Tag: Blog Improvement Project

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.