Bloggiesta 2011 - Finish Line

OK, I'm a little late with this but I was all worn out from the fiesta yesterday.

Here's the original list with updates

• Write reviews. Drafted/outline two reviews; completed one for publication this week.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day. Drafted two thinky posts
• Write that great post idea from three months back.  See above; also noted some ideas for future and uploaded to google docs.
• Create template posts for your future reads. This doesn't really work for me since my format is very loose.  I did do one for the Thursday Thirteen posts that includes the header pic and the footer text.  It took me less than 10 minutes.

• Clean up tags & blogrolls - Blogrolls-DONE; labels not so much
• Fix the favicon - DONE
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature) - not so much
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above - Opened up some dialog with fave fantasy bloggers
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions. Researched a bit.  Did not really have any "a-ha" moments.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).  Nah.
• Back up your blog. Nah
• Participate in some mini-challenges. I read most of the challenge articles but didn't really do the exercises.
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired. Yes!  thanks fellow participants!
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material. Sooo, as near as I can tell from the decidedly non-actual-legal advice I found on the challenge and elsewhere, your own material is copyrighted whether you put the special little symbol in your footer or not; registering with the copyright office (for a fee) may give you more protection. Opting out of that for the moment. 
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!) Yes!  I can't really say "Done" because how can you be "done" with something like that? but I did chip in my 2 cents here and there while I was hopping around.  Good thing there was a challenge for this because I am known for being shy and retiring online.

========================================
Things I did that I didn't expect to:

• Added social networking buttons to the post footer template.
• Went down a rabbit hole researching fancy ways to organize labels on the Blogger platform; decided to leave any major re-org for another time, but collected a list of reference links.
• Discovered a book with associated challenge that sounds interesting (The Heroine's Bookshelf).
• Thinking about glomming onto the Sunday Salon meme.
• Updated my "About" page.

 ========================================
So all in all, a very productive weekend.  I managed about 12 hours over two days, perhaps a bit more if you include the bloghopping (loved the participant feed reader!)

Many thanks to Natasha at Maw Books for hosting and organizing; I found the whole event to be a great motivator for those "tune-up" items that are easy to procrastinate on.

Bloggiesta 2011 - Almost Done

Today's been almost a bust.  I completed a post for later this week and meandered around some other blogs.  Added one to the blog-roll.  It's been a puttering kind of day.

I'm clearly not going to make it to 20 hours.  Maybe I'll get a second wind after dinner.  *yawn*

Right now, I'm thinking: siesta.

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!

Bloggiesta 2011

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It:
A blog-improvement marathon.  Hosted by Natasha at Maw Books, this is an event that she has run a number of times.  Officially it goes from 8 am today (ie, NOW) to 8:00 am Monday morning.  However, there is flexibility -- not many of us can expect to start right at that moment or to work continuously all weekend.  Click on the emblem in the sidebar to see the announcement post with the rules, sign-up, and suggestions.

I did this challenge about a year and half ago, in the summer of 2009, and my goals are going to look remarkably similar now as they did then.  Thing is, some things you can do once and forget them; some you need to pay constant attention to, and others, well, you can let them go for awhile but it's good to spruce them up every now and then.  The Bloggiesta challenge is good motivation/inspiration for me to do that kind of maintenance and  maybe to look at my long-term strategy.

This Year's To-Do List
Because Natasha has gotten so good at these lists, I've done a cut and paste from her post (credit where it's due!), deleted the ones that I'm not interested in or have completed, and modified a few to suit me:

• Write reviews.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day.
• Write that great post idea from three months back.
• Create template posts for your future reads (ie: title, images, linking, tags, etc,) so you can open up, write review and post without being bogged down with technicalities (interesting idea, no?  worth a try!)

Notice that these all pertain to making it quicker and easier to get good content out of my head and into the blog.  I have a notion that I might outline a few ideas I've had -- I could write them later but there are a few ideas I've had knocking around for quite a while.  What I've learned after three years of blogging is that at this point? if I don't do something pretty soon, they'll fade away.  These ideas don't need more mental percolation time to gel; they need butt-in-seat, hands-on-the-keyboard time to make it happen.

Some housekeeping type things, to do in between the heavy-duty content generation:

• Clean up tags & blogrolls
• Fix the favicon
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature)
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).
• Back up your blog.
• Participate in some mini-challenges
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired.
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material.
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!)

I'm not going to have much time to work on this today, and I have some other stuff to do here and there over the weekend, but I figure I could probably get in 15 or 20 hours.  Let's call 20 the goal.  I'll be checking in here and there, and be sure to visit Natasha for the linky -- do some bloghopping and get some ideas for your own improvement program.