X-Siting News: Holiday Guide, Browse by Map, Big Giveaways, Holiday Tipping Poll, Sale Mail

There's so much new stuff going on, I just wanted to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming with this brief message explaining some of the happenings:

Story Maps
You may have noticed the NYC map added to our left sidebar. It's not just any map, it's actually a very cool tool created by local news site Outside.In that let's you search for our stories by map. Each marker on the map represents a place we have written about. Click on the marker and you'll get a pop-up of every post we've written about that place. Just click on the story title to go to the article. It's pretty cool. You can zoom in to the part of the city you want to find places or events and find stories from as far back as 6 months ago by changing the time-frame at the top of the map (which is set by default to one week). I'm testing this feature out and want to know if you all find it useful or not, so please shoot me an email and let me know if you'd like to see more mapping tools like this.

Mommy Poppins Holiday Guide
Our Holiday Guide is up and filled with great holiday activities, gift ideas and other fun and crazy stuff to get you in the holiday spirit. Like always, we'll keep writing about more Holiday fun and add it to the guide throughout the season so stay tuned.

Week of Giveaways
To kick off our Holiday Guide, next week we are doing a huge week of giveaways. I don't want to give-away any secrets, but we've got an AMAZING line-up of prizes that everyone's going to want to be part of. So rest up this weekend and make sure to check back on Monday so you don't miss the first one!

Holiday Tipping Poll
I haven't done a poll in AGES and this one got off to a shaky start as I realized I didn't actually know how to use my poll-making-thingy, but the poll is up now and working; so if you tried to answer before and couldn't you can go back and try again now.

How much to tip your nanny or caregiver. It's the question so many of us struggle with especially when money is tight. Share your answer and find out what other people say. You have to answer to see the results, but when we've all answered, I'll publish the results for everyone to see.

Sale Mail
We sent out our first Sale Mail last night with 6 discounts on cool stuff we thought you'd like. These mails only go out to email subscribers, but you can see it archived here. If you'd like to get our future Sale Mails subscribe to our free daily emails. We'd also like to hear if you like getting those types of mails or not and what you might like to see in them in the future. Again, just email me.

In fact, I'm always happy to hear from you with any tips, ideas and questions you may have. Thanks for reading and hope you find these new changes helpful and interesting.