Video: All the Truth About Chocolate and Antioxidants

From Denny: When The Social Poets became too much of the Wild Wild West I started dividing my interests into many blogs so people wouldn't feel quite so dizzy when they landed. As my first blog, this has always been a "Musings" kind of blog but was also developing a lot of competing themes, so I began a pack of other blogs to handle the information overload for readers. The scope is narrowed on the other blogs, themed, for easier reading - and so you have the comfort of knowing what to expect when you visit.

When people are stressed we do like to develop healthy routines - like reading favorite sites and blogs - as a distraction to help mediate our mood from work or whatever. To give you an idea of my food blogs this is a video I'm running over at my two food blogs, Romancing The Chocolate and Comfort Food From Louisiana - even over at my health blog The Healing Waters.

This is a great little video chock full of useful information about how the decisions you make to get the most out of that chocolate benefit factor. She gives you percentages of chocolate to sugar for best antioxidant value and tells you how much (really how little) of a percentage of your favorite candy bar has of real chocolate. Also, beware of how chocolate is processed because you can completely lose your antioxidant value!

Thank you for your support!

Photo by papalars @ flickr

From Denny: Just wanted to take the time to thank everyone for subscribing to the feed on this blog and all the others - and following on Blogger and other sites. You are much appreciated! Blogging is so much more fun when you have company and such good company you all are, thanks! Thank you for your support and hope you are enjoying your time here learning right along with me.

New Additions to Photo Blog Roll!

From Denny: "Can I tell ya?" Spent hours and hours this past weekend pouring over some awesome photo blogs, amateur and professional alike, sifting through them to place the BEST on my blog roll for you! There are about 70 choices now - around there, I lost count... :)

If you enjoy looking at photos and want to see what is going on in the photo blogosphere then this is a good place to start. My blog roll list is located at my photo blog, Visual Insights.

Talk about a wonderful way to while away a few hours with beautiful and thought-provoking photos! Take a look and enjoy! Go here.

Twitter Counter Added to ALL Blogs

From Denny: Just added the Twitter Counter to all the blogs! Come by and drop off a link to YOUR NAME on Twitter! Great way for you to boost your followers and just plain fun. Get a little link love! :)

Have also started a reciprocal Link Love on The Social Poets and will be extending it to the other blogs too. Just email me, Denny Lyon, warriorspearl@gmail.com so I know which blog is the best fit for your site's link - unless you have a preference. Keep a link on your site or blog with a link to one of my blogs and I'll keep a link for you too.

If we don't promote each other in cyberspace, who will? :)

Here's the link to the Twitter Counter page to make your own:
http://twittercounter.com/pages/buttons/skydiver

Here are quick links to the various blogs:

The Social Poets

The Social Poets Fav Bloggers

The Social Poets Fav Links

The Healing Waters

The Soul Calendar

The Soul Calendar Fav Links

Romancing The Chocolate

Comfort Food From Louisiana

Dennys Blog Feeds

Visual Insights

Beautiful Illustrated Quotations

Ouch Outrageous Obnoxious And Odd

Thanks for visiting!

New Health and Humor Posts!

Photo of nuttall woodpecker feeding the family by mikebaird @ flickr - Mike is an awesome professional photographer! Check him out on flickr.

From Denny: Am working feverishly to get caught up on my daily posts on all blogs. Here are the latest updated blogs:

The Healing Waters: 3 Fascinating articles from Evelyn Lim about positive affirmations, intelligently written.

Humor blog, Ouch Outrageous Obnoxious And Odd: The latest updates from my friend, Christoph, who is one funny writer with a skewed view about today's pop culture. He will keep you laughing - and it's all true! :)

OK, back to the salt mines to get caught up with the other blogs! Thanks for visiting!

New Blog Look!

From Denny: Have spent the day fine-tuning the new blog template. It's just so much fun (not!) when you have to go back to the original sites and generate and install a new code for one thing: the original no longer fits in the new column, too large or too small, the Amazon store and the visitor counter and more. Simple to do but time-consuming. Hopefully, I've gotten all the details. My eyeballs look like a Halloween scary mask, all blood shot! :) (Hmmm... is this where I'm supposed to whine and whine some more...?)

Why did I decide to change the look? She must be crazy, you tell yourself silently in your own head. (You are right, BTW.) Actually, Himalman of Himalman's Weblog suggested I change my template. He even provided the link to a great template site.

After a couple of hours (remember there are 12 blogs now) of pouring over pages of great interesting templates for the Blogger platform, I downloaded a bunch of them, all excited to get started. One by one, none of them were accepted to upload to Blogger, even though all were compatible with my browser. Great... now what? Well, after studying the best for so long by then I realized I could do something close to the preferred templates - and set about redesigning the blogs by using Blogger's established templates.

Hope you enjoy the new look and find the navigation much easier! Thanks for visiting! And me? I'll be the guy at the drug store buying eye drops so I won't scare the neighborhood children...

Top 100 Blogs List

Photo by foxtongue @ flickr

From Denny: You know how it is as a blogger, post and ping, ping manually because Blogger doesn't allow embedding the automatic to all the web bots. So, of course, I'm over at the very popular and doing well Swedish site, Twingly, to ping them and re-visited this page of top 100 blogs. Thought you might enjoy taking a look too! Just click on the title link to take you to the page. Nope! I'm not listed there ... yet! ;)

New Link Added to Interesting Mountain Climbing Blog

From Denny: Since I have a number of readers from Poland I thought you might enjoy checking out this guy's site. He is a friendly, smart guy who writes well in English so anyone can enjoy his unusual blog. He teaches beginner mountain climbing.

