Blogging Recommendations and Credits

I've had several people ask me what I used to use to do various things on my blog. I know so much less than most of you but the following is a list of sites that I found useful in personalizing my blog and several other recommendations. I'm still such a beginner in all this and would love any of your suggestions too!

Blogging Tutorial Website that a friend of ours wrote. Has some great start-up tips (thanks Ike!):
http://www.mybloggertutorial.blogspot.com/

Website that helped me learn how to do a lot of the fancy stuff and referred to some good sites:
http://brookie-wookie.blogspot.com/2007/10/dressing-up-your-blog.html

This one is where I got the code to make it a 3 column blog (I like having the extra space for more permanent things):
http://www.thurstemplates.com/

This site has tips on different ways you may want to change your blog template (this is how I added the "recent comments" section. They've got instructions to do other cool things that I haven't tried yet like peekaboo posts:
http://hackosphere.blogspot.com/

I didn't actually use this site but I looked at it and it has some easier ways to put a different backdrop on your site without uploading your own "paper":
http://cutestblogontheblock.blogspot.com/

This is where I uploaded my paper images for the background to:
http://pages.google.com

This is a great site with free downloads available if you need paper backgrounds (there's lots more sites like this if you want to search around...but not all free):
http://www.shabbyprincess.com/

I really like Photoscape for making photo collages to put on the blog. I'm still figuring it out but there's lots you can do. It's a free downloaded program. (Google Picasa does a similar collage-thing but I like photoscape's a lot better)
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php

I used slide.com to make my slideshows then posted them as a new page element in the columns. I selected “text” then “add to blog”. Once in there I selected edit HTML and copy and pasted the code from slide.com into that space and saved the changes. (there’s lots of other slide sites…this was the first one I tried and I was happy with the options it gave me)
http://www.slide.com/

I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to make my header.

The only way I can keep up with all the many blogs that I like to watch without spending all my time checking them is Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader

I haven’t actually tried this yet but I’m interested in a website I found that prints bound books of your blogs for a very reasonable price. You can download the software to set it all up for free. I’ll let you know how it goes whenever I do get enough content for a book. I’m sure there’s tons of sites like this one so let me know if you have one you like better.
http://www.blurb.com/