Category: Everything Else

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Other Weekly Geeks

Weekly Geeks – An Interview with the Gruffalo

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.

  • Are you really scared of the mouse?
    When I was younger I was really scared of the mouse, but now I’m older I realise how clever that little mouse is, and we just tell the story to our children so that they don’t wander off into the dangerous wood.
  • Do you have a favourite book?
    Gruffalo can’t read. We love telling stories to each other though. Our favourite stories are ones about our clever ancestors, and how we tricked other animals into getting what we want.
  • What is your favourite food?
    I’d love to say mouse ice cream, but really we just eat nuts and berries.
  • How many Gruffalo are there?
    I don’t know. There are lots of us, but we’re very hard to find, as we are very good at hiding.

    •  

    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!

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Other

Technical help required!


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!

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Other

The Book Seat

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!

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Other

My first book giveaway!

I’ve decided to host my first ever book giveaway! I’m going to give away a copy of one of my favourite reads of last year: Random Acts of Heroic Love, by Danny Scheinmann. It is an emotional story about love and loss, which I think is unmissable. See my full review here.

 

 

As I’ve discovered with my two little boys bribery works! I’d like to encourage more comments on my blog, so if you’d like to win a copy of this amazing book, please leave a comment on this post AND somewhere else on my blog before the end of February.

This is an INTERNATIONAL giveaway, and as this book has not yet been released in paperback in the US, it is well worth winning!

GOOD LUCK!!

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Other

I’ve completed Blog Post Bingo!

In the third week of the Blog Improvement Project. We were challenged to add ten different types of post to our blog. I’m really happy, because I managed to do it. I have created a poll here, so that you can let me know which of my post types you liked the best. It would be really helpful to know which are the most popular, so I can concentrate on them in the future. Thank you!

I’ve completed Blog Post Bingo!

  •  A Link Post – share a series of links your readers might find interesting

Links to book related news this week.

  • A Short Post – less than 200 words

I just included a picture of me and my little boy in the snow.

  • A List Post – simple as it sounds, a list of some sort

A list of 10 blogs with great layouts.

  • An Opinion Post – take an event, news, or another blog post and share your opinion on it

For Friday 13th I wrote a short post about my superstitions.

  • A Poll or Question Post – post a poll or ask your readers a specific question for feedback

As well as my ususal weekly ‘Can you judge a book by it’s cover?‘ quiz. I have also added a poll, so you can let me know which of these post types you prefer.

  • A How-To Post – You’re an expert in something; big or small, share how to do it

I wrote a guide on how to search for books on the Internet.

  • A Long Post – more than 700 words

My Weekly Geek look at different book covers is more than 700 words long. You can read it here.

  • A Review Post – self-explanatory, I think :)

With all the other posting I didn’t have much time for book reviews, but I did manage to squeeze a review of David Ebershoff’s 19th Wife in here.

I’d never heard of a BLOOK before. Have you?

  • FREE SPACE – a type of post of your choice (that is not the same as one of the previous posts)

I interviewed Sandy from You’ve Gotta Read This.

This has been a real challenge for me. I have enjoyed researching all the different posting types, and will make sure that I include more in future, but it has been very time consuming, and I haven’t been able to read as much as I’d like, so I’m off to read a good book!

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Other

Which posts do you prefer?

I have now completed the Blog Improvement Project ‘Blog Post Bingo’ It would be really helpful if you could fill in the poll below, to let me know which of my posts you have enjoyed the most over the past two weeks. Hopefully, I’ll then be able to get a feel for which types of posts are the most popular, and will be able to include more posts like them in the future.

You are able to vote more than once, so please vote for two or three if you’d like to see similar ones in future.

Thank you!