One easy and frugal way to get lots of pots for seed starting is to make them from things you may find around your house. Seed starting pots from newspaper is not only very cheap but you’re keeping trash out of landfills. I take a sheet of newspaper and fold it in half so that it’s about the length of a can of soda (or “pop” as we say in Chicago) and then just roll the soda can until it wraps around the can. Then I’ll just fold in one end of the newspaper and you have a quick and cheap pot for starting seeds. In the photo above I used this technique to start some Amaryllis seeds, but you can do just about any seeds you want. When the seedlings have sprouted you can plant the whole thing in the ground where the newspaper will eventually decompose.

You can also create your own seed pots from toilette paper rolls. One good alternative I like when I only have a few seeds to work with is to make them from the tubes of gift wrapping paper. They’re usually much sturdier than the tubes for paper towels or toilette paper. These seed pots can also be completely planted in the ground or into your container gardens.

Tip: set all of your homemade pots inside a take out container, if you don’t have seed starting trays, so that they’re touching. When you water fill the container with water and allow the water to be absorbed by the paper pots. If you’re very eco-friendly make sure the newspaper you use prints with soy based ink.

Other things around your house you can use are yogurt cups, cut a water bottle in half and poke holes in th bottom for drainage, plastic containers from restaurants, Styrofoam cups from fast food restaurants or instant soup.

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Mr. Brown Thumb You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Posting Every Day Makes Me a Better Blog?   Here’s how I see it. If I post great content every 3-7 days, isn’t that better than if I were to post poor or mediocre quality content every day? The answer is obvious to me. I should post in a way that results in better quality, no?So then, posting every day is not a “carve it in stone” rule. If search engines use it in their algorithms to rank sites, it’s another misnomer as I see it, because the everyday post could just be junk.

Quality Posts Must Be Frequent and Regular Still   I know, I probably don’t post enough to this blog for some of you. Sorry, but producing quality content that is meaningful and valuable takes a little more time, thought and effort than that.But I will agree that posting often and regularly is important because of the audience and the need they have for continuous information. Otherwise they may lose interest or think the blog has become inactive.

What Is The Minimum Time Standard for a Quality Blog?   I’d say it is at least once a week. Anything less than once every 7-10 days and people will begin to wonder. Once a week may also match how often people would regularly visit the site based on how much info you provide per post. It may take them a couple days just to read one post.However, I also say, cut us bloggers some slack! Sometimes our lives get busy too! We can’t always blog, but we will most of the time.

Depends on the Topic Too   Entertainment and celebrity gossip sites may have a daily audience while other more academic or information-based sites have a every few days or once a week following.Whatever the case may be, follow the key rule in marketing and product satisfaction - match the service you provide to the needs of your target audience or market.I hope this was helpful and definitely welcome some dialogue on this one. How often would you visit this blog BTW, daily? Maybe I blog too little then, As always feedback is helpful.

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Quality Blogger You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

This blog writer thinks outside the box and has created a comic blog. Since comic strips are too long to fit in an except, we’ll just run the first panel and let you go to the blog to finish up. The rest can be found HERE.

We’re going to vary from our usual thing and post the main site of a blog instead of an individual blog post. The reason? We are going to point out overall design as making a good blog rather than the individual blog content. The winner of our Blogger Blog best blog is Ordered List. The site won best design at Elliott Back with this comment:

“Besides his Tiger Admin plugin for the WP administrative interface, Steve Smith’s blog invented the wide-horizontal look. Black, green, and blue, with bigger fonts than most blogs, it’s both plain and subtle at the same time. Check out the careful use of icons everywhere, tagging and related links, and comments. Because he uses more color than images, the pages are light and fast to load. They’re also very uncluttered.”

Here’s a shot of the main page:

So I am on the phone with Alex and he and I start talking about classic TV shows and at one point I am singing the theme song to Growing Pains. I realized then, that television really isn’t the same anymore. WHERE ARE THE THEME SONGS?!?!?!

I mean, some of my fondest memories growing up was singing along to Good Times, Facts of Life or One Day at a Time. I can remember my first solo in grade school. I had to sing the first verse of The Greatest American Hero. You know it - “Look at what’s happened to me, I can’t believe it myself. Suddenly I’m upon top of the world. It should have been somebody else…”

I used to imagine myself showing up in the credits. I was always a guest star on The Love Boat or Fantasy Island. I saw myself running down the hill with Laura, Mary and Carrie on Little House on the Prairie. I was another member of the Keaton family and my picture too was in a frame for Family Ties.

So what happened?! Has the television industry become so consumerist that we can’t have a 30 second theme song now? Are we so focused on airtime and getting in that Tampax commercial? We are robbing future generations of this delight. I say, bring back those writers. Classics like Wonder Woman, Golden Girls, Three’s Company… ah I could go on. Still I can always find a website or two that allows me to reminisce

This Best Blog post was excerpted from On My Mind You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Conventional wisdom used to be that if you’re going to succeed as a solo, you need to jump in with both feet. But the one rule of solo practice is that there are no rules, only millions of exceptions. And here’s one of those exceptions: Danielle Colyer, a teacher by day, busy real estate attorney by night, as described in this article,
Her Homework: Law Practice. According to the article, Colyer went to law school after she’d burned out of teaching. But after getting her law degree, she also received a “dream job” offer teaching law to high school students. Still, as a single mom, her teaching salary didn’t go far enough, so she started a real estate closing business on the side. According to the article, these days, she juggles 100 closings with the aid of a part time assistant and earns as much from her part time practice as from her full time teaching job.

So if you’re thinking about solo practice, but too nervous about cutting off your salary entirely, see if you can arrange a part time gig and use it as support to get your practice growing…before making the leap entirely or, keeping a slash career.

This Best Blog post was excerpted from My Shingle You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Well, it’s been a long time coming, and for football to be the impetus is just fine by me. Finally Iraqis have something to celebrate, and in this case it’s something that has united them more than any other occurrence in recent history - the Iraqi national side has just won The Asian Cup.

“Iraq beat Saudi Arabia 1-0. Celebratory gunfire was heard in Baghdad, where authorities had banned vehicles and urged fans not to gather.

It was feared crowds could be targets for bombers. Some 50 people died in attacks after Wednesday’s semi-final.

Correspondents say Iraq’s progress has temporarily united the divided country.

The team includes Sunni and Shia Muslims, as well as Kurds.

The crowds in Baghdad included members of the security forces. Guns were fired into the air despite an earlier warning by the authorities that any such displays would be punished.

“It’s a huge success for Iraq and it’s a very, very good news for Iraq,” Iraq’s national security adviser Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie told the BBC.

“You should come to see the jubilation and the joy which is spreading all over Baghdad’s streets now. People are pouring in, hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into the streets.”

Want to know what the closest thing to world peace looks like? Well, here it is…

This Best Blog post was excerpted from matthewgood.org You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.