Jeff and the boys are at basketball practice, and I confess that the 9-to-11am Saturday morning practice is starting to spoil me. They leave around 830am, don’t get home till about 1130am, and I have three glorious hours to do things like play around on the computer or read. This morning, I’ve been tweaking my blog, thanks to Bloggiesta.
Bloggiesta is an event hosted by Natasha at Maw Books. It’s a kind of blogging marathon — and participants might catch up on reviews or other posts, or write a few extra posts ahead of time for “a rainy day” — but it’s also an opportunity to spiff up your blog, add new buttons, update the blog roll, find and fix (or delete) broken links, organize your feed reader, and get tips from other bloggers, either on their blogs, or by chatting with them on Twitter. It’s all about improving your blog, helping and learning from each other, and improving all the tasks and processes related to your blogging experience. (For book bloggers, updating their book info in LibraryThing or GoodReads counts!)
I did some laptop stuff last night, not specifically blog-related, but I did work on the Evernote account I created last week. I hope to fill that with quotes and other good pieces of information or pearls of wisdom that I want to remember and keep on hand. So, there’s at least a desire and intent to get a little more organized. (I also deleted some super-old messages from my Gmail account, and THAT felt good.) This morning, I spent about 90 minutes tweaking some little things on my blog, and reading other bloggers’ advice and suggestions. I added a copyright blurb to my RSS feed posts, and added a subscription to my own blog in Google Reader, since I had no idea what it looked like before. (Good news: it looks okay!) I switched my comment notification from the home e-mail account to Gmail so I’ll usually see them sooner. I put a Creative Commons license in my blog footer. I modified the LibraryThing widget in my sidebar, and tweaked my “Friends & Favorites” list.
It’s nearly 1030am now, and I’m thinking if I get on the treadmill soon, I might be able to “buy” some goodwill from Jeff and the boys, and get more time with the blog later today or tomorrow. Now that I’m looking at it closely, there’s definitely more I’d like to do — update the Blog Roll tab being first, and writing posts for the two challenges I plan to join this year. (I did add buttons for the challenges this morning — yay for me! — but that doesn’t make it official.) I’m going to add myself to the list of Bloggiesta participants, and cross my fingers I can get another couple hours for blog cleanup this weekend. To the other Bloggiesta participants: Ole! And happy blogging!