Tag: Bloggiesta

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!

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

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.