Bloggiesta Wrap Up

I knew going into the weekend that finding even 18 hours over 3 days to devote to Bloggiesta was going to be difficult. Then I suddenly found myself with my mother-in-law come to visit on Saturday into Sunday. Which should have made it more difficult but curiously made it easier for me to sit at my desk for hours. After all, that's where she was camped out. I couldn't very well wander off to clean bathrooms and leave her all by herself, could I? So I got my did manage to get 18 hours of work in after all. So what did I do with all of that time? I started by hitting up some of the mini-challenges. Rebecca at The Book Lady's Blog challenged us to set goals for the coming year which actually helped me to figure out my priorities for the rest of Bloggiesta. Then I grabbed on from the previous Bloggiesta, where Emily, from Emily's Reading Room, taught me how to set up alerts.

While I was checking out the flashback challenges, I noticed Trish's (of Hey Lady! Whatcha' Reading) which talked about favicons and gravatars. I had no idea what favicons and gravatars were so I had to check that out. And now I have a favicon and a gravatar and I know how to change them when I finally hit on the image I want. For now, the book picture I've been using for a lot of other things will work.

I was having so much fun with the old challenges that I checked out how to analyze by blog (and was very surprised and pleased with the result) and took a cue from Rebecca again and cleaned up my feedreader as well as catching up on all of my unread posts.

Then I got back on track with the things I had planned on doing to begin with: I put together a list of ideas for Sunday Salons, a list of books I want to highlight on my Friday Favorites and downloaded the book covers I need for that, I fixed and updated by slide show, put together a list of ideas for future posts and authors to contact and I got my blogging calendar put together. But the big thing I got accomplished, which you'll notice right away if you've been reading this blog, is to switch the blog to a 3-column format. I'm still not sure I'm happy with it but it is a change.

I feel so good about everything I accomplished. Maybe even better, I feel like I'm re-energized about blogging. Thanks to Natasha, of Maw Books, for hosting Bloggiesta!