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out 17,000 customers without power Sunday evening. Virginia had fewer than 12,000 still in the dark. New York also had about 12,000, mostly on Long Island. In New Jersey, where President Barack Obama toured flood-ravaged Paterson on Sunday, about 2,000 had no electricity. More than 9 million customers lost power during the storm. Scattered outages remained in North Carolina. Just a handful of customers still had ecdotes. You can also use updates to link to photos or videos and blog entries hosted elsewhere. You can post links from anywhere on the web. For longer journal entries, you can use Facebook's built-in Notes application. Notes can be as long as you want. You'll find the Note application in the left-hand sidebar. Click the Notes link to go to the Notes page. Then click the Write a New Note button. Start writing your journal entry. If you want, click the Add a Photo link. This lets you select a photo from your album. You can then add a caption and place it in your text. When you're done writing, you can choose the note's privacy settings. This is a drop-down menu at the bottom of the page. You'll probably want to choose Friends Only or Just Me. Then click Publish to post the note. Facebook also lets you import entries from other sites. For example, you can import a post from another blog as a Note. I'll cover some excellent blogging options in a second. To import posts, go to the Notes page. On the right side of the page, click the Import a Blog link. Then follow the directions. It's important to note that imported blog entries can be seen by everyone, regardless of the privacy settings you choose.   Facebook is accessible no matter where you are. You can post from any computer with Internet access. You can also post using one of the many Facebook mobile apps. These allow you to post, upload, and chat right from your smartphone. If you prefer privacy, Facebook has several valuable privacy settings. You can set your profile and posts to be seen only by specific people. After all, you don't want information about your child visible to just anyone. I suggest that anyone using a social networking or blogging site read the terms of use before joining. Some sites state that anything on your profile is property of the host. That can be a scary thought. Reading the terms may help you choose the best option for you. Blogger Search-giant Google owns the blogging platform Blogger. Blogger is a lot of fun. You can customize anything from the background to your page's format. Customizing is so easy you might end up making periodic changes. While the layout takes time to set up, the settings are simple to understand. If you don't understand a setting or term, just use Blogger's help page. The privacy settings are also very robust on Blogger. Much like Facebook, you can limit who can see your blog. You can also control how your blog appears in Google searches. You can even keep posts hidden entirely. Then you'll have a by-invitation-only. You might choose to let some visitors see more than others. Blogger also allows that level of control. I've found Blogger to be much more user-friendly than Facebook. Blogger, in general, has a more appealing layout. That's because Facebook focuses on connecting people. Blogger focuses more on customizing your content. As a result, it offers a much more intuitive method of giving you control over your posts. Blogger can host pictures as well. Pictures uploaded to Blogger get stored in Google's Picasa Web Albums.  Like blogger, Picasa is one of the many free Google services. There are some limits on pictures, but they are very lax. Picasa allows unlimited Blogger pictures as long as you meet a couple of specific criteria. Google rewards people for using multiple Google services. There are fewer limitations if you also belong to Google+. In that case, free pictures can be up to 2048x2048 resolution. That enables a fairly high-quality photo. If you don't belong to Google+, pictures must be 800x800 or smaller. But for blog posts, the lower resolution may be all you need. You'll want to keep higher-quality copies on your own computer, of course. Be sure to keep them backed up so you don't lose them,    You can also embed YouTube videos in Blogger posts with no problem. Learn more about embedding media in blog posts and websites.     Google lets you export your blog. You can then import the entries into another blog, print them out, or just save them on a disc for your personal files. Google Blogger also has a mobile app. The mobile app lets you write posts, add Web links and upload photos in an instant. Overall, Google has developed a really useful combination of services. They should provide just the right complement of user-friendly tools you'll to journal. Remember, you can control the amount of time you'll spend on this project. Just make sure to set your blog's sharing and privacy options. That is the most important part of any site you use. Blogger's help pages, FAQs and forums will easily guide you through that process. Wordpress Wordpress is another popular blogging site that has a high level of customization. Be aware, however, that some of the customization features require a yearly fee. Still, you might prefer Wordpress's functionality. You'll just want to choose the components you need carefully, because the extra fees can really add up. The first difference I noticed between Blogger and Wordpress is theme customization. You can choose pre-configured themes in both platforms