Sunday, January 10, 2010

Bloggiesta: Wrap-Up Post



 All right, I'm finally calling it quits for bloggiesta, but I'm really pleased with what I accomplished! I think I ended up spending somewhere around 12 hours working on my blog between yesterday and today. Here's what I accomplished:

Mini-challenges completed:
  • 2010 Resolutions Mini-Challenge:  See my separate post here with my reading/blogging resolutions for this year.
  • Comment Challenge:  I commented on 10 new blogs and joined the comment challenge to comment on at least 5 book blogs a day. 
  • Labels/Tag Mini Challenge:  Admittedly, this one was not hard for me to do as I had <10 posts at the time, but I labeled all my posts in a system that I will hopefully stick to.
  • I posted on the new book blogger forum, Bloggie Cult.
What else I accomplished:

I got through all of my original goals that I posted about here:
  • I decided which other challenges I want to participate in for now and posted about them here.
  • I added a profile picture that I'm mostly happy with.
  • I thought for a while about a possible ranking system for reviews, but ultimately decided that since I haven't written that many reviews yet, I'm going to wait and reevaluate this one later.
  • I put my entire to-read list onto goodreads, and learned that there are 76 books I want to read right now. That's a little overwhelming, but I at least have it organized in the order I want to read them... I'm not sure what the benefits are of having it up at goodreads versus library thing (or any other sites I don't know about), but I'm happy to have it easily accessible right now. You can see my goodreads profile here. Feel free to friend me over there (or make an argument for why I should have used library thing/other site instead!)
  • I redid the layout of the blog, adding widgets for currently reading (from goodreads), books I'm reading next (from goodreads), labels, and a list of my reviews. We'll see how it holds up!
  • I went through every book blog in my google reader, purged the ones that are inactive, organized the rest, and added at least 20 (I lost count at some point) new blogs to follow!
  • I thought a bit about what kind of content I want to feature on my blog. Nothing is set it stone yet, but I do have a few ideas for types of posts:
    • My goal is to read one book a week minimum, which means write one review a week minimum.
    • I also may review some of the books that I've read recently (before starting the blog), and some of my other favorites -- at most one a week.
    • I'm going to keep doing Tuesday Teasers and Booking Through Thursday memes, but I'm going to think carefully about joining other memes, as I don't want the blog to be overcome by them. 
    • Even though I started this blog to rant about both books and TV, I'm going to limit myself to a maximum of one tv-related post per week for now, and see how it goes.
    • I may consider occasionally blogging about other topics that I'm near-fanatical about other than books/tv. Specifically, I may try to blog about environmental issues (which is my current field and what I studied) whenever I find something interesting to share, and I'd like to try to read an environment-related book every once in a while.
Overall, a very productive weekend! Thanks to Maw Books for hosting this awesome event!

4 comments:

  1. Love your bio! I'm a lurker too. However, my new years resolution was to make an appearance from time to time.

    I enjoyed my visit to your blog :)

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  2. Good job - it looks great. I see you are reading Rebecca... that has been on my TBR since Summer!

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  3. I used to have ratings on my reviews but I took them off earlier this year. It's a personal decision to make, but I didn't want to lead people away from reading a book just because *I* didn't like it, and I feel like in my reviews, I try to point out what I liked and disliked, whereas a rating is too stark a number for me.

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  4. Great job!! :o) I am envious that your GR is so organized now... mine's so totally not.

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