#Bloggiesta – El Fin

One thing I’ve learned that I already knew but just hadn’t realized and applied to Bloggiesta is… I’m a sprinter.  I got an incredible amount of stuff done on Friday, not so much on Saturday, and then today has felt like a huge brain-ooze.  But, here I am at the finish line, even if I’ve drug butt the last 6 miles… OKAY, 16 miles.

Today has reminded me of the scene at the end of Run, Fatboy, Run! Where he’s at the wall and is ready to quit.  I have to say that it’s definitely the help and encouragement of fellow bloggers that kept me going.  And I still have a few more things I want to get done, but I think I’m out of gas for this weekend.  But I’ve been writing them down on post-its for later.

First off, I want to give a rousing THANKS! to Natasha at MawBooks for organizing Bloggiesta in the first place.  AND to thank the publishers and sponsors who have provided the prizes.  I also have to give a special thanks to everyone who thought of and hosted the mini-challenges.  There are a LOT of things I just would have NEVER thought to do that I found out about on their blogs.  I still want to go through a few more, but again, too pooped out to do it tonight.  Blogging with children is a LOT of stress!

So Natasha asked for the following in the wrap up post:

Let me know how many hours you spent on the challenge, the mini-challenges you participated in, how many comments you left other bloggers, what you accomplished, what you liked best and any constructive criticism you might have.  I also need some ideas for mini-challenges for the next Bloggiesta so let me know!

So here we go:

I spent 12 hours working on Bloggiesta on Friday, 4 hours on Saturday, and 5 hours on it today.  That’s a total of 21 hours of Bloggiesta bonanza!

I participated in the following mini-challenges:

1. Emily’s Reading Room – set up Google Alerts
2. Books, movies, and Chinese Food – created an elevator pitch
3. Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Set Goals for 2010 – firmed up and fleshed out my main goals for 2010
4. Bloggiesta Mini Challenge:  Footers – Got a copyright doodad widget in the sidebar.
5. Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Clean Up Your Feedreader!
6. BethFishRead’s Mini-Challenge – Got a fun rainy-day rant wrote up for later.
7. Go forth and comment – I’ve commented on more than 10 new-to-me blogs now.
8. Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge – Dead Links – last minute mini-challenge completed
9. Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge Sign-In – made tons of comments on several blogs, both old and new
10. Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Blogging Buddies!! – Hi Care! 😀

As to how many comments I have left, I could NOT even BEGIN to say, because I’ve done my best to keep up with my Google Reader, and to leave comments on the posts as they’ve came up.  Plus the ones that are tweeted.  AND the ones that are posted through Networked Blogs on faceboook.  I’ve gone cross-eyed this weekend from all the montior-reading! 🙂  I should’ve grabbed one of those people-counter-clicky things and ticked off each comment.  It’d have to be between 60 and 70 comments.

Things that I accomplished this Bloggiesta that I’m most happy about, besides mini-challenge stuff, is that I’ve updated all sidebars, widgets and pages.  I’ve decided that, for now, I’m going to take a break from Viral Video Wednesday.  It was something for my own pleasure, anyway, and I ended up doing a LOT more video searching and watching than I did reading.  I may still have a random video post, but not a regular meme for a while.  I edited my Mt. TBR inventory page to be just my ARCs and then put a link to my LT Catalogue if people want to see what ALL books I have, which is over 1000 books.

What I’m super-excited about, though, is that I’ve got a separate blog set up for The Welsh Reading Challenge.  Rhinoa, host of the Manga Challenge, and BethFish, who hosts Sookie Stackhouse Challenge and What’s in a Name?3 Challenge, both had talked about making a separate blog for their challenges so that they can keep things better organized.  Now that I have the Welsh Reading Challenge blog, I can do so much more, like have featured authors, places for the reviews, and list suggested reading.  I’m looking forward to really getting it finished so I can announce it’s grand opening 🙂  Maybe I’ll be able to get a few sponsors and prizes then 😉

Minor adjustments were made to better organize and navigate the blogs pages and widgets were also made.  One thing that may change later is the pages and categories.  I think I’d like to make a page to list the review links for all the books I’ve reviewed.  I haven’t decided whether to list them by author or by title, but I suppose I could do both.  As for categories, I’m thinking “Blog Reviews” may be to broad a category.  I may break it down by genres, that way it’d be easier for someone looking for a specific book or topic to find.  I know that when I was visiting new blogs for the comment challenge, I looked through their categories like Reading with Tequila’s 5 Shots books (now I have Mockingbird coming in the mail) and English Major’s Junk Food’s Jane Austen label.

