Bloggiesta: Friday and Saturday Progress Report

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

Bloggiesta: Starting Post

Today is the first day of Bloggiesta! For those of you who don’t know what Bloggiesta is, it’s a blogging marathon hosted by Natasha of Maw Books and is a great way for bloggers to get ideas and inspiration to help improve their blogs.

When I first decided to start a book blog in October last year, I had no idea the book blogging community was so huge. I just thought I would post some reviews as a kind of online reading diary and if I was lucky one or two other people might read them. Consequently I didn’t give much thought to layouts, graphics, post templates or anything like that. That’s why I’m looking forward to taking part in Bloggiesta this weekend. I’ll try to post a few updates along the way to let you know what I’ve been doing!

See this post at Maw Books for more information.

National Just Read More Novels Month 2010

NaJuReMoNoMo books

January is National Just Read More Novels Month 2010 hosted by yellojkt of Foma.

Here are the rules, taken from the NaJuRedMoNoMo post:

1. Must Be A Novel. Works of fiction only, please. Memoirs, non-fiction, how-to books, and Garfield collections don’t count.
2. Memoirs Aren’t Novels. No matter how made up the story, anything ostensibly true isn’t a novel. Also known as The James Frey Rule.
3. Start and Finish in January. I guess if you got some cool books for Christmas, Hanukkah or some other gift-giving event and jumped the gun, you can’t be blamed. But I only count books I start and finish within the 31 day window.
4. Re-reading Doesn’t Count. Try something new. Read something by your favorite author or try an entirely new author or tackle that novel you have always wanted to read.
5. Have Fun. Nobody is grading you or paying you or judging you. Read what you like and like what you read.