Category: Blog Updates

A new reading year begins…

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Image courtesy of pamsclipart.com Happy New Year!

I did have a book review scheduled for today (still trying to catch up on a backlog of books read near the end of 2013) but as most other bloggers are posting about their plans and resolutions for 2014 today, I decided to do the same and keep my scheduled post for tomorrow instead. And this will probably be the easiest post I write all year, because I don’t actually have a lot of reading or blogging plans for the year ahead! I have signed up for two reading challenges – the Historical Fiction challenge, which is never a difficult one for me as I read so much historical fiction anyway, and the What’s in a Name? challenge, for which I already have my five choices in mind and will be starting the first one soon. Other than that, I have avoided the temptation to commit myself to any more year-long challenges or projects. One thing I’ve learned during my four years of blogging is that I’m happiest when I can choose to read exactly what I want to read and when I want to read it – and that’s what I would like to do in 2014.

The Classics Club However, one reading event that does fit in with my plans for this month is the first of the Classics Club’s Twelve Months of Classic Literature. Each month, the club will be hosting a month of themed reading based on a different literary period or movement. The theme for January is William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which is perfect for me as I’m starting a FutureLearn course on Hamlet later this month. I’ll be re-reading Hamlet in January, then, but beyond that I’ll be looking forward to seeing what other Classics Club members are reading for the event.

I do have one other goal for 2014, in terms of blogging: I will be trying to write about every book I read within two or three days of finishing it. I hate being behind with my reviews and would like to avoid any more situations like this, where I’m starting a new month with five books from the previous month still to write about!

Do you have any exciting reading or blogging plans for 2014?

Temporary absence…

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Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be away for a few days. I’m going to Dublin tomorrow (the first time I’ll have been to Ireland) and will be back on Friday.

I won’t be able to respond to comments or emails, but I’m scheduling one or two posts for while I’m away. See you at the weekend!

It’s time for Bloggiesta!

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Bloggiesta is here at last! I was unable to participate in last June’s event, so I’ve been looking forward to this one.

For those of you who are wondering what Bloggiesta is, it’s a three day marathon for bloggers to spend some time working on their blogs, making improvements, fixing problems and finding inspiration. Bloggiesta is hosted by Natasha at Maw Books and you can sign up anytime during the weekend.

I don’t know how much time I’m going to have this weekend, but I’m hoping to do as much as I can. Here are a few of my goals, though I’ll probably be adding more things to this list as they occur to me. I’ll strike through each item as I complete it.

1. Catch up with writing my reviews – I hate being behind with them! UPDATE: Got most of these done, but still have one to write.
2. Write the next few posts in my Remember These? series – UPDATE: Started these but will need to spend more time on them.
3. Check that my posts are tagged correctly and in the correct categories.
4. Update my About page and Review Policy.
5. Check my reviews on Goodreads and LibraryThing – I know some of them are still linking back to my old Blogger blog instead of this one.
6. Finish cross posting reviews to Goodreads/LibraryThing/Amazon.
7. Tidy my sidebars/update links in Blogroll.
8. Try to organise my Google Reader.
9. Change email address and associate blog with new email address.
10. Find out how to transfer my Google Reader feed subscriptions to my new email address.
11. Make new header image.
12. Back up my blog.

I’ll be updating this post a few times over the weekend. Good luck to everyone else who is taking part!

Here I am!

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Hello and welcome!

To those of you who have followed me over from Helen Loves Books, you’ll see that all my old content is still here (including your comments) – I wanted a fresh start with a new name and new look, but I didn’t want to lose all those reviews I’d worked so hard on!  If you’re wondering about the new name, see the quote at the top of my sidebar (it’s not completely true because I do sometimes read the Sunday papers, but I’m much more likely to spend my Sundays with a novel).

There is one other change that you might notice – I’ve made the decision to remove my five star rating system.  From now on my reviews will not be given conventional ratings, but if it’s a book I particularly enjoyed it will be marked as either Recommended or Highly Recommended.  Other than that, everything else is the same.

To those of you who are visiting for the first time and are wondering what I’m talking about, I have just moved from Blogger to WordPress.  I’ve successfully imported my old Blogger content but there may still be some broken links or things that just don’t look right – don’t worry, I’m going to be working on tidying things up over the next few days.

I hope you all like the new blog!

The Sunday Salon: Labels, Labels, Labels!

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This week I have combined my Sunday Salon post with my Week 3 Blog Improvement Project post.

