My writing fingers are a little rusty, but there is no better day to bring them out than on Blog Action Day 2008. Last year I wrote about how you can reduce your daily waste. This years topic is about poverty.

Teaching children about poverty, while living in a society that doesn’t talk about it very often in daily conversation, makes it harder to teach children the concept of poverty. Including the topic in their lives and making a habit to involve our children with various activities, can help them understand and bring them more understanding of what some other children living in poverty go through in the world.

I have decided to bring out a few ideas for other parents, because I know children can help with poverty too! Use some of these ideas to get your child interested in helping others who are living in poverty. Each idea will need to be adjusted for age and your own child’s temperament.

1. Donate unused clothes
   Help your child pick out some of the clothes they don’t wear or are no longer using. Make sure the clothing is clean and wearable. Bring them with you when you make the donation. Don’t forget to pick out some of your clothing too so they see you are helping!

2. Donate toys and books
   ALL children love to play and read books. Just as you had your child pick out clothes, help your child pick out some of their toys, books, and games they no longer play with to donate. Make sure they are not broken and clean them before donating.

3. Volunteer with your children
   Take your children with you when you volunteer. Smaller children are harder to take volunteering, however there are many days where organizations have family volunteer days which will help get your child used to volunteering and the extra energy is welcomed.

4. Donate to charity on their birthdays or holidays
   On their birthday or special holidays, you can make a donation to a charity in your child’s name. You can either present your child with the certificate of the donation or make a special craft project out of it by making a card, placing the donation in it, than having your child help place the stamp on the envelope.

5. Donate to food banks together
   Get your children involved with donating food to the local food banks. Help them pick food in the pantry or at the grocery store. You can teach them what type of food is good to donate and deliver it together to the food bank.

6. Talk to your children about poverty
   This is a very simple thing we can all do to help our children. Help them recognize that there are still millions of people throughout the world, including in our own country that need our help.

7. Volunteer and participate too
   Every step always included you helping right along with your child. Make sure you show and tell your child all the steps you take to help with poverty.

Poverty is still an ongoing issue throughout the world. Our children will be fighting the battle when they grow up. Get them involved while they are young, so they not only are excited about helping others but will be excited about getting others to help too!

I’m still open to any guest posters at the beginning of Novembers because I will be going away for 2 weeks, contact me if you would like to give it a shot.

This week I only managed to get 2 posts out, however it didn’t stop the commenting at all! Thanks this week for all the comments, but I only list my top 10 (this week I have a top 12). Here are this weeks top commentors:

• Adam Donkus vouches to blog about the environment at least once a month. I might just take him up on this too and promise one post to the environment.

• pelf participates in a photo hunt, which she finds something smelly, I find this interesting. Also she has Gone Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness month.

• Acopic does web design. Do you?

• Rhys is flat out yelling these 3 tips to survive oktoberfest. I would not ignore his advice.

• Monika discusses when enough is enough when blogging, issue I’m facing lately. Also, don’t forget about her group writing project!

• WarriorBlog has another indepth article about the 7 reasons marketers are the best bloggers, plus a cool monopoly photo.

• Aseem Kishore provides tips on reading our RSS feeds in Outlook (2000, XP, 2003, and Express).

• menopauseprincess blog is rated for general audiences, and sadly so is mine :c). Pretty funny!

• Felix Ker provides us a answer to why 3000 chickens crossed the road.

• david shares with us the benefits of making your business environmental friendly.

• Mohsin gives personal blogs tips on becoming semi pro.

• Madhur Kapoor keeps us updated on Googles changes to YouTube.

You have all been stumbled too! Everyone have a great weekend and enjoy the whether if it is good where you are!

Photo by greggoconnell.

My blog is a little over 3 months old and right now I have a total of 107 posts with 1,091 comments. I have tried a lot of things to attract comments on my blog, many which have worked out well and continue to help bring in a lot of comments. Most of these techniques do not require special settings or plugins on your blog, so they will work great for any blogger on any blogging platform.

Comment on blogs similar to mine

Since I am generally interested in webmaster and blogging subjects, commenting on blogs similar to this subject was just very natural and easy for me. I could easily read the articles, actually learn something, and have a useful comment to share. I typically try to only comment if I have something to add to the conversation and this hopefully will show that I am genueaily interested. Bloggers have a very unique radar that can track down people commenting just for commenting sake!

Comment on blogs that started when I started

I don’t know if I did this on purpose, but I defiatnly was very drawn to bloggers who started when I did and who had similar goals to me. Not only was I able to learn a lot by their own trial and errors they were posting about, but I could in exchange share my own knowledge with them. This helped create friendships in the blogsphere and mutual interest in each others new blogs. I still enjoy discovering new blogs and sharing information.

Starting friendships and creating a community

The blogsphere is not like any other community on the Internet. It is very unique in all aspects and you need to be a blogger (past or present) in order to understand what other bloggers are going through. By starting friendships with other bloggers, my blog starting to turn more into a community where other bloggers knew each other and commenting was just like a continued conversation from each others blogs.

Visiting and commenting on my commentors blogs

I enjoy visiting my commentors blogs and leaving comments. I have even subscribe to my commentors RSS feeds, infact 75% of the blogs I’m subscrirbed to happen to be from my commentors. I really do enjoy visiting other blogs where I know the blogger and that the blogger is also interested in what I have to say. I guess in exchange I attract other bloggers who are similar to me in this way. My biggest hurdle now is trying to keep up with visiting my commentors blogs because my comments have kept increasing making this a little more difficult to keep up with.

