Category Archives: site updates

Site updates

Posted by melydia on August 16, 2010 None comments

A few assorted bits of randomonium:

  • I got my 100th wild catch not too long ago. That made me happy. :)
  • As you may have noticed, I’m participating in Mission 101, AKA the Day Zero Project. The basic idea is to pick 101 goals to be completed over the course of 1001 days, which is not quite three years. I’m blogging that separately, so I went ahead and included a link in the sidebar.  I’ll cross-post here from time to time if it’s interesting, but most of my updates will be exclusively over there.
  • I added the ability to subscribe to this blog via email to the sidebar.
  • Writing: I wrote another Squidoo lens, and a script I wrote was filmed. (Actually, you should just visit the Sine Fine Films homepage because a lot’s been added there recently.)
  • I’ve been trying to include more non-review posts on this blog, but if you have any suggestions for topics I’d love to hear ’em.
  • My answering machine has been sadly quiet lately.
  • Coming up: I’ll be at Baltimore Comic Con, Intervention in Bethesda, MD, and Anime USA in Arlington, VA, over the next few months. Visit the BS/OD table in the artists alley and say hi.

Open post: what now?

Posted by melydia on May 24, 2010 7 comments

This is an open post to my regular readers (of which I think there are roughly three) and anyone else who happens upon this post.

My blogging has been pretty sporadic lately. Truth be told, I’ve been in a bit of a rut. Book reviews are all fine and dandy but I’ve been uninspired by my regularly scheduled memes and I haven’t had much to say about anything else. I’d really like to get back into the swing of things again, but I need some help from you all. Here are some possibilities for posts:

Art – My husband suggested I start scanning and posting more of my sketches and doodles, and generally discussing the artistic process more. Another idea is to post about my current projects, swaps, and other artistic endeavors.

Writing – I like to pretend I’m a writer. Would you like me to post short stories from time to time, or even as a regular (perhaps monthly) feature?

Events – I do, believe it or not, go to concerts and other events from time to time. Would you like me to report back on these more often?

Links – I’m an avid Google Reader user, and am always looking for more blogs to follow and posts to check out. Would you like me to do occasional blog reviews of the ones I really enjoy? Shall I do a regular roundup of pages I stumble upon?

Memes – I have an extensive list of writing prompt websites; should I start looking into answering some of them?

Photos – One of my “things” in my 101 things in 1001 days project is to take and post a photo a day for a month. Would anyone be interested in having that posted here, or should I leave it on my personal blog?

Other – Anything I haven’t thought of, including longer and more thoroughly researched posts (i.e., single topic with lots of links), contests and giveaways, additional subjects to write about, movie/music reviews, etc.

What would you like to see more of? I’d ask what you’d like to see less of, but the only real possibility there is book reviews, and I’m afraid I’m not going to reduce those. If there are any other “feature requests” for my site, I’m open to those too – more regular posting schedule, better comment system, additional pages, whatever. Don’t be afraid to give ideas, no matter how specific or general.

Thanks!

Site Updates

Posted by melydia on March 10, 2010 None comments

I’ve been doing things to my site! No, really! And because I love lists, you get one:

  • Automatically updated alphabetical (by title) lists of the books and movies I’ve reviewed on this blog.
  • A handy-dandy contact form to the About page. Bracing myself for the influx of spam.
  • I joined Book Blogs, which I’ve discovered is pretty much the biggest book blogger group out there. And since I’ve finally accepted the fact that I am indeed a book blogger, I’ve decided to embrace it.
  • I signed up on Squidoo. Check out my lenses (articles) about Markeroni and Sine Fine Films.
  • I’m also now on Formspring. Ask me questions.

Book Review Guidelines

Posted by melydia on February 2, 2010 2 comments

As of August 2014, I am no longer accepting books for review.  I apologize for any inconvenience.  I will review the books already in my possession.

If you’d like to chat, there’s a contact form on my About page.

Bloggiesta, et al.

Posted by melydia on January 10, 2010 1 comments



Forget two birds; I’m killing a whole flock with one stone in this post. See, this week’s Weekly Geeks is basically “participate in Bloggiesta-type activities” so I feel perfectly justified in using this post (and, honestly, the previous one too) for both challenges. I’m even squeezing the recently restarted Write on Wednesday in here too – the prompt is “fresh start”, and that’s a lot of what Bloggiesta is about: catching up and starting anew. Check out all the stuff I’ve done over the course of Bloggiesta:

  • Added “addthis” bar to the bottom of my posts, which is pretty awesome.
  • Added genre tags to all book review posts. (mini-challenge)
  • Added copyright footer plug-in for posts and feed. (mini-challenge)
  • Some housekeeping on my other website, Sine Fine Films.

More Mini-Challenges!

Not going to participate in blogging mentor challenge. Likewise with the mind-map challenge, because my last five posts were either book reviews or a list of the books I read last year or intro posts to reading challenges. Not much to expand on there. But it’s something to think about for the future.

