Bloggiesta!

     Isn't this little dude cute? He's blogging! His name is PEDRO, Plan, Edit, Develop, Review, Organize, and he's the mascot for Bloggiesta, an online party, Friday, Saturday, & Sunday, for working on your blog's "to do's".
     I learned of this from Suey @ It's All Bout Books this past Wednesday. She and Enna and Emily and Penelope and Jenny came to my publishing class as guests! Because, you know, book bloggers rule (and help authors and publishers out a ton).
     Anyway, I'd like to be a part of this and get some things done here on the blog. As you can see I've revamped the blog already (I hope you like it!), which was not part of Bloggiesta, but which has motivated me to do more updates, etc.

So here are a few things I plan to work on this weekend in honor of Bloggiesta:

GOODREADS!
Good grief do I need to update my profile and shelves and just all around get the hang of it.

READING CHALLENGES!

I keep hearing about and seeing badges for various reading challenges. I'd like to sign up for a few! I think this would help motivate me to read more instead of ending up on the couch late at night, eating popcorn, and watching Korean dramas (I do love me some Korean dramas though).I signed up for three, the perpetual Local Author challenge and the 2012 YA Author challenge (linked images for both can be found in the scrolling marquee on the lower right sidebar) and the Goodreads 2012 reading challenge. I decided to try two books a month starting tomorrow. We'll see how it goes!

COMMENTS!

I'd like to peruse around the book blogging community and post meaningful comments. Not just to potentially win something, but to connect with the writers of the blogs. I'd especially like to focus on the Utah book blogging community so that I can get to know more of the wonderful people that live near me who I probably pass by at each and every author event I go to. I've made some great friends already, but I'd like to make some more! Hooray for making connections.
I replyed to all those who commented here (thank you!) and commented on a few more besides. From now on, this will be one of the ways that I am more social (internet-wise).

WEED! (not the noun. The verb, people, the verb.)

I have waaaay too many images on my Google/Picasa account. I am pretty much out of space. I need to go through the albums and delate the duplicates and unused images.
I've done some!

REDO!

After purging my blog image albums, I need to go through my posts and make sure the image links work. Because I revamped my blog, I also need to check the sizing of the images in my posts. Some images are now too large and need to be smaller-ized.
I've re-sized images to several posts, but I still need to do more. Soo many posts with images! Darn you old blog layout in which I made the widths so wide and thus made the post images large!

edit: TWITTER!
I need to put myself out there more. I must become clever in 140 characters or less.

edit: PINTEREST!
I just posted about it here.
And now I've gone and done it. Check out the Pinterest Hamburger social media button I made in my upper left sidebar.

edit: ADD SHARE BUTTONS!
Do you see them down there? I added an FB like button and a Pinterest button next to the normal blogger share buttons. Lots of tweaking went on. If you'd like the HTML code for how to do it, let me know.

edit: REMOVE PICTURE BORDER!
Got rid of that pesky default sucker. I'm referring to the default white border and shadow around post images that comes with this blogger template.

edit: POLICIES!
Create a policy page for reviews and giveaways.

edit: and I've done  so many things that I don't have listed. Oy, my eyes.

Well, I think this is enough to keep me busy, and thoroughly unproductive in other aspects of my life like laundry and dishes.

Hooray for blogging!

     Aside from personal "to do" lists, another part of Bloggiesta is (are?) the challenges. These exist to help make blogs the best they can be. So whether you are a veteran blogger, and new blogger, or an in-between blogger, (or not even a blogger) there is a lot that you can learn.

Check out the challenges here:
* New challenges
* Past Challenges

Thank you! And good luck to all of those who are [participating in Bloggiesta!