I’ve just been given this great award by Molly from the Cozy Book Nook! This was such a nice surprise, as I didn’t even know she’d been visiting! I only spotted her blog a few weeks ago, and since then have been a real fan. She has only been writing book reviews since January, but I’m sure she must have been practising before, as they are great! Thank you very much!
As part of the Dewey’s Books Challenge, hosted by Chris and Robin in Dewey’s memory, I’m going to take part in the Try Something New Mini-Challenge.
Here’s how it works:
During the month of March, I’m going to step out of my comfort zone and try something new.
To make things more fun, the Mini-Challenge is going to work in pairs: If you’re an even number, you’ll be paired with the person before you; if you’re an odd number, with the person after you , like we sometimes did for Weekly Geeks.
I’d like to try a graphic novel, or a western, as I’ve never read either before, but I won’t commit until I’ve found out who my partner is, and which sort of books they’d like to try, as it would be nice if we could try something new together!
This is the fourth week of the Blog Improvement Project. Our task for this week is to focus on the basics of our blog. I’ve been very busy!
I spent ages trying to improve the layout and add a ‘recent comments’ section to the sidebar. It didn’t really look very professional, and I was worried all my messing around was actually making it worse!
Then I upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and everything became much easier! WordPress 2.7 is a big improvement. It is much easier to add things to the sidebar without a knowledge of html, and all the behind-the-scenes management of the blog is much more intuitive.
With WordPress 2.7 it was really easy to add the recent comments section to the sidebar. All I had to do was tick one box!
It also has an option to add a text box, so I added my ‘currently reading’ and ‘top of the TBR’ boxes, so that everyone can see which books I’m focusing on at the moment.
My next task was to try to add a tab to show all the books I have reviewed on my blog. This was a lot harder than I expected. Bloggers seem to want everything archived by date, so it took me a while to find this azindex widget to organise things alphabetically. It is a big improvement to have all my book reviews in one place, but I’d ideally like them ordered by author. I know this can be done using tags for the first letter of an author’s surname, but this would be a lot of work for me. I’ll try to do it one day when I have a bit more time.
I must have done something to improve my blog’s visibility, as I was previously getting between 5 and 10 spam comments a day. I the last 12 hours I’ve had 156! I’m off to find a good way of getting rid of it!
I look forward to seeing what improvements everyone else has made, and hopefully I’ll get a few more good ideas!
This weeks Weekly Geeks task is to interview our favourite character from a book.
There are lots of characters I’d like to interview, but it would give away too much of the plot to those people who haven’t read the book. So I decided on my favourite children’s character – The Gruffalo.
I love The Gruffalo, and the sequel The Gruffalo’s Child. If you haven’t read them, then you should really try to have a look at a copy (or buy one for any toddlers you have in the family). They are the cleverest picture books I have ever seen.
I think I’ll stop there! I feel really silly doing this – it was great to give it a try though. I look forward to seeing what all the other ‘weekly geekers’ have come up with!
The Blog Improvement Project challenge this week is to update the basic parts of our blog – improve the blog roll, the ‘about me’ page and the archive section.
As part of this project I’d like to create a page on my blog to show all the books I’ve reviewed. Ideally I’d like all the books displayed alphabetically by author. Does anyone have a widget which does this automatically?
How do you archive all your book reviews? Has anyone seen a really good way of doing it? All help greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
I’ve just stumbled across The Book Seat. It is, essentially a bean bag for a book, which allows you to read without having to hold anything.
I was immediately drawn to this, and was very tempted to add it to my wishlist, but I now can’t decide whether it is a great solution to a very old problem, or just a marketing ploy, which won’t work in practice. How easy will it be to turn the pages? Will it just fall over all the time? I’d love to give it a try, as I’m always moaning about how heavy some books are!
Does it sound like a good idea to you? Or is it just silly? All thoughts appreciated!