I haven’t posted any book reviews this week because I’m still reading Drood by Dan Simmons which seems to be taking forever to get through (775 pages but it feels even longer). I’m having mixed feelings about the book at the moment – hopefully I’ll be able to review it for you later in the week. However, I took a break from Drood yesterday to post my first short story review – Chekhov’s The Black Monk. One of my personal reading challenges for this year was to read more short stories, so now that I’ve begun I hope I can make A Short Story for Saturday a regular feature.

[Edited 16th April 2010 to add: This post was written before I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress, therefore its no longer relevant]

This week’s Blog Improvement task is to improve the way our posts are organised by ensuring that we’re using labels that are useful and meaningful. I had already spent some time doing this in January as part of Bloggiesta, but I thought I’d take another look and make some more changes.

You can see my list of labels at the top of my blog’s left sidebar. I’m currently using 12 different labels, as follows:

Author Interviews
Blog Updates: Includes Blog Improvement Project, Bloggiesta and anything else relating to blog maintenance.
Book Miscellany
Features
Fiendish Fridays: My series profiling literary villains
Great Books: The books that I consider to be among the very best that I’ve reviewed – worthy of a 6th star!
Memes: I don’t participate in these very often, so I’ve just used one label to cover them all.
New Book Arrivals: Highlights books that I’ve bought, won, borrowed from the library or that have recently come into my house in one way or another.
Not About Books: Personal or non-book related posts.
Reading Challenges
Reviews
Sunday Salon: I don’t really consider The Sunday Salon to be a meme, so have not included TSS posts in the Memes label above.

In the future I may add more different types of posts which will need their own labels, but at the moment I think these twelve are adequate.

Further down the left sidebar are two more label clouds – Explore by Genre (e.g. Classics, Historical Fiction, Mystery) and Explore by Theme (e.g. 19th century, Afghanistan, Christmas). I don’t know how useful these are but I like them because over time they should give a new visitor a good idea of the types of books I read and make it easier for them to find reviews that interest them. What do you think – is this useful or not?

Are there any more changes I should make to my labels? Any feedback would be very welcome!

2010 Blog Improvement Project: Week 1

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I’ve decided to take part in the 2010 Blog Improvement Project. I know there are plenty of areas in which my blog needs improving and I’m hoping that participating in the BIP will give me some ideas and inspiration.

How does the BIP work?

On the first and third Monday of every month, a new activity will be posted on the BIP blog. Each participant can then spend the next two weeks working on that task or challenge.

Week 1: Create a Blogging To-Do List

After spending some time thinking about what I would like to achieve this year, in terms of improving the quality of my blog, here is a list of things I want to focus on.

  • Comments – I’ll try to include more questions at the end of posts to encourage people to comment more. I have a few ideas for other ways in which visitors could interact too. I also need to comment on other blogs more often and get more involved in the blogging community.
  • Navigation – Now that Blogger allows us to create permanent pages (in a similar way to WordPress) it means there are more options as far as navigation is concerned, so I could add an About page, Awards page etc.
  • Frequency of posts – One of my biggest problems is finding time, so I want to be better organised and have more posts written in advance. Also, I’d like to be more consistent – there are some weeks where I manage to post almost every day, but other weeks there are three or four days between posts.
  • Quality of posts – At the moment, I have book reviews and the occasional meme or challenge post. I would like to include more original content and other types of posts to add some variety.
  • Labels – This was one of the areas I worked on during Bloggiesta last month, but I will continue to delete labels or add new ones whenever I think it’s necessary.
  • Social Media – I will try to use Twitter for more than just announcing new blog posts (I use twitterfeed which does this automatically). I also want to learn about other social media tools. I’d appreciate any advice on this – which ones are worth using and which aren’t?

As the year progresses I know I’ll probably think of other things I want to improve on, but this list is a good starting point.

Bloggiesta: Wrap-Up Post

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Thanks to Natasha of Maw Books for hosting Bloggiesta and thanks to everyone who has commented on my posts this weekend! Bloggiesta has been very productive for me and I feel I’ve achieved a lot. I didn’t have time to do everything and there are still some more changes and improvements I’d like to make to my blog, but I made good progress and am very happy with what I’ve accomplished.

To see a list of everything I did during Day 1 and Day 2 please see my Friday and Saturday Progress Report. My list for Day 3 follows below.

Day 3
1. Spent some time cleaning up my Google Reader by going through my list of subscriptions and moving things into folders. This was a Mini-Challenge hosted last year at The Book Lady’s Blog.

2. Added meta tags to my blog.

3. Cleaned up my sidebars.
4. Updated my Review Policy.
5. Made a Favicon – I know it looks very basic but it’s better than using the default Blogger icon.
6. Got my Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari profiles up to date with my most recently acquired books/latest reviews etc.

Time spent: 4 hours

Total time spent during the 3 days of Bloggiesta: 14 hours