What I like about his blog is that from a spiritual or writing perspective it really is a metaphor for life as he teaches how to overcome obstacles that seem immovable! An enjoyable read worth the time to visit again and again. To visit his blog, Himalman's Weblog, go here.

Added him to the The Social Poets Fav Bloggers blog roll list so you have a permanent link to find him. He is also linked on The Social Poets Fav Links under the Travel section.

New Links Added to The Social Poets Fav Links Page

Image by coincoyote via Flickr

From Denny: To The Social Poets Fav Links blog I hit a gold mine recently! Have added another 19 sites as well as adding 2 more original poem links. Newly created a section of links for all the Libations Friday! posts, complete with descriptions. I'm really starting to get the hang of this blogging organization! :) (Well, eventually...)

New Link Pages: List for Fav Bloggers and Fav Links!

Links Image by cobalt123 via Flickr

From Denny: Hi, everyone! Been busy on the blog's housekeeping and you all know how much I don't like (OK, despise) housework...

The Social Poets has become a bit of the Wild Wild West. Read that as too much overwhelming info on one page. Too much on one page has really slowed down the final load time of this blog too. Surely you find it as annoying as I do! So, something had to be done and two more blog pages were born:

The Social Poets Fav Bloggers

The Social Poets Fav Links

OK, so I'm one of those people who enjoys a clean house, everything in its place, neat and orderly - I just don't like the effort it takes to do it! (Hmmm... TMI...)

Seriously though, if you are a blogger or are thinking about starting a blog, maybe try out the same idea for your convenience. For both content and link worthiness it's a great idea to have links to other blogs and sites. I just choose to do so by fitting it into my niche because I'm a total information junkie. Sigh... TMI yet again... :)

Actually, I've been wanting to expand on finding additional blogs to fit my categories and have been limited - until now. I really see the potential for how I could create additional interesting pages/related blogs!

Currently, on The Social Poets Fav Bloggers there are blogs on general musings, poetry blogs, writing blogs, political and social issues, creativity blogs, and more will be added. If you have some interesting blogs or sites you have run across (or your own) you think warrant as an addition, feel free to drop me an email with the link and I'll be glad to consider it! (Always looking for new talent as life is a team effort.)

On the links list page, The Social Poets Fav Links, there are links to my original poems (parked in various places so required a link page area), links to my friends who write poetry (let me know if you want to add your poetry page, be glad to do so to help promote fellow poets), writing sites (let me know your contribution to helping others develop their writing skills and be glad to include your site), poetry sites, music and more.

For your convenience the new links are located right before the day's post. The link pages also have a link to navigate you back to the home page of The Social Poets blog too.

Blogging is a lot of fun! Always learning how to solve "all the problems of the world." Now if world politics and world peace were just this easy...

Check Out New Coffee Recipes and Amusing Poem!

From Denny: Posts have been delayed due to my jury duty service this week but I'm getting back up to speed.

Well, hike yourself on over to my blog called The Social Poets for the Libations Friday! 8 May 2009.

Why? New coffee recipes, new coffee site, original and amusing light-hearted poem by "moi" AND it's Friday! Does Life get any better? :)

Oh, and if you have never visited this blog before now, just scroll on down past the posting area to get an overview of all my blogs. There are the blog descriptions so you can get a feel for each blog's focus and personality. There are also headlines of the latest postings from each blog all contained on one page, a convenient fast-paced glance. Enjoy!

Photo by Sarah Sitkin @ flickr

Follow Fellow Bloggers!

Image via Wikipedia

Most of the folks who follow this blog (THANK YOU!) and all my other blogs subscribe to feeds from feedburner, MyBlogLog and several other sources, even email. Not too many have ever used Blogger's Follower function. Maybe it's perceived as Old School?

A couple of weeks ago I dumped as many gadgets as I could from these blogs in order to speed up the page loadings. So, added back in is the area where if you are a fellow blogger on Blogspot you can follow this blog too.

(In proper circus barker loud voice) Step right up, folks! Join up on a rising popular blog! OK, now, no pushing and shoving to the head of the line like this is a 95% off sale...! :)

Seriously, thanks everyone for supporting all my blogs. It's been a blast to start them a few months ago just out of curiosity to see what would happen. Besides the fact I have learned a lot, and still learning, it's been fun to watch the blogs' traffic rankings go from the cellar skyrocketing upward toward the heavens! Every day lately every blog has grown by 100,000 or more in global traffic ranking according to the Alexa software. Pretty cool!

I have no idea where all of us are going but one thing is for sure - we will all enjoy the rocket ride! Thanks for becoming part of my growing community. You are well loved.

Just scroll on down toward the bottom of this page near the visitors count and you will find the Blogger followers area. Thanks for joining! I'm currently carrying over 5,000 feeds (mostly in Bloglines) so let me know and I'll be glad to join yours too!

Even More April Fools Day Funnies

More April Fools Day funnies over at another one of my blogs, hike yourself on over there: The Social Poets, go here.

What started out as a dumping ground for my poetry and other serious writings ended up a Wild Wild West place for human interest news and lots of humor too.

More April Fools Day Funnies

For more April Fools Day hoaxes from the math and science geek crowd, hike yourself on over to one of my other blogs: The Soul Calendar - go here.

On that blog I place a lot of articles about the mind, how the brain works, some astronomy (killer eclipse photos) and anything else mildly geeky I enjoy when I read magazines like Discover. Enjoy!

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar @ flickr.