Bloggiesta 2011 Check-In

Halfway Mark
It's really more like 2/3s over, but since I didn't start until today, I'm 1/2 done.

How am I doing?  Not too bad.  I've spent about 8 hours on Bloggiesta, interrupted by a shopping trip for craft supplies (school project for the kid, quilt project for me) and a school play-- just spectators; my girls had several friends performing.

I pruned back my blogrolls for those that are no longer active (*sob*); updated the "About" page and debugged my favicon.  Sites that provide free hosting for .ico files seem to come and go; my favicon has been MIA for awhile now.  I found a new hosting site for it (IconJ) and it's working again.  Took awhile though; and I fiddled with my ISP account for a bit to see if I could host the file myself but it was too much of a PITA to set up.  Of course, I made that call after spending close to an hour on it.  Grrr.

Those are the visible changes; for the rest I have drafted about 4 upcoming posts to varying degrees of completion and jotted down ideas for 3 more.  I also checked out this year's mini-challenges -- unfortunately none of them really resonated with me so I don't know if I'll participate.

Research
I poked around on a couple of different stats counters.  I've had people tell me that my numbers look too low, but two different programs are showing approximately the same numbers, so *shrug* I guess I'm what you call a "boutique" blog, lol.

I did some research about ways to categorize/group labels in Blogger -- I'm very jealous of the two-level organizational capability that Wordpress has.  Ultimately I decided not change anything at the moment because my options (that I could find) appear complicated, difficult to maintain, and yet still not quite what I want.  Toying with the idea of moving all my author labels to a page though, since the label list is getting long and I'll probably always have a lot of authors with only one link.

Hopping
Outside of my own blog content, I've hopped on over to a couple of random Bloggiesta-ers to check out what they're doing, and left a couple of comments.  I wish I had time to visit everyone, it's such a candybox to have a couple hundred blogs to choose from -- you never know what you're going to get, but your odds are good of finding something tasty!