As for ideas for the next Bloggiefest in June… can’t wait, counting down already!  I don’t know, really.  I’m content with leaving such things to the more experience and learned blogging folks.  By June, I’ll have been blogging for 2 years, which is still a bit young.  THEN, remember all the sidetracks and diversions and breaks I’ve taken, and it probably averages out to me being an 8-month-old blogger, if that much.  I’m just hoping that I won’t get distracted between now and June!  I’ll try to have a better answer by then 😉

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Bloggiesta Progress Update #5

Okay, I’m having a spastic moment.  There’s some weird smell somewhere in the house that smells like maple syrup, hot dogs and Fat Bastard.  I took out the overflowing trash can in the kitchen, which was a challenge.  I had to put a black trash bag over can and turn it over… then sweep up everything that had fallen out.  JOY!  But I’m still smelling it.  Maybe I need a shower?  And now I’m getting  a bit of a headache and SOMEONE has run off with the Ibuprofen. Grrrr….

Oh, and I forgot to eat today, so now I’m in that “Whoever gets in between me and the TWINKIES will DIE!” hunger mode.  And I don’t even LIKE Twinkies!  LOL, but I did love Zombieland.

So I’m just a bit ADD at the moment, and was going through my starred stuff in my Google Reader.  Some of those posts I can’t even remember WHY I starred them.  Some of them were for challenges and to bookmark them so I could blog about it, but then I forgot to unstar them.  But one of them was a fun distraction:

Just for fun: stress test

Dawn at She’s Too Fond of Books had posted Just for fun: stress test last June, a time of year when one kid was gone to Dad’s, another was in summer school, and the third was spending all day outside with her friends.  So it was a LOT less stressful then that it was a few minutes ago when I looked at the not-moving, but “Hey, they ARE moving!” pics.

Apparently, the pictures are suppose to gage your stress level.  The more stressed out you are, the faster the images “move”.  They are, of course, NOT moving.  It’s only an illusion.  But the funny thing for me was how much faster they seemed to be going today than six or so months ago.  That one on the bottom is waving like a flag in a hurricane for me!

So how did you fair with them?  What’s your stress level?

Bloggiesta Progress Update #4

started at 7pm today

Well, it’s been a busy day away from Bloggiesta today.  Mags and I went to eat at her favorite restaurant, The White House.  We read a bit of Fruits Basket volume 5, then went to the library for their showing of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.  It was a cute enough movie, but I wanted to leave more than once.  It’s just… IDK… childish? annoying?  I did, however, love the monkey, Steve, as well as the police officer who I think was voiced by Mr. T.  I had to laugh when I said, “Hey, that’s Mr. T!” and Maggie said, “Who?”  I remember a time when the answer would have been to either do my best “I pity da foo'”, or say “B.A. Baracus”, however today my answer was, “You know, the Night Elf Mohawk.”  Ooh, yeah… lol.  I picked up some books for The Welsh Reading Challenge, too, and then we were off to the grocery store for the ingredients for Taco Casserole, which I ended up NOT making because I was too dang tired.  We stopped at Hardee’s for an industrial sized cup of coffee for me and a hot chocolate for Mags.  We sat there and finished Fruits Basket, for which I’ll write a review and schedule it for later.

I’m hoping to manage to get at least 3 more mini-challenges done tonight before going to bed, and then hopefully finish them all tomorrow. 

AND I just realized the mini-challenges I did yesterday were from last Bloggiesta, but it’s all good.  I needed to do them, anyway.  I still want to get through them, too, but that doubles the amount of challenges… not sure I’ll get them all done in that case 🙂

So first challenge tonight at Emily’s Reading Room.  It’s about setting up Google Alerts to keep track of trends in searching for topics to do with your blog.  Personally, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do for me, so I set up a couple with “The Kool-Aid Mom, thekoolaidmom, In the Shadow of Mt. TBR, Mt. TBR, and Welsh Reading Challenge”.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens.  According to @pussreboots and @bookladysblog, it also lets you know when the phrases you put in the alert are mentioned on the web, whether they link to you or not.

