This is a busy month. We’re not only preparing for the holidays, but several of our relatives also have birthdays this month. Busy, busy, busy! To make things a little easier I went looking for greeting cards online and I found American Greetings. They have a large selection of ” happy birthday ” cards in stock. Some are free, and some are available only to subscribers of their service. After looking at the quality and variety of cards they have I think it would be worthwhile becoming a member.

I was surprised to find that not only do they have a variety of different types of birthday greeting cards- from funny, or animated, Family, belated, Over the Hill, to serious and mushy, plus there’s even ones for specific Birthdays such as a 40th. They also have Birthday invitations, printable birthday cards, and even a desk top calender that you can use to list the birthdays, important dates and anniversaries of all of your friends and loved ones. There’s a reminder service that goes along with that too! It’s pretty much a one stop shop for birthdays.

It’s really easy to send an e-card. Simply pick out the ones that interest you. I’m not a member yet so I went with the free cards to begin with, click on the card of your choice, take a look at it when it comes up on your screen, and then click on the Personalize and send button. You’ll be taken to another page where you can create a personal greeting and list the email address of the person that you are sending the card too, your email address so they know who it’s from and your very own personal greeting. You can even change the font colors in your personal greeting if you’d like. Birthday invitations work in a similar manner as I’ve described for the cards.

If you want to print out your own cards you need to register on the site first. You’ll get a one month free trial when you become a member. Once you are signed up go ahead and select the card you want to print out and follow the easy to understand directions.

Give it a try if you are like me and have a lot of upcoming Birthdays!

I’ve been checking out a new News site, it’s called Newgie.com. It seems like a good way to get the latest news and to discover what other Newgie members are reading most often.

The newgie site offer a rating system for the various news stories. You can use your mouse to hover over an article that you’ve read and a box will pop up that lets you recommend the story for other readers, discuss it by leaving a comment, or even add it to your favorites.

What I like about this site, when I compare it to Yahoo News- which is where I always used to go to read up on the latest news items is the rating system. The newgie system keeps track of what the other members are reading most often and as a result, when you sign in and check your ” My Newgie” page you’ll see the most popular articles of the day all in one easy to use listing. Yahoo news doesn’t list the news in this manner- yes it does list the most popular stories world wide, but with Newgie you know that the popular stories that you see first are the ones that are most popular with Newgie members.

The Newgie site also lets it’s members submit their RSS feed. If it’s accepted you can add a chicklet to your site so that you can easily share your feed with other newgie subscribers. Pretty cool if you ask me.

It’s really easy to register on the site and your membership is free. Once you are registered, you can start selecting news categories that you want to see when you first visit your newgie page. The site ranks stories based on the interest that other users have shown.

Navigating through the Newgie site is pretty easy to do too. Visit your My Newgie page and if you’ve already set up your preferences all the stories from the topics and categories that you selected will be there for you to browse through, or you can click on your My account page and set up your preferences there, see the stories that you’ve viewed most recently, and manage your categories, RSS feeds and communities.