Bottom of the Blog Wonders

Today I began rounding out our choice of news and other gadgets which appear at the bottom of Starting Points, always after the regular postings (my originals, re-posts from others). You have to scroll down to see all these goodies. They're not just cute. They're an integral part of this blog.

So is the right sidebar, to which I also added a few more gadgets today, all designed to make your online life easier and a little more fun. (Yeah, I know some of the diverse postings here can get a little heavy.) There will many new link headers in the sidebar in coming days.

Here's a rundown of today's new sidebar gadgets:

• Translate This Blog or Any Other Webpage (new)
  
• Dictionary Help Tools (new)
  
• Sidebar Search Menus (new)
  
• Google Phrase Translator (new)
  

And here's a complete list of all that's now at the bottom, since the original posting explaining what I was doing down there has now gone into the blog's March 2009 archive:

• Breaking News Customized for This Blog (unique, covers all areas mentioned in the blog logo)
  
• BBC News (new)
• Al Jazeera Video News (new)
• TwitterSearch (a very easy way to get the best of Twitter fast)
  
• Many Other Social Networks (new, may not yet cover your favorite)
• Easy Wikipedia Search
• Google Mini Search
• Google Tools (new)
• Search YouTube
  

I re-named some of these gadgets to better reflect what they do. Collectively, they're a unique set of tools which to a significant degree replace typical blog postings and facilitate net search- and-explore processes. Try out as many as you can. The learning curve is pretty flat. Play around -- you can't break anything.