Bloggiesta 2011 - Finish Line

OK, I'm a little late with this but I was all worn out from the fiesta yesterday.

Here's the original list with updates

• Write reviews. Drafted/outline two reviews; completed one for publication this week.
• Write backup posts for a rainy day. Drafted two thinky posts
• Write that great post idea from three months back.  See above; also noted some ideas for future and uploaded to google docs.
• Create template posts for your future reads. This doesn't really work for me since my format is very loose.  I did do one for the Thursday Thirteen posts that includes the header pic and the footer text.  It took me less than 10 minutes.

• Clean up tags & blogrolls - Blogrolls-DONE; labels not so much
• Fix the favicon - DONE
• Work on any specialized projects (Friday Fantasy Feature) - not so much
• Put out invitations for guest posts for above - Opened up some dialog with fave fantasy bloggers
• Master the art of the feed reader and blog subscriptions. Researched a bit.  Did not really have any "a-ha" moments.
• Make business cards (eh, maybe).  Nah.
• Back up your blog. Nah
• Participate in some mini-challenges. I read most of the challenge articles but didn't really do the exercises.
• Learn more about blogging, read great articles, get inspired. Yes!  thanks fellow participants!
• Make sure you have properly copyrighted your blog and know what to do when somebody reposts your material. Sooo, as near as I can tell from the decidedly non-actual-legal advice I found on the challenge and elsewhere, your own material is copyrighted whether you put the special little symbol in your footer or not; registering with the copyright office (for a fee) may give you more protection. Opting out of that for the moment. 
• Help other bloggers, answer questions, share your expertise (let’s face it – this is the best part of Bloggiesta!) Yes!  I can't really say "Done" because how can you be "done" with something like that? but I did chip in my 2 cents here and there while I was hopping around.  Good thing there was a challenge for this because I am known for being shy and retiring online.

========================================
Things I did that I didn't expect to:

• Added social networking buttons to the post footer template.
• Went down a rabbit hole researching fancy ways to organize labels on the Blogger platform; decided to leave any major re-org for another time, but collected a list of reference links.
• Discovered a book with associated challenge that sounds interesting (The Heroine's Bookshelf).
• Thinking about glomming onto the Sunday Salon meme.
• Updated my "About" page.

 ========================================
So all in all, a very productive weekend.  I managed about 12 hours over two days, perhaps a bit more if you include the bloghopping (loved the participant feed reader!)

Many thanks to Natasha at Maw Books for hosting and organizing; I found the whole event to be a great motivator for those "tune-up" items that are easy to procrastinate on.