One of my sisters decided to start blogging! She decided to start up her own craft blog. I am probably one of the most useless people there is at crafts. I think my sister got all of those genes. If you are at all interested in crafting, particularly any kind of holiday craft take a look at my sisters blog Holiday Craft Source. I think you will be able to find some unique and fun holiday crafts.

Found some more free stuff that you can download and use on your website or blog. These are probably most appropriate for a blog, but you never know you might find a use for them on a regular website.

There are 12 sets of icons in different colours and styles. Here is a sample of the Black icons with a reflection.

Go and check out Review Saurus to see them all and download them.

Thanks for the icons guys I am sure I will find a use for them at some point.

Happy Valentines everyone! Hope you are going to spend some time with your special someone today.

I wanted to let people know that Epiblogger is holding a Valentines giveaway today! If you are an Entrecard user this is your chance to win an easy 1000 credits to do with whatever you want. If you are new to Entrecard you could take the credits and buy some advertising on some of the more popular blogs to help get the word out there about your great blog.

So go and visit the Epiblogger Valentines giveaway post and get your entry in for your chance to win!

Google Webmaster Tools is a helpful service for all webmasters whether your website is hundereds of thousands of pages or less than ten pages. Google has put together a nice little quickstart guide to show people some of the features and what you can do with the site. Go and check it out.

I personally find the links section of Google Webmaster Tools the most helpful. It shows you a lot more links that Google has about your website than the link: search operator. The search queries is also very informative to give you an idea of what keywords and phrases you are ranking for. It also has a great robots.txt analyser that you can use to check to see if you have your robots.txt file setup properly to keep the robots out of areas you don’t want them in. You can also use it to set a preferred domain, so Google knows that mydomain.com is the same as www.mydomain.com and only reports back one of the site. I would still recommend you use an htaccess redirect for the other search engines though.

While many people praise the sitemaps feature of Google Webmaster Tools, I actually recommend that people don’t submit sitemaps to Google. If your site is being updated constantly then your sitemap gets out of date very quickly. I have also found it does not speed up the indexing of pages by Google enough to warrant the extra work that you have to do to make the sitemap. Just let Googlebot crawl your site and do its job. Why should you do Googles job for them. They need to earn their paychecks somehow.

Somehow in the midst of all the craziness of this week I finally got some new favicons up for download over at FreeFavicon.com. I have had a folder of favicons I have been wanting to sort through and upload and realized I might not get to them for a while, so I decided to upload them to a misc folder and move them later. There are some nice tartan favicons in the folder so if you like tartans you might just find the perfect one for your site.

Here are some of my favourites

If you are looking for a favicon for your website and take a look the new misc collection, you might find the perfect one.

I have to admit the holidays were great. Having a 4 and 2 year old is just so much fun to watch them open presents and get so excited. The other thing that was great about the holidays was a chance to spend a little time just goofing off. Yes, that is correct, I goof off occasionally.

Over the holidays I spent way to much time sitting in front of the computer playing Gold Rush. Never heard of it? It is one of the games that you can play over at Moola. If you have never heard of Moola I would be surprised. I got my invite to the site way back in October of 2006 but I did not spend much time on it then. Over the holidays I made up for it and spent way to much time there.

Moola calls itself a “Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game (MMRG)”. You sign up and they give you a free penny to start playing games. If you win a game you advance and can play at the next level. If you can win 30 games in a row you could win over $10,000.00. It sounds easy but considering the number of hours I played I never got higher than 9 wins in a row or roughly $5.00.

I have seen photos of cheques of people that have cashed out $300 to $400 dollars. I can only imagine how long they spent playing the games to get that high. If you want to give Moola a try they are still in beta so you need an invite to login. I have invites available and you can get one by going here and filling in your email address. It is fun to play so if you are looking for something to spend some time on besides writing or coding take a look.

Came across this great post this morning with the top 10 URL shortening services. I don’t use URL shortening services very often but they can come in handy when you want to send people links to things like YouTube or sites where they use a long list of characters in the URL. My favourite is still TinyURL.com. Of course Twitter uses TinyURL as the default for links when you post a link. Anyways go and take a look, there might be a service you like.

Do I have your attention? I have been waiting a while to write this post. Since September actually, when I first read about the Million Dollar Wiki on Shoemoney.com. Just when that post came out is when I had money sitting in my PayPal account and I just wanted to try it out. It was also when Rhett Soveran and I happened to be starting up a new business partnership. The result is that the Million Dollar Wiki Canada page is the first project for Soveran and Robertson Internet Publishers the new partnership between Rhett and myself. We have another project that will be ready to launch soon so look for an announcement here in January.

Go and get a great set of Foliage Shapes for Photoshop. These shapes will make it easy and fast to create all sorts of interesting things. I found this a just the right time. I had a great idea last night and these will come in very handy to quickly take my idea to being completed. Many thanks to Dezignus.com for the collection. Hope others find it useful as well.

First there was the Million Dollar Wiki and now there is the Five Dollar Wiki. The Five Dollar Wiki offers a similar service, but you don’t need to cough up a $100.00 for a page, but only $5.00 for a page, so it is affordable for everyone. Who can’t find $5.00 in their PayPal account. If you are Canadian it is even less now that our dollar is so high.

If you are a blogger though you can save yourself the $5.00 for a page on the Five Dollar Wiki by simply creating a blog post and linking to the site just like I have done in this post. Check out the details on the FiveDollarWiki blog post. Never hurts to have a page, and if you can get it for free why not. Pick the right page and you can maybe make a few dollars when you are able to resell the pages.

I know they are just trying to create some buzz about the site, but I just can’t resist a free page.