1. Marketing and Design: I want to have a blog, gravatar, favicon, and business card that are aesthetically linked. And I don't want to pay big money to do it. COMPLETE (if not perfectly matched)
2. Search Engine Optimization: I want to insert a description and metatags to my coding.
3. Scheduled Posting: I want to post on some sort of regular schedule, and not every day. To do this, I will have to get used to scheduling posts. I like to post immediately upon finishing a review so that I can immediately add the link to the appropriate challenge websites.
4. Comment Friendly Posting: Each post I make needs to include some direction for commenting, a question or discussion point to encourage responses (comments).
5. About Me Page: I want to create an About Me page (post) that includes info about me, the blog, and review copy policy. The post will be linked in the header. COMPLETED!
6. Challenges: I need to find a more clean, organized way to display the challenges I am part of, where both links, the challenge website and my challenge post, are in the same place. Right now they are a bit all over the place. COMPLETED!
7. Social Networking: I want to add ShareThis, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc. Not all of them as I think it's a bit ridiculous, but finding effective ways to promote my blog is a goal. ReTweeting active.
8. Writing Posts: I would like to take a bit more time with my posts before hitting the Publish Post button. For the most part, I write in one quick sitting, I don't edit, I don't revise, and I in general defy every rule of the writing process I preach to my composition students. In my defense, I do not want this blog to become too much like work; I am doing this for fun, not to make money, and I have a full time job already. That being said, I do think it a good idea to maybe, just maybe, force myself to re-read everything I write before I can hit Publish Post.
9. Draft Posts: I would like to set up some drafts to be used continuously including: book review draft, Sunday Salon/Weekly Wrap Up draft, monthly wrap up draft, monthly movie review draft.
10. Labels: I really really need to eliminate some and organize the rest. What an ewwww-y task, but I think a necessary one. COMPLETED!
11. Legal Hullabaloo: I want to add copyright and disclosure statements.
12. Google Reader: I need to clean this up and possibly eliminate the Following option for organizational purposes.
I know there's more, but that is my initial list. If anyone has any suggestions for how to complete these goals, or if you have suggestions for the blog, please let me know!
I think these are great goals! I think I need to join this challenge too. Especially b/c I was thinking about how I'm going all out to make it to the book blog con and yet haven't really been paying a whole lot of attention to my actual blog recently, haha.
ReplyDeleteI really like your list! Very inspiring ... uh-oh! Just what I need -- another project!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand #1. What is a gravatar and favicon?
That is an admirable list! I do actually pre-schedule posts, 3 to 5 weeks out. Takes the pressure off a little bit.
ReplyDeleteYou've got some good ideas to work on. I'm sure I'm going to sucked into doing some of this too.
ReplyDeleteI preschedule posts all the time ... it is quite easy to do.
I like your to-do list -- it's practically the same as mine. I just recently started using templates for common posts and I love it. It takes some of the time-consuming formatting out of writing new posts.
ReplyDeleteIt is a great to-do list! I would love to schedule posts in advance too. I managed to be about 5 days ahead last year, but that all collapsed over Christmas. Hopefully we'll both manage to get a bit more organised in the future.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with the rest of your list!