The dead link challenge was particularly handy for me. I ran Link Valet and it worked very well. Sure, it didn’t delve into the depths of old blog posts, but I’m not too concerned about those right now. A lot of my oldest posts referred to news articles, and I’d expect those to disappear sooner or later anyway. I did, however, discover a weird bug: some of the links to my oldest posts no longer work. I’m not sure what’s going on, since I can edit them just fine. Changing the URL for these posts seems to help, so I’m slowly going through them and fixing them as I find them.

The putting your best forward challenge interests me as well. Here are some of my favorite posts:

  • The series of posts I did during the recent Basic Drawing class I took.
  • Mr. Peep Goes to Illinois: an adventure in landmark snarfing.
  • My review of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Love it or hate it, it’s huge right now, and I happen to be rather pleased with my review of it. I know it’s the only book review I included, which implies it’s my best review evar, but I’m not so sure about that. It’s just a recent one that seemed to work really well.

There are probably others, but it’s really hard to sift through the over 900 entries I’ve posted since starting this blog back in 2003.

Bloggiesta’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve gotten a lot done, both on my blog and in other ways: I cleaned up my study, caught up on a few forums (fora?), and logged a few outstanding snarfs. Thanks for hosting, Maw Books!

Bloggiesta

Posted by melydia on January 8, 2010 5 comments

Okay, so it’s last minute, but I’ve decided to participate in Bloggiesta. Looking at the list of suggestions, there are definitely some things I can do. I’m not behind on my reviews at the moment, but there are plenty of other things I’d like to get done. I only post once per day at most, so don’t expect this to be any kind of blogging marathon or anything, but I do hope to write a bunch of scheduled posts so this blog sees a bit more content than the weekly-odd book review.

For this introductory post, however, I’m going to participate in a few mini-challenges.

The Book Lady suggests setting goals for 2010. I’ve already talked about my personal resolutions elsewhere but I haven’t talked much about reading and blogging goals. Honestly, I’d like to blog more non-book-related topics. Lately this has been pretty much all book reviews all the time, and while I know it’s important to have a designated topic, I’d like to branch out a little more all the same.

One of the things mentioned is blog stats. I get around ten visitors per day to my blog, which is about ten more than I expect, so I’m happy with that. Sure, I’d like to have more regular readers, but considering my reviews are posted several other places I’m not too concerned.

That said, I am very proud for my recent compilation of a TBR spreadsheet, which I hope to keep up to date. It includes not just BookCrossing books but also all the unregistered stuff on my shelves and even a couple library books I’ve been meaning to check out. As of this writing there are an even 160 books on that list, and I’d love to get that number down. I’m only participating in one reading challenge this year, so I’m pretty free to tackle whichever book tickles my fancy at any particular moment. I’m pretty confident I can blast through another 80 books in 2010.

I’m not going to participate in the comment challenge (no way I can find five book blogs to comment on in a day!), the cheat sheet challenge (I don’t reuse links except to BookCrossing and I already have that one in my book review notes document anyway), or the backing up your blog challenge (we have auto-backups set up on the server).

I did add a copyright footer to my RSS feed, as suggested by the footer challenge. Another challenge I’m going to take part in is the labels/tags mini-challenge, because while I did recently go in and tag/categorize/title every single post on my blog, I only tagged things as book reviews, author, book title, and series title (where applicable). I did not use genre tags, and I think I probably should. I’m happy with my current categories, but there’s no reason not to go a little tag-happy, since they only show up at the bottom of each individual post and not on the main page.

Okay, that’s enough mini-challenges for one post. I’ll check in again later with a progress update and perhaps even more mini-challenges.

Titles and Tags

Posted by melydia on October 3, 2009 None comments

When I was back at Blogspot, none of my posts had titles. There wasn’t even a textbox to enter one – I assume I’d unknowingly disabled it. When I moved over here to WordPress, I imported all my old blog entries, all of which were then posted with blank titles. Makes it a little difficult to search for entries.

So I added titles. And tags. To every single post. Even the stupid ones about articles that almost certainly don’t exist anymore.

You’re welcome.

Geocities Closing

Posted by melydia on August 12, 2009 1 comments

As you may know, Geocities is closing. I’ve moved the main pages I had stored there – the Writing Prompt Websites list and my Wild Catches from BookCrossing. Man, I found a lot of really bizarre other stuff on there. I guess I’d used it strictly for online file storage, but not for anything particularly important. Weird. Anyway, just sayin’ that if you have any my Geocities stuff bookmarked, it’s time for an update.

Hobbies ahoy!

Posted by melydia on August 5, 2009 1 comments

I can never turn down an opportunity to write lists, so I’ve added a more fleshed-out hobbies page, complete with a list of my wild catches from BookCrossing.

I’ve also added a couple more sites to the Writing Prompts Websites list, but I won’t make a separate post every time I do that.

In sadder news, my softshell turtle Matey died yesterday, so I’ve updated the about section accordingly.  I’ll miss that ugly little turtle.

A simple truth

Posted by melydia on August 4, 2009 None comments

This site needs more bacon.

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