First the personal note. My son, Devan Levi Morgan was born on the 6th of July (his big sister K’tala Dawn Morgan’s 2nd birthday). I’ve been kinda preoccupied with that and have not done much of anything online since short of a couple posts at How To Forums, some participation at the Rich Jerk’s Alliance and a short, aborted participation in Dr. Mani’s 10 Day Blog Challenge (more about that in an upcomming post).

Other than that I’ve largely been enjoying my family, and dealing with some unexpected issues related to Devan’s birth. Devan developed a cataract in his left eye about 4 days after he was born. Initially we were concerned because hi sister tested positive as a carrier for the genetic disease, Galactosemia, and that meant there was a chance that he would either also be a carrier, or even have the condition. If you’ve not heard of this before, and you are planning on having children, I encourage you to learn a little about it. It’s not terribly common, but it can have devestating effects on those born with it, including death in the first weeks of life, as a result of breast feeding or being fed dairy based formula. So that isn’t the cause of the cataracts, thank God, but we aren’t sure what is. Could be genetic, as Diane had cataracts and actually had to have her lenses removed as an infant. Or it could be related to preasure as his face was pressed against Diane’s pelvis hard enough to bruise his lip just prior to birth.

In any event he will be seeing a specialist tomorrow in Memphis, and hopefully this will all be well behind us soon.

Now, to the Free Blogger Tools I promised. I stumbled across this site, where Venkata Ramani offers some really cool tools for blogger users. I can’t read a word of his blog, but the bloger tools page is in english, so even a dumb biker like me can get it.

First there is the Archive Browser for Blogger blogs - This tool allows you to call upa a technorati-like archive listing of an entire years worth of posts from any blogger blog. You can use the tool at his site to read other peoples blog archives, or you can embed the tool in your own blogger blog for the benefit of your readers.

Next up is the One-click Comment Notifier - using this nifty little tool, you can easily respond to comments on your blog and with a single click send an email to the person who posted the comment you are replying to, letting them know that you have responded, so they can come back to the blog and follow up as needed. (I’d Really like to see a WordPress plugin version of this one!).

Finally we have the Featured post of the day from archive - This will automatically pull a new random post from your blogger blog’s archives and make it the “featured” post of the day. All of this happens automatically with out any intervention on your part. This should help get people to some of your older posts and exploring your archives, as well as providing the search spiders with some links to content they might have missed the first time through. Nice tool.

Also there is a page of blogger template hacks. You can choose the ever popular Minima or try out rounders or scribe with these tools already built in. Just copy and paste. Thats a great feature for those who aren’t comfortable modifying their own themes.

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