Bloggiesta 2011

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It:
A blog-improvement marathon.  Hosted by Natasha at Maw Books, this is an event that she has run a number of times.  Officially it goes from 8 am today (ie, NOW) to 8:00 am Monday morning.  However, there is flexibility -- not many of us can expect to start right at that moment or to work continuously all weekend.  Click on the emblem in the sidebar to see the announcement post with the rules, sign-up, and suggestions.

I did this challenge about a year and half ago, in the summer of 2009, and my goals are going to look remarkably similar now as they did then.  Thing is, some things you can do once and forget them; some you need to pay constant attention to, and others, well, you can let them go for awhile but it's good to spruce them up every now and then.  The Bloggiesta challenge is good motivation/inspiration for me to do that kind of maintenance and  maybe to look at my long-term strategy.

This Year's To-Do List
Because Natasha has gotten so good at these lists, I've done a cut and paste from her post (credit where it's due!), deleted the ones that I'm not interested in or have completed, and modified a few to suit me:

• Write reviews.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day.
• Write that great post idea from three months back.
• Create template posts for your future reads (ie: title, images, linking, tags, etc,) so you can open up, write review and post without being bogged down with technicalities (interesting idea, no?  worth a try!)

Notice that these all pertain to making it quicker and easier to get good content out of my head and into the blog.  I have a notion that I might outline a few ideas I've had -- I could write them later but there are a few ideas I've had knocking around for quite a while.  What I've learned after three years of blogging is that at this point? if I don't do something pretty soon, they'll fade away.  These ideas don't need more mental percolation time to gel; they need butt-in-seat, hands-on-the-keyboard time to make it happen.

Some housekeeping type things, to do in between the heavy-duty content generation:

• Clean up tags & blogrolls
• Fix the favicon
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature)
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).
• Back up your blog.
• Participate in some mini-challenges
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired.
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material.
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!)

I'm not going to have much time to work on this today, and I have some other stuff to do here and there over the weekend, but I figure I could probably get in 15 or 20 hours.  Let's call 20 the goal.  I'll be checking in here and there, and be sure to visit Natasha for the linky -- do some bloghopping and get some ideas for your own improvement program.