardens. Who can't relate to that?

Rather than me giving you a long list of blogs that are of interest to me − although I may do that later − here are some sites where you can pick out your own favorites.

The Subterranean Homepage News has a long list of "More gardening blogs than you have time to read." Each entry has a short description which usually includes the location of the gardener. You are sure to find one that fits your interests and/or gardening climates.

Garden Voices
is a great site to get acquainted with a variety of gardening blogs. The site has an ever-changing group of the latest blog articles from selected sites and in the right-hand column has a list of hundreds of gardening blogs.

A blogger who has spurred several other articles on gardening blogs lately is Hanna at the This Garden is Illegal blog. She has a great article, Yes, you are allowed to leave a comment on a gardening blog, that is dear to my heart and has prompted to me to leave a comment or two on sites that I have been visiting. I hope you'll read that one and drop me a comment here! It is nice to know when someone is reading.

Now the hardest thing about finding so many interesting blogs is keeping up with them. I'm learning that there are lots of ways to keep up with your favorite blogs. There are free news readers such as NewsGator, Bloglines, or dozen of others which bring the newest articles of your favorite blogs to your browser or desktop.

You can easily add the "feeds" to your personal
Google homepage or MyYahoo page. If you use GMail, which I'm most familiar with, you can also add a feed to your GMail webclips which will notify you of the latest articles on your selected sites. (Even I have figured out how to do this!)Blogs often have little clickable icons in the sidebars which will automatically add the blog's feed to the program you use. I'm afraid I haven't learned how to do this yet, so you are on your own here! Sorry!

I feel a little silly talking about these technical things of which I obviously know almost nothing about. I'm just assuming that some of my readers may be gardeners rather than bloggers and I hope this information will help lead you to some of the real experts who can help.

If I only had a laptop, I could do my blogging here!
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