I?ve finally decided what I?m going to do with my New Word Monday. Every 5th word I will have a contest where one lucky commenter wins 20$ USD.

It’s easy to participate. Every fifth word Emma will run a contest that will last two weeks (the first one ends September 16th though) in which one lucky comment picked at random will win $20.00 for using all five words in a comment. She has example on her announcement post.

The list of current New Word Monday Words can be found here.

I should be good at this! For instance I can easily use the following four Words in just one sentence:

Defeat, Deduct, Defense and Detail.

Ready?

Defeat of deduct went over defense before detail.

I’m a winner for sure.

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And I never thought red layouts would be so easy going on the eyes.

The first one is Emma’s It’s Write Now. A new blog dealing with “Insights into how to write, and where to publish the content” (may she forgive me for stealing a possible logo off of one of her posts). And although the blog is still new and we all know how “learning the WordPress ropes” can take some time, she has her “niche” well chosen and established already in just three short months and of course, the best way to begin is to post quality content and she’s off to a grand start as far as that’s concerned. As a matter of fact I found several good resources already that Emma had posted about that I hadn’t known of before and the only way to see what these resources are, is to head on over and check out her posts.

As far as her blog’s layout is concerned it’s a simple, basic two column theme that’s perfect for focusing on the content she writes and along with good readability makes for very comfortable experience.

Good work so far Emma, I’m cheering for ya’!

The second site I stumbled across and later joined is Sara’s The Blog Experiment which is a combination blog/forum that is tailored specifically for bloggers and blogging. In it’s current form, the site is just a bit over 1 month old and according to the TBE announcements section of the forum, there’s already around 130 members and nearly four thousand posts so far.

What impressed me right off about the site was how well laid out it was and the features it offers to the users such as the editor that’s used for posting to the forum. It’s excellent and in fact I’m a bit green with envy since I’ve never come across the equivalent for WordPress. I want one–plain and simple!

The overall stability is good also with only a few slowdowns when banging back and fourth through various threads. I find this refreshingly different in some ways since server problems are usually the most common cause of slowdowns, crashes and general frustration that goes along with running a forum such as this one especially when it’s new. And there’s a good chance that the statistics service for the site is also installed locally on the server which can quickly slow down the works as time goes on. As it stands now, the site functions well and has a good, solid feel to it which is impressive in itself.

If Sara is as good at keeping the mechanics working correctly (or pounding on the “mechanics” when something goes wrong as the case may be) as she is a developer, then The Blog Experiment should turn out to be a rousing success. I hope so.

So when you get time, stop in at these two sites and give Emma and Sara a hello and a word or two of encouragement as they both work on their respective projects. They definitely deserve it.

Technorati tags: new blogs, blog forums, writing

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