Answer my own commentors

When I started to get comments on my blog, I was estatic and I started to respond to my commentors on a regular basis. At first it seems a little dopey to say thanks, but once you get into it you will find you have a lot more to say and continue to share more information you may have not included in your post. This also will help continue the conversation and hopefully your commentors will provide their own knowledge too. There is a movement started by Baron Brown, Mark, and Mike called “You Comment, I Reply” which encourages bloggers to talk to their commentors.

List my top commentors on my sidebar

Along with listing my top 10 commentors on my sidebar, I also list the 5 most recent comments on my blog too. Both of these help commentors get a little link love and I often use it to see what conversations are going on in my own blog. A few of my commentors have mentioned getting quite a few visitors from being in the list, so I’m glad it is working out for some of you.

Feature my top commentors

Many of the blogs I visited would feature their top commentors weekly or monthly. I loved this idea because it gave me a chance to give back to my top commentors. I even further decided to start stumbling my top commentors too based off of Pure Blogging’s top commenter post too. This has been well received and my top commentors certainly have been loving my weekly Jar Full of Link posts.

Removing the No-follow tag on my commentors link

Once I discovered that there was a no-follow tag on my commentors link, I quickly removed it with a WordPress plugin. If you comment on my blog, why not get a linkback to your website for search engines too! A lot of people are worried about getting more spam by removing the no-follow tag, but honestly I haven’t had too much of a problem because I approve all first time commentors. Maintenance on my comments has been very minimal.

Comments attract more comments

Once I started to get regular comments on my blog, the comments just kept on coming. I am very appreciative to all my commentors and I thank each of you for taking the time out to comment on my blog. The one downside to attracting more and more comments is that I’m not able to get to know all of my commentors and visitors as well as I used to. But the knowledge that is shared through comments cannot be beat on any other platform!

This post is an entry for The Wrtiers Manifesto’s Tutorial Group Writing Project.

Today is Blog Action Day, where bloggers unite to blog about the environment. I wanted to share a few of my quick tips that I use daily to reduce my waste on a regularly basis. If you have any tips you use daily or if you made a post today for Blog Action Day, feel free to share it!

• Use reusable bags or no bags at all
  Not just for grocery shopping but when you go shopping at the mall too. If you are only buying a few items, consider carrying them out in your hands or pockets instead of taking a bag.

• Spot clean rather than rewashing
  Often we will get a stain or a dirt stain on our clothing. If you take a wet rag and spot clean the area and let it dry you will be able to re-wear your outfit without the need to rewash the entire thing. This works especially well for blue jeans and winter jackets.

• Use reusable storage boxes and containers
  Zip lock bags are a great invention, but they are also a wasteful and are not recyclable. Store your food in reusable containers that you can wash and reuse again.

• Look for less packaging and buy in bulk
  A lot of products we buy have excessive packaging or double packaging which should be avoided. Best way to avoid excess packaging is to buy products in bulk and store them at home in a reusable container.

• Use cloth napkins instead of paper napkins
  In the Kitchen, the garage, or even on your dinner table, using cloth napkins that you can rewash will help reduce your consumption of paper napkins.

• Opt-out of commercial snail mailings
  All I get through snail mail these days are junk mail! This waste a lot of paper, but you can now opt out by visiting the OptOut Prescreen website. You can also call each company individually to opt out too. It might take a lot of time at first but overtime your junk pile will be reduced.

• Shop at thrift, used item, or consignment shops
  If you are looking for just about anything, chances are a thrift shop might just have one at half the cost. This not only saves you money, but you will be reducing the need for another new item to be made.

• Repair broken items
  There is a R that I always state in the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle stance, that is Repair. Instead of buying something new when it breaks and throwing it out, consider repairing it instead!

The tips are pretty simple and if you just try to add one to your daily routine each week, you can drastically reduce your daily waste. For daily tips on helping the environment, please visit The Giving Hands which posts about the environment and ways to help reduce, reuse, repair, and recycle.

I typically don’t complain on my blog, but finally I broke down and wrote about the issues I’ve been having with the Google Blog Search in the new version of Wordpress 2.3, which replaced Technorati. What a great response I received with solutions listed by Kyle, Dee, and pelf. You can go the easy route and update a few lines of code within your wordpress files, or download a quick plugin to replace Google Blog Search. Either way you won’t have to deal with Google Blog Search anymore!

On to this weeks top commentors. Sadly I was not able to keep up with any sort of posting schedule this week, I’m hoping for a more balanced week this following week to provide everyone more chances to actually comment. I still did receive a lot of comments and thanks to everyone for commenting on my slow week! Here are this weeks top commentors:

• Felix Ker is sharing with us what he learned about php.

• Aseem Kishore wants us to scare the crap out of everyone with these neat Halloween ideas.

• menopauseprincess wants us to see this mastercard priceless commercial. I like these commercials, never thought I’d hear myself say I like commercials.

• david shares his thoughts on the life of parody websites.

• Acopic is a north-east web design studio, who loves what they do. REALLY!

• Adam is teaching us how to add our blog to our Flickr account.

• Madhur Kapoor is educating us on using Google talk. I’m clueless when it comes to Google Talk!

• Reminder! Monika is running a group writing project. Entries due on October 20th (I better move my booty).

• Bush Mackel continues his cut the fat series with shaping up your blog. Start working out!

• WarriorBlog is sharing his top 10 online promotion techniques.

• Susan has a very cute video of a baby laughing. I’m a sucker for cute babies and this one is sooooo cute and funny.

Congratulations, you’ve all been stumbled too! Have a great weekend everyone.