I posted my Bloggiesta to-do list on Friday morning. It wasn’t very long, but it was pretty heavy on time-intensive post-writing, so even as I put it together I wasn’t sure I’d be able to accomplish it all. And then Natasha had to mention the mini-challenges, and I thought about trying out a few of those too – hey, they were mini-challenges, right? How much time could they take?
Some of them took longer than others. I spent about 8 hours on Bloggiesta this weekend; I was at work all day Friday and out of the house on Saturday morning, and my family actually wanted to see me for some time this weekend (go figure!), so I did have some limitations. I didn’t get as much of the writing done as I intended, but diverting some of that time to mini-challenges was worth it, for other blog-related reasons.
I won’t restate the whole original to-do list here – why dwell on all of the things I didn’t get done? Let’s just celebrate the Bloggiesta accomplishments!
- Drafting my next two posts for the LA Moms Blog was actually my first priority, and I got that done on Friday night. I’m supposed to post there twice a month, so I now I’m set into July – plus, I’ve got ideas in the works for the next couple of posts after that! Momentum is good.
- I set up drafts for six book reviews, which means I’ve actually planned my reading for the next few weeks – that never happens! I’ll just need to write my discussions, rate the books, and add in links to other reviews. Head starts are good.
About half of my Bloggiesta time was spent on these two tasks. I still have a Weekend Assignment to write; that’s probably not going to happen within the Bloggiesta time frame, but there’s still some weekend left!
The mini-challenges weren’t part of the original plan, but some were both irresistible and useful:
- Rebecca at The Book Lady’s Blog proposed some helpful suggestions for cleaning up the ol’ feed reader.
I found the Trends page in Google Reader. It turns out that one of the things it tracks is inactive feeds – thanks to that shortcut and individual inspection of the rest of my subscriptions, I deleted about 50 inactive and/or rarely-read feeds. I’ve used folders to sort my feeds for quite a while, but I reorganized some of them, and I edited the “blogroll” gadgets in my blog sidebar to reflect the changes. I just didn’t have much time to read many blog posts on Saturday, and had to resort to the “mark all as read” button. Fresh starts can be good.
- Emily from Emily’s Reading Room suggested that setting up Google Alerts for your blog is good – I’ve got ’em now.
- Deborah from Books, Movies, and Chinese Food asked us if we had an “elevator pitch” for our blogs. I didn’t, but now I’ve got a start on one, at least. What do you think?
- Trish at Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin’? pitched bloggy branding with favicons and gravatars, and assured us that they weren’t hard to create, either.
Well, they weren’t exactly quick-click tasks for me, but within about an hour or so, I had created both a favicon for my blog and a gravatar to follow my profile around the Internet. And as far as I can tell, they both work! You’ll probably be seeing them around. The favicon is, of course, very tiny, but it’s the new logo my husband designed for my blog business cards – hopefully, it’ll actually be on the blog itself soon!
- Ruth from Bookish Ruth recommended using Website Grader to – well, it’s probably obvious from the name of the site.
It just takes a couple of minutes to generate the ratings and rankings. This blog got a grade of 87% – that’s almost a B-plus, which isn’t all that shabby – and a page rank of 4, which makes it “(a) popular site with a fair amount of inbound links.” Popularity is good, isn’t it? I don’t have a lot of experience with it.
I don’t have a lot of experience with these bloggy marathons, either – this was my first. I am amazed by the folks that can dedicate giant chunks of their weekends to these things! Even though we had a window twice as big as the 24-Hour Read-a-Thon, I couldn’t devote a lot of hours to Bloggiesta. I work full-time, and there’s only so much of my “normal” weekend stuff I can put on hold; and I have a feeling my family might not entirely appreciate my spending so much time with my MacBook and not with them. Given that, I probably should either avoid mini-challenges or decide to focus on them, with a much shorter to-do list for myself!
But having said all that, Bloggiesta was good! Thanks to Natasha for creating and hosting such a fun event, and I hope this won’t be the first and last time! Hopefully, I’ll be able to get more actual writing done the next time, though.
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I'll have to check out Rebecca's post about the feed reader. Even though the minichallenge is over, I still need to clean up my feed reader.
As for marathons, this was my first and I spent about half as much time as you on it. I wish I could say I spent longer, but I'm not going to lie.
Good to see you again, Florinda…um, you're one that I won't be culling from my reader, btw. 🙂
I know what you mean. I haven't committed to any weekend blog events because weekends are for my family.
Seems like you've been busy this weekend.
The website grader thing seems interesting. I'm sure I won't have a passing grade though. 🙂
I'll keep an eye open for your gravatar.
The challenge was a lot fo fun and it is exciting to see how many were involved in improving their sites.
Bryan (JustaReadingFool) – Glad to know I'll make the cut in your feed reader; you made mine as well. Now, just post more often :-). Nice to see you here again!
Kathy (Bermudaonion) – That's why I haven't done any before this, and it has to be a consideration every time. Sometimes it's a choice between online friends and the ones you live with :-).
Mike – I think you'll only see the gravatar on non-Blogger sites, but it's the same as my profile picture. You'll recognize it :-). Did the favicon show up in your browser when you came here to comment?
Oh, grade your website :-). It gives you some good suggestions for improving your score, too.
BookJourney – I'm glad I joined in, even if it was for a relatively small chunk of time. Thanks for coming by!
Great job! I didn't sign up because of my anniversary but ended up doing a bit on Saturday. I managed to get a few things done.
I hadn't known about the "Trends" feature on Google Reader. I didn't have too many inactive blogs listed. But then, I did clean up my reader about a month ago and I'm sure that helped. I'll have to look more into the favicon and gravatars branding. I'd never heard of that before either.
It sounds like you were able to get a lot accomplished, Florinda!
Chris – Glad you found a little time to join in!
Wendy (Literary Feline) – The favicon was a little bit troublesome for me, partly because I had to translate Windows instructions to Mac-speak, but I kind of like the result. I may tweak my gravatar a little, though.
I knew about the Trends page in GReader, but hadn't seen it for awhile. I'm glad I found it again :-).
I guess I did get a bit done – just not necessarily what I had planned!
I have a hard time completing the events too. I just put in the hours where I can and never expect to get anywhere near the "requirements". I tried to do the Read-a-thon, but it was so nice that I sent a considerable amount f time out drinking and eating with friends.
Nicole – Maybe that's the key: just decide to be in for whatever you manage to do? I tend to do better with a small, attainable to-do list anyway :-).
Sounds like some excellent productive blog work. Congrats!
TexasRed – I did some follow-up on Monday, too. I'm going to count it :-).
This is great – thanks for the round-up – it's given me a few things to check out.
Magpie – The mini-challenges turned out to be pretty useful. I'm glad I did some of them, even if I got less writing done as a result. I'm glad you may get some useful stuff out of them too!
I'm so late!! But I'm here wanting to say thanks for playing! I know what you mean about weekends and blogging events. That's part of a big reason that I'm still trying to wrap this whole thing up. I think we just have to do what we can and I hope that the challenge was open minded enough for flexibility. I can't wait until the next one!
Natasha – I agree, the challenge was pretty flexible. I'm glad I was able to participate for as much as I did – thanks so much for getting it going?