Tag Archives: memes

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.

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