Have you seen the spider in my sidebar?

If you are a regular reader of this blog via an RSS newsreader you may be unaware of some recent additions to my sidebar. So I thought I would spend a post detailing what you can find there. (Yes, there is a spider, keep reading!)

At the top there are two links. One to a post that lists my ancestral surnames. The other link ("Genealogy Resources") is to a series of pages I put together listing and annotating online resources for the states of Missouri and Illinois, along with US and International resources.

Then there are links to subscribe to either my posts, or my comment threads via RSS. For those confused by RSS, there's also a widget where you can enter your email address, and receive the posts in your email. Then, as you scroll down, there's a translation widget that can translate the blog into a variety of languages. (Though I suspect the machine translation isn't that great. Phrases like "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak" might get translated to "The wine is potent, but the meat is tasteless." That's what you get sometimes when you ask a computer to do something.)

Then there is a series of Missouri, Illinois, and US research links. This is a subset of the links you will find by following "Genealogy Resources" at the top of the sidebar. I have more room over there.

Scrolling down you will see my blogroll, and then a list of my 10 most recent comments. Following my archives you will see a section labeled "Google News Search". There you can see a handful of news items for the key words: Genealogy, Ancestry and Family History - provided by Google News.

Finally you will see a "GeneaSpider". What's a GeneaSpider? He (or maybe she)'s a colorful spider that will crawl inside a box, following the movement of the cursor. S/He doesn't do anything else. But move your cursor around and watch the spider move.

And then there's a Google Ad. Since it's that low on my sidebar, I doubt very many people are going to click-through and earn me any money, but there's always the possibility.