Next, I went to Books, movies, and Chinese Food‘s mini-challenge to create an elevator pitch for my blog.  Here’s what I came up with: 

In the Shadow of Mt. TBR is a fun and informative blog where The Kool-Aid Mom reviews books, posts humorous memes, occasionally rants, and has fits of ADD randomness.  Come on over and sit a spell in the shade, have a good laugh and contiue on your Web-browsing journey feeling refreshed!

Was kinda tough to write, but I’ll be surprised if I ever remember it when someone asks about my blog… lol.

For my third challenge this evening, I went to The Book Lady’s Blog Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Set Goals for 2010.  Rebecca has sooo many great ideas there, and my main goals that I’ve set for myself this year are:

• Get back to posting daily, whether a review, meme, or random post.  I had gotten distracted by playing the computer games, and got out of the habit.
• I plan to make a monthly reading plan and sticking to it.  I made one for January, but I’m already starting to whine and want to cheat… there’s just SoOoOOoo many good books out there!  But I really WANT to make the ARC-alanche pile disappear, so I’m staying with it.

Okay, so now I’m onto my fourth mini-challenge and that’s with Bookalicio.us’s Bloggiesta Mini Challenge:  Footers.  I caught some chatter about this one on Twitter last night and wanted to make sure I got it done.  To be honest, I’ve never done anything copyright related, so this is a completely new thing for me.

*tick-tock… time passes… spring, summer, fall, winter…I now have a headache…*  I don’t know how to do this stuff.  It looks like I have to pay for the copyright thing, and I can’t figure out how to do a footer.  I’ve looked all up and down the control panel in my dashboard, and I can’t find a thing to do a footer.  I can’t figure out how or where the plug-ing for it is, and even if I could, I think I tried to do some WP plug-in once before and found out I had to upgrade my account to use them.

I give up… I think I’ll go lie down and watched Stargate for a while.

***edit*** I added a Copyright widget, so I got it worked out.  I’m gonna do the feedburner, too.

Bloggiesta progress update #3

So, after taking a four hour break to eat and relax a little… very little as it turned out, as the kids screamed and fought and fussed until I sent them to bed, which they fought and fussed about with me (When a 17-year-old tells you “No”, it’s a delicate situation.  Diffusing nuclear BOMBS are less dangerous).  But it’s quasi-quiet, and after trying to read, only to fall asleep, give up and decide to sleep, only to have screaming and yelling and fighting start just after I slip into unconsciousness… Well, I’m wide awake now.  So, back to the Bloggiesta fiesta 🙂

I decided to go ahead and make a separate blog for The Welsh Reading Challenge, but it’s still some work before linking it up here.  It’s coming along nicely, though 🙂  I figure with a devoted blog, I can make all the lists and links that the challenge deserves without turning Mt. TBR into a chaotic mess.  Thanks BethFishReads and Rhinoa’s Ramblings for sharing their wisdom from their first year of hosting challenges 🙂

So now I’m doing a few mini-challenges…

First up, cleaning out the reader. The Book Lady’s Blog is hosting a mini-challenge to clean up your blog reader.  I use Google Reader, and currently have 64 subscriptions.  She puts it like this:

If you’re like me, you subscribe to more blogs than you can keep straight. You love some of them, you skim some others, and you might even mark some as “read” without even glancing. This mini-challenge is all about organizing your feedreader to make it work for you.

yeah… sadly, that’s true for me with a couple blogs.  Why I put them in my reader, I don’t even remember anymore.  Maybe they had a funny Friday Fill-In, so I thought I’d love their whole blog, but it always seems to be about rock collections or dogs in tutus… IDK… lol.  Actually, I’d probably read the dogs in tutus *glances over and Missy, looks to her left and sees the camera… wonders where the tutu and princess cone hat went*  Hehehehe.

So I’m cleaning out the reader and I’ve found one blog that’s moved several months ago, as well as a few dormant blogs and a couple whose content I never read.  As I’m going through the blogs that haven’t had a new post in more than three months, the thought hits me:  What if what happened to Katie in Undiscovered Gyrl happened to them?  What if they’re missing or dead, and I’m just callously ticking off their blog to unsub because they don’t post from the Great Beyond? 

