Three days of all-out blog improvement, checking things off the ‘to do’ list, and brainstorming with other bloggers! What a fiesta! I was able to spend a fair amount of time both Friday and Saturday (about 8 hours total), but wasn’t up to more ‘hair of the dog’ on Sunday (family commitments kept me away, actually).
I got started early Friday morning by backing up my blog. I see that Jackie at Farmlane Books had a mini challenge about backing up your blogs. I still need to automate this; and in the comments Ann Kingman points out a few plugins that may help me do that on WordPress.
I made some good progess on my original list, here it is:
- organize sidebars (challenge buttons, buttons for vendors, review sites, literacy organizations, etc.)
- change bullets in sidebar widgets to solid circles (this has proven Difficult with a capital D!)
- make sure vendor links in sidebar are correct/working
- decide on literary charity to benefit from link income in 2010 (continuing with First Book)
- soul-search if I want to re-establish affiliate relationship with A..zon (no. for now. I’m very conflicted!)
- add blue line/bar after footer in blog post (see note thanking Puss Reboots)
- add more obvious link to open comments for reading/writing
- add tab/page for giveaways (see note thanking Trish Hey Lady and Natasha/Pedro)
- add tab/page for challenges (gracias tambien)
- add BTR player for interview w/Nicole on That’s How I Blog (thanks to Trish Hey Lady and Natasha)
- test adding ’most popular posts’ widget
- switch from ShareThis to Sociable for social bookmarking/sharing
- add related post links to most-viewed posts (may have to do this manually; I’m not always happy with the auto-suggests)
- contact/follow-up invitations for people to guest blog for Spotlight on Bookstores
- rss and email subscribe buttons should be in color (even without hover)
- plan/prep a few posts for Weekend Cooking
- fix italics issue – a word styled with italics runs into the next (non-italicized) word in preview/post
and, some things not on my original list bubbled up over the weekend:
- added subscribe via email/RSS buttons to sidebar
- subscribed/installed Feedburner
- added ‘recent comments’ to sidebar (thanks to suggestion from @SuziQoregon, this subs for out-of-date blogroll)
I really wanted to get a handle on my Reading Challenges for 2010, and to wrap-up all 2009 Challenges. I’ve added all current challenges to the sidebar, and hope that it’s not affecting load time. If it seems sluggish, would you let me know? I officially signed up for What’s in a Name? and the 100 Mile Fitness Challenge, and didn’t sign up for another challenge that I had been considering (that’s good, right? setting limits!). I plan to sign up for War Through the Generations – Vietnam, and My Friend Amy’s Buy One Book and Read It challenge. Finally, I have wrap-ups for Dewey’s Books, Kim’s Blog Improvement Project 2009, and the LT Author Challenge.
A huge thank you to people on twitter who answered the SOS when I was struggling with a few Bloggiesta issues this weekend. @PussReboots sent a tweet to all #bloggiesta participants: “If you need help with html, let me know.” I was trying to add a solid line separating my posts (after the footer and extending full from left to right in the body of the post; you can see my attempt above); she gave me very detailed instructions for which parts of the code to change — we were exchanging tweets Saturday evening before dinner, and I haven’t had a chance to implement it yet, but it’s in my notes for this week.
@TrishHeyLady emailed the code I needed to install the That’s How I Blog! interview player that you see on my left sidebar; many thanks, Trish!
And Trish and our hostess, @mawbooks pointed me in the right direction when I was looking for a way to get a Post to post to a specific page, and NOT on the Home Page. I wanted to created a Page called Giveaways, and have posts with the Category “giveaway” post only there. Trish and Natasha showed me a plugins that might work … but now I’m not sure the setup is really what I need. Ay caramba! I had them going in circles with me!
Thank you, thank you to Natasha (and Pedro!) and everyone who came to the bloggiesta fun this weekend. Many hands make light work, and being able to bounce ideas off other people kept me motivated. This was a fantastic event, Natasha!
The load time did not seem at all sluggish to me. By the way, at least if you’re on a Mac, you can do a bullet with option-asterisk.
Your wrap-up is a lot more organized than mine. There’s still so much I want to do, but I didn’t make a list of them. I’m going to have to do that. Bloggiesta has really been a great resource, I think.
Great work
It took maybe three or four seconds to load versus instantaneous,but I don’t consider that an issue. I’m so proud of all of you. I guess my bloggiesta was New Year’s Day, when I did all that organizing with the challenges. Still there is so much I need to do, but weekends are tough around here.
LOVE the photo! And I think your blog is one of the more professional looking ones that I read. Congratulations on such great work!
Your blog looks fabulous! Very easy to look at/read too.
You had a great bloggiesta! Glad to see you celebrated it in such style!
Great job and I love the picture!!! Coming from a Ding Dong, I hope you had tons of margaritas (the most caloric beverage evah!) and lots of greasy fat filled tortilla chips! Don’t forget the queso and guacamole!!!
Wow, you got a lot done! OLE! And it is so good of you to stay out of more trouble… erm challenges! See you around in the 100 Mile Fitness & What’s in a Name? challenges!
That looks more like a cosmo than a margarita!
Bloggiesta has just kicked off a storm of activity… hope my motivation keeps up with my task lists!
You got a lot done in 8 hours. And surely win the prize for most festive!
Wow, looks like you made way more progress than I did! LOL I’m just exhausted reading all this.
You did a great job — I avoided HTML like the plague this weekend, so I’m impressed at what you accomplished with it! And of course, I’m loving the maracas and sombrero.
The blog looks great! And you can tell that Ms. Fizzythoughts that in Tucson, at least, we drink prickly pear margaritas which are indeed sort of Cosmo-colored!
You’re so organized – I’m jealous! But the changes look great. Well done!
It sounds like you had a great time with Bloggiesta this year, and I hope next year I can participate as well. The site looks great!
Nice work, although I was pretty used to the old look, so this takes a little getting used to
You inspired me to finally add a counter to my blog which I’ve been wanting to do for a while but just never bothered to figure out how to do. Of course it took five minutes when I finally bothered…
Love the photo! And I somehow got sucked into Bloggiesta even though I didn’t sign up. I ended up doing an entire blog makeover.
Wow…you accomplished a lot. I should have participated
omg, is that pic cute!! Congrats on all you accomplished. And you have a great list to work from in the future, too! Dang you’re organized!
Congratulations on a very successful Bloggiesta. You were extremely productive
Love the picture. So glad you were up to doing the Bloggiesta. I’ll watch for your post on the LT Author challenge.
Great picture! I am blown away at all your advanced technical knowledge!! I’ll probably never go self-hosted because I am just too ignorant to figure all this stuff out. All the changes look great.. you are so organized!! Very impressive!