Bloggiesta Ends!

What a weekend! My back aches , my eyes are so tired and I'm suffering severe reading withdrawal syptoms but I'm delighted with what I managed to achieve over the past three days. Here is a summary of what I did...

Friday - 6 hours

While I waited for the rest of the world to catch up I focused on small improvements to my blog and ended the day having:
page tags under header
changed archives to dropdown
added recent posts gadget
wrote a message for about me
cleaned up labels
updated blogroll
wrote a review for Saturday
prepared 6 draft templates for ShowMe5 posts.

Saturday - 7 hours

I did five mini challenges:

•Kim and Jackie at the Blog Improvement Project (@kimthedork and @farmlanebooks) – Take a step back and view your blog as a whole. Where do you want to go from here? On goals and analyzing your blogs (I’d do this one early and first).........this one was really good and made me look back before looking forward.

•Pam from MotherReader (@MotherReader) – Be brave in your writing and push the limits of what your comfortable with............something I'm constantly trying to do and hope I'm making progress with. And I did what I said I was going to in my comment.

•Danielle at There’s a Book (@the1stdaughter) – Do you know what programs you can use to discover your stats and what the heck do they mean anyways?.........already had Sitemeter but signed up with Google Analytics

•Cass at Bonjour Cass (@bonjourcass) – It’s often said the best part of book blogging is the community. Go discover them in this commenting challenge!...........so many lovely new blogs to explore. Despite some blogger connection problems I visited as many as I could.

•Jackie from Farm Lane Books (@farmlanebooks)– Do not lose it all! How to back up your blog.....something I've known I needed to do but didn't know how............and it was so easy!!!!

Wrote and scheduled two reviews.
Visited lots of blogs

Sunday - 7 hours

Very tired and lacking concentration so spent a great deal of time visiting and exploring other blogs. Lots of ideas for the to do list and lots of books added to the TBR.

Mini-challenge:

•Sarah at Puss Reboots (@pussreboots) – What is RSS and how to make it so your feed is easily discoverable..............I already had RSS but discovered there were things I didn't know and improvements I could make.

Half finished my Cranford Read-Along post
Did an awards post
Added a few reviews to challenges and Shelfari
Wrote and scheduled this wrapup post.

Thought about changing blog layout because I had originally planned to move with the seasons but its such nasty winter weather outside why would I want to look at it on the blog as well so sticking with warm autumn colour - I can pretend it's a fire - and maybe have a change in Spring.


Discovered Parajunkee's instructions for changing to a custom domain - I think I will do this soon. It makes  me nervous absolutely terrifies me, I'm such a computer dummy but other people seem to be coping ok so maybe..........soon!

Total Hours - 20

A big thank you to Natasha at Maw Books for hosting this great event. It was very productive and lots of fun. I feel like sleeping for a week and longing to sit and read!

Ole!