Category: Events

The Read-a-Thon Begins!

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It’s 1:00pm here in the UK which means the April 2010 Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-a-Thon has begun! This is the first time I’ve participated – I had only been blogging for a few days when last October’s Read-a-Thon took place and I didn’t know about it until it was too late. I’m very excited about being able to join in this time!

Here are my answers to the Hour 1 Meme:

Where are you reading from today? I’m at home and at the moment I’m in my nice peaceful bedroom away from the noise of the TV! It’s a lovely sunny spring day here, though, so I’ll be spending some of the day reading outside in the garden.

3 facts about me…
1. I work in admin.
2. I have one younger sister.
3. My middle name is Louise.

How many books do you have in your TBR pile for the next 24 hours? I haven’t decided exactly which books I’ll be reading, but I have about 10-15 that I’ll be choosing from depending on my mood.

Do you have any goals for the read-a-thon (i.e. number of books, number of pages, number of hours, or number of comments on blogs)? No – as this is my first read-a-thon I didn’t want to set any goals for myself. I just can’t seem to read as quickly as a lot of other bloggers and I don’t want to feel under any pressure. I’m also not planning to go without sleep – I work full time during the week so I look forward to being able to catch up on some sleep at the weekend!

If you’re a veteran read-a-thoner, Any advice for people doing this for the first time? No – not a veteran.

Good luck to everyone else who is taking part!

I’m planning to spend most of my time actually reading rather than blogging etc, but I’ll post a few updates throughout the 24 hours to let you know how I’m doing.

The first book I’m reading is Our Promised Land by Michael T. Darkow.

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.

NaJuReMoNoMo – Challenge Complete

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National Just Read More Novels Month 2010 (also known as NaJuReMoNoMo) ends today. The challenge was hosted by yellojkt of Foma and the idea was to read some novels (as opposed to non-fiction, memoirs etc) during the month of January.

The books I read in January were:

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst
The Divine Sacrifice by Tony Hays
The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson
Spring Bear by Betsy Connor Bowen

That’s 5 books which means I’m a Silver Winner.

Silver Winner

Bloggiesta: Friday and Saturday Progress Report

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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

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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

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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.