So now I’m down to 51.  There is the possibility of 10 dead and missing bloggers somewhere out there and 2 blogs whose content I groan after skimming.  What’s next?  Categories and folders.  Good idea… if I’d have thought of that before unsubbing, I could’ve just made an “MIA” folder incase they’re found before the guy hacks them to bits and they return to blogging to tell their story.  BUT… I think I’m following them on twitter, so it’s all good.  Okay, so now I have a Welsh Challenge folder and a Meme folder, then the rest are regular bloggers that I read in general.

After that, all I need is to catch up on the reading, which I got caught up on a couple weeks ago, and have stayed caught up 🙂

Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Clean Up Your Feedreader! DONE 🙂

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Next up is BethFishRead’s Mini-Challenge to write up a rainy day post.  Either one of an opinion or a list.  I’ve actually got a half-done post that I started about a year ago… lol.  It’s a Fantasy Island list thing, so I think I’ll go ahead and finish it up for this. 

…… On second thought, after looking at what I thought was a half-finished post that turned out to be two lines of what I thought would be a fun post but I no longer know what I was talking about, I’ll write a new one. LOL.  But what to write… hmmmm…  I pretty much exhausted my opinions with the Festivus posts.  Okay, so it’ll be a list then.  BUT, you know me… it won’t be a dry, sensible list… oh, no… it’s going to be goofy and random.

*Tick-tock… minutes have passed*  Okay, got it done.  I set out to make a list, but it ended up more of a humorous rant, so I guess that’s an opinion… lol.

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And for my last mini-challenge before calling it a night, I’m going to Go forth and comment as commanded by Soft Drink at Fizzy Thoughts.

So for this mini-challenge, I (actually, it’s Natasha’s idea, I’m just channeling her for the moment) challenge you to seek out 10 (yes, ten!) new blogs (from the list of bloggers who signed up for the Bloggiesta) and leave a thoughtful comment on their blog. Saying “Just popping in to say hey ‘cause Softdrink told me to” ain’t gonna cut it for this challenge. Find a book review that intrigues you and tell them why. Look for something you have in common and chat about it. Ask them a question about their blog design. You get the idea, right? Be original…be engaging…be yourself!

Okies… so here’s the blogs I visited and left comments:

1. Reading With Tequila’s review of Mockingbird by Charles J. Shields lol, ended up ordering the book from PBS.
2. English Major’s Junk Food review of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen I’m safe from a new book addition, at least 🙂
3. Books of Mee’s review of The Sandman Volume 1:  Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman Again, another safe, non-book-getter one 😉
4. Notes from the North’s The Sunday Salon:  Terry Pratchett OooOOoo… now I’m whining because I want to join the Terry Pratchett reading challenge.
5. ReadingAdventures Terry Pratchett 2010 Challenge lol, wouldn’t you know it… she’d be a Bloggiesta participant.  Must be fate!  I joined the challenge for the 1-3 book range: Cashier at Ankh-Morpork Mint.  I can add ONE more book to my list this year, right?  lol
6. Graasland’s The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (The Sunday Salon of December 27th, 2009) safe from another book or challenge 🙂  Except… that I want to re-read it and I mooched my copy away… crap.
7.  Coffeespoon’s review of Slumdog Millionaire (or Q&A) by Vikras Swarup Already have it on Mt. TBR somewhere, and I’ve seen the movie… safe. 🙂
8. Michelle’s Masterful Musings’ review of Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris It’s already on my reading list for this month… or next.
9. The Zen Leaf’s review of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards Already read it, and found it okay, but the movie version killed it for me.
10. Bibliofreak’s review of All the King’s Men:  the movie I’ve seen the movie and liked it, but she says the book is even better… and I have the book, Yay!

Wow, 10 was kind of hard.  I got to about 7 and wanted to poop out.  Of course, it IS 3:30 am… and I have put in about 11 and a half hours on Bloggiesta… so I have a good excuse for being tire.

All in all, I think I really got a LOT done today.  While doing the commenting mini-challenge, I came across a few blogs that I always loved reading, but somehow never managed to get in my Google Reader, so my GR sub list is longer now, too 🙂

Kk.. I’m knocking off for the night.  The library is having a family movie event tomorrow, so I’ll probably start back on more mini-challenges sometime in the afternoon.

11:10 am – 7:25 pm… took a break… 11:20 pm – 3:45 am… going to bed.

