Blog Tune Up

The inspiration continues and the ideas are flowing!
I've been tweaking the blog today to ease navigation, organize and de-clutter!

I've added new pages:  Nature Cards and Books, and renamed others.  What used to be the Mission Statement page is now simply called About New Pioneer, and NP Styles is now About NP Styles.  

This makes it easier for newcomers and general reference.

The Nature Cards page is a big deal!  I first took the best of my recent images and created a new gallery on my artist website at Fine Art America (you can view it here ).  These images are only available as greeting cards at this time.  If you are interested in enlargements please contact me.

Then I created the new Nature Cards page on the blog (view here ) which is the full collection with several links for purchasing.

I have been with Fine Art America for almost three years and they do beautiful printing, timely shipping, and secure purchasing.

The Books page was a terrific way to get them all in one place!  I have several photo collection books available through MagCloud;  great coffee table books or gifts.  I also have my second poetry book and the Backyard Bird Sighting booklet available.  You can view that page here .

I'm gathering recent poems for a third book, coming soon, and I plan to reprint the first book from 2004 in this new format on MagCloud - so stay tuned for that!

Additionally, I have cleaned up the side bars on the blog.  The images to the left under the first house photo are all available as greeting cards and click-able to that page.

On the right side bar under recent posts I have added easy access links to the pages as well.

Other new surprises coming soon will be a Nature Kit, The Shift oracle cards, and several new ideas for quick downloadable guides!!

Whew!  What a great day for cleaning blog house.

Thanks for being here!

Documenting the Sightings

One more post about the bird tracking template.  Bear with me, this is one of my most favorite subjects - wildlife.

I noticed in the stats that no one has read either of the previous posts, so either you're not birders or I have failed to represent it correctly.  If you are interested in documenting your backyard sightings, here are some tips on how to use this PDF document I created.

This is available from MagCloud.com and you can easily access it by clicking on the image of it in the left sidebar, or in my previous post.  The downloadable version is only $2.  I recommend this format so you can print out one document for each month you want to track your bird or other wildlife sightings.

Here is a sample page.

  

The left column going down is the day of the month.  Years across.  In this sample I have used a page from May that had some sightings documented over three years.  This document is for the period of 2008 through 2011.

When I created it I wanted something simple, easy to use and lots of options to change it.  So for the MagCloud copy, the years are 2012 through 2015.  You fill in the month.  There are enough pages for all the days of the longest month.

The fun thing here is that for instance if the Swallows arrived on May 22nd in 2008, and May 25 in 2009, they may arrive again on May 22nd in 2010.  So you have documented their arrival for every year for four years - at a glance!

OK, maybe birds aren't your thing.  Do you have deer?  Bear?  Raccoons and babies?  Maybe you want to track the plant growth;  when you planted the seeds for the spinach, what did well when.

Anyway, you get the idea.

OK, so there is the how-to on the bird tracking form.  Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.