Friday 8th January 2010

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to do much on Friday as I was at work most of the day. Here’s what I did have time to do:

1. Signed in to Bloggiesta and posted my Starting Post.
2. Finished writing my review of The White Queen.
3. Looked at all the available Mini-Challenges and decided which ones to do.

Time spent: 1.5 hours

Saturday 9th January 2010

1. Commented on some other Bloggiesta participants’ posts.
2. Linked my review of The White Queen to challenge posts and challenge host blogs. Updated my challenge progress bars.
3. Completed the Labels/Tag Mini-Challenge at Beth Fish Reads. I was using far too many different labels so I removed the ones I decided were unnecessary. I’m still not sure I’m using the right labels, though. What do you think? I’ve also created a new tab (the tabs are near the top of the page under the blog header) so that I have a list of reviews by author.
4. Completed the Bloggiesta Back-up Challenge at Farm Lane Books. I had never thought about backing up my blog and it was a lot easier than I expected! I’ll have to remember to do this regularly.
5. Completed the Footers Mini-Challenge at Bookalicio.us and updated the copyright notice in my blog footer (I hadn’t even noticed the date still said 2009!). I also added a copyright to my RSS feed footer.
6. Completed the Cheat Sheet Mini-Challenge at There’s A Book. I’ve created a cheat sheet in Google Docs with some useful links, HTML code and post templates. I can’t believe I’ve never thought about doing this before – it’s going to save me a lot of time!
7. I ran my blog through Website Grader as suggested by the Grade Your Blog Mini-Challenge which was hosted by Bookish Ruth last year. I got a grade of 74/100 and it told me I needed meta tags, so that’s something I’ll have to work on.
8. Created a signature to use at the bottom of all my posts.

Time spent: 8.5 hours