Bloggiesta progress update #1

So, I’ve spent about the last 5 hours going through my widgets and sidebar contents and arrangements, as well as Tweet about #Bloggiesta and do a few other improvements.  Here’s what I got done:

• I took all the 2009 and older blogging awards I’d received and made a page for them here:  Past Awards  That way, I didn’t just abandoned them, and now the blog downloads faster.
• I tried to organize the sidebars so that like information is together.  My contact info, blog button and twitter thing together in the upper corner; blog posts, comments, pages, etc is together. 
• I’ve also updated the “Currently reading” widget to reflect what I’m reading and for which challenges, which will hopefully help keep me on track.
• And, of course, the biggest part of my task was going through my blogroll, making sure the links work and they lead to blogs that are currently active.  If it was still a good link, but the blogger hadn’t posted in over a month, I made sure they were in my reader, but removed them from the roll.  If they become active again, I can add them back 🙂
• Also, with the help of @TequilaReader, @neshelf, @jennsbookshelf, and @tanabata2000 on Twitter, I’ve finally got the Mt. TBR set up to tweet updates through Twitterfeed.  I have the RSS feedburner, too, but I’m not up on how to use it.  I think I added that during the last Bloggiesta, and there it’s sat since.

After getting all that done, I ran it through the Website Grader and had improved to 95.2% now.  I’ve got some broken links to address, but it continues to balk over all the images that are on my blog, over 60, with 23 not having ALT text? whatever that is.  IDK, I like images, so that may just be a part that we’ll agree to disagree on.  It’s also squealing about the Metatags as stuff, and I have NO CLUE how to fix them.

I need to go through now and update my Challenges page, as well as Mt. TBR’s inventory page, which I’m thinking about just putting a link to my LT library, as that’s my most accurate list.  I don’t want to delete the page, as people have left comments on it, so taking all those book links out may improve the site, as well.

I also want to visit the mini-challenges when I get everything caught up.

Chips, Dips, Memes and Quips ~ Comenzamos La Bloggiesta!

 Began at 11:05 am, Friday January 8th, 2010

Say hello to my little friend, Pedro! 

Plan.  Edit.  Develop.  Review.  Organize 

K, got my coffee… ate my sausage, egg and cheese biscuit from Hardee’s and I’m working on my country potatoes (mmm… soo much better than hashrounds!), and I’m saving the cinamon raisin biscuit for later.  My rat terrier, Missy, is full and happy after her Monster Biscuit (ham, cheese, egg, cheese, sausage, cheese, bacon and did I mention cheese? on a biscuit – It’s her new favorite from her FAVORITE restaurant), but would you believe that, after all that, she’s still bumming potatoes?  LOL..  Hardee’s is her one vice… that and cat turds fresh from the litter pan. 

My snow boots are kicked off, I’m feeling warm and relaxed, and I’m reading to get down with PEDRO!  Baila conmigo, buddy! 

So here’s what my plans are so far: 

• I need to update my widgets!  Some of them contain info from last summer, some from last year, in general.  I need to bring them up-to-speed.
• I’m evaluating whether or not to begin a seperate blog for The Welsh Reading Challenge.  A few people have joined (to be honest, more than I had expected, even), and there’s a wealth of titles and resources out there that I could tap.  The question is, however, how deep do I want to get in the challenge when my main reading focus for 2010 is to clear out all my ARCs by the end of the year.
• I’m debating whether or not to chuck Viral Video Wednesday.  I’ve been lazy with it anyway, and it’s a distraction all week long when I’m really trying to focus on my reading goals.  I love it and enjoy it, but maybe set it aside at least until next year.
• I need to update my Challenge page, my Mt. TBR inventory and ARC-alanche pages, as well as decide what to do with other pages.
• I need to update my accepting books policy, because I really don’t want to add more books to the pile unless it’s one I’m dying for and can’t live without.
• I need to establish a comprehensive and well-defined ratings system.  I feel the way I’ve been rating books is a bit arbitrary, and luckily I’ve found a good one to steal 😀
• I want to visit everyone’s mini-challenges and check out what everyone else is doing in case there’s anything else I want to steal 😀

That’s about it for now.  But I may add more later.  I’ll update as I complete things! 

 Visit MawBooks‘ Bloggiesta!  Ready, Set… Let’s Fiesta! for other participants, list of mini-challenges and to link your Bloggiesta party!