Bloggiesta Complete

Well, you're never really finished, adding, improving, editing, updating, changing. Ranganathan's Fifth Law (The library is a growing organism) is very, very applicable to the blogosphere, and this here corner of the web is no exception.

How'd I do?

I didn't keep track of every hour spent... so I don't have a "total hours" to share.

I do, however, have a list of things I worked on.


My goals:

Worked on blogging some entries (didn't complete as many as I expected), including a list-post that I'm really having fun with. Fixed a lot of broken image links in some of my older posts.


Blog design:

Added the Link Within widget. I think I like it. It's kind of fun to jump around randomly, from one post to another and see where it takes you. They advise that the longer you are on it, the better links it will provide, and that is certainly true. Will I keep it for good? I'm not sure. Can't quite decide if seeing those old blog posts is worth the slightly more cluttered look on my blog.

I did something I've been meaning to do for a long while... I set up a "dummy blog" so that I can test out any design ideas, so that any new changes won't cause my real blog to go "kablooey". And it's a good thing I did, because "go kablooey" is exactly what happened. I tried out several blog skins on my tester blog, and most of them crashed. Not loving the new blog templates on Blogger, either. There's more granularity, to be sure, but none of the designs really grabbed me. With so many people switching over to the new templates, perhaps in time, this one I'm using will start to look charmingly retro?

I swapped out some of the blogs listed in my blogroll. It's good to keep things fresh.


RSS feed:

Double-checked it, and yes, I think it's working the way that I'd like. I normally don't truck much with RSS.

Added a "follow by e-mail" option. Again, not sure if I'll keep it. I hate clutter.


Blog stats:

Signed up for Google Analytics.
I generally don't really worry about blog stats. I guess it will take a while for Google to decide how things are looking and give me back some interesting charts/graphs/numbers to obsess over. This would probably be a lot more important to me if I was interested in running ads on my site, which I'm really not. To me, at least, it feels like you give up soooo much, and get soooo little in return. In exchange for covering your blog with blinking, flashing ugliness, with pictures of people with eyes that are too big, or otherwise disturbingly photoshopped "attention-getters" you get what? A few pennies? Not worth it.


Other mini-challenges:

Tried the comment mini-challenge, and got seriously waylaid, checking out so many blogs. The blogosphere is huge, my friends. Really huge. Like, staggers the imagination huge. I'm quite the lurker, so actually posting comments was tough for me. For every comment I left, I read about three different blogs. Interesting to see what's out there, especially with non-kidlit bloggers.

I think I lost about half a day, struggling to change my favicon, and unfortunately, it just kept crashing, crashing, crashing. I'm a details-oriented person, and I'd like to fix that. But, not at the expense of not being able to load my website properly. Clearly, this requires more thought.

Sometime it feels like a real slog, taking care of all these un-sexy, nuts and bolts type housekeeping tasks. And it feels a bit odd, too, to be posting about it! I'm happy that I got so much done. This weekend left me feeling inspired and connected. It sure was a lot easier taking care of business when I felt like I had a crowd cheering me on. I can't wait to get back to posting book reviews, reporting on literary events, and sharing general thoughts about librarianship.