New name and new features planned

So with the help of the Warrior Forum and my wife, I've settled onto a title for the blog: Building Blocks for Building Blogs. I think it's pretty catchy, and says exactly what it is I'm trying to lay out here.

I plan to spend a couple of hours a day, roughly six days a week on this blog. This is kind of the thing I plan to work on in 2007, but since I'll have a few days to myself for the holiday weekend, I figured I'd get a head start.

Something new to me about this blog is that I'm using the "new" Blogger for the first time. It came out of Beta earlier this week and I was surprised when I visited the login page to check on my blogs. I'm well familiar with their old service, but I'd held off switching over until they made me do it. They're not forcing me to switch my old blogs, but since this is a new blog, I've been pushed into using the new platform.

I have to say, I like the changes so far. Trackbacks and Labels have been added, so I'll be exploring those features. Also, the new layout editing tools are cool, and allow me to do more customizations faster. I'm having trouble with it and getting errors here and there with the interface while I was experimenting with creating AdSense blocks and moving them around and resizing them. No biggie though - I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.

Some other features and cool stuff that I'll be adding:
* A new Google Group devoted to the blog and my writing projects where I can share files and communicate with my readers via email. When it's ready, you'll see the subscription form here on this site.
* I'm going to be implementing some free poll software here and surveying the users of my e-book projects to see where they feel I should go next. I'd like to know where my readers feel I should develop my tactics and clarify my explanations, or even add more variation or functionality or whatever.
* I've had a lot of questions about other blogging software and other ad networks and other techniques than the ones I use. Any experiments I implement will all be referenced here so my readers can see in real-time the kind of things I'm trying out. Hopefully I can broaden my own horizons while answering your questions.
* I'm going to launch my prior e-book products on the public market and use the traffic to this blog to bring attention to them. I figure, if you end up here, reading these words, my techniques must work pretty well, right? To do this though, I'm going to switch from a hosted domain and try to utilize free web hosting to run the entire operation. I want to see if it's REALLY necessary to have your own hosting accounts and domains. I suspect that the web is much more forgiving than it used to be.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts I'm putting out there and you'll be seeing a lot more here over the course of next year, and hopefully it will be interesting enough to keep you coming back. See you soon, I hope!