Bloggiesta wrap up

Another Bloggiesta has come to a close. How did I do?

My primary goal was accomplished Saturday morning: all posts going forward are using IntenseDebate. So far I like it, though there are a few kinks I need to work out. Maybe it's just me, but every time I click to reply to an ID comment, the comment field is already populated with the last comment I wrote. It's totally bizarre. Is that happening for anyone else?

Other than the comments change, I caught up on all of my reviews - which, granted, was only 5. Barely a drop in the bucket. But I still got them out of the way, so that's good.

I was also able to put together my feminist YA novels list. I'm pretty proud of it. I think I might put together a reflection post on it to post on a rainy day - I've already had one comment suggesting I add The Hunger Games which I just don't think is going to fit in with how I conceive of the list. Also, I recognize it's a rather white list - the two books about African-American women are both set in the army in WWII. Of course, a lack of racial diversity (or the perception thereof) has been a longstanding problem in the feminist movement, so it's unsurprising that the same problem is found in YA representations of the topic.

My sidebar has been tweaked a couple of times over the weekend - the subscribe by e-mail option is more prominent, as is subscribing via Google FriendConnect. NetworkedBlogs has also been added. I removed the links to the old reading challenges and added a link to my TBR shelf on Goodreads. It's a pretty empty shelf at the moment - adding my (massive) TBR list to Goodreads is one of the things I didn't happen to accomplish. However, I think I want to try to be more social about my Goodreads use, so please add me as a friend if you're so inclined!

I also learned about FeedFlare and implementing those options both into my RSS feed and the footer of every post here on the blog! Oh, and the aforementioned wireless set up in my apartment was completed yesterday afternoon, too.

I was much more relaxed about Bloggiesta this time than previously. I think it's because I had no big projects that needed to be tackled. My tags are kept rather orderly and I didn't want to do any massive layout changes. Thanks to my new year's resolution to spend 6-8 hours writing every weekend (including writing for the blog), I've been able to keep mostly up-to-date on my reviews. So I found that a lot of my Bloggiesta time was spent on Twitter and I went out of my way to comment on more blogs than I have before. I think if I can keep on top of general blog work, I'm going to be doing a lot more cheerleading in future Bloggiestas. I think this is a really worthwhile project and I profusely thank Natasha for setting this up for the fourth time! Poor thing hardly has a chance to work on her own blog she's so busy organizing and cheering the rest of us on. I hope to help out in June by at least hosting a mini-challenge of some kind! Perhaps helping to change comment systems, since I've found that so rewarding.

This is the end of the Bloggiesta posts until this summer (I hope!). Fellow participants: congratulations on all of your hard work! Just think - anything you didn't get done this time around, you can get to next time!