Blog Improvement Project: Task 4

Part four of the Blog Improvement Project was all about the basics, and proved to be much more challenging than I at first anticipated. In fact, I still haven’t finished!

Write (or update) your “About Me” Page — Make sure you can see your About Me from the main page of your blog because someone just arriving at the site should be able to easily see a little information about you

It’s coming soon, I promise! First I got caught up with my general maintenance (see below). Then I had a fabulously original idea that requires images and JavaScript. Since said idea only arrived a few hours ago I’ve not had time to implement it.

Update your contact information

See the profile section of the left sidebar - it now contains my email address.

Add some sort of picture of yourself (if you’re comfortable with that)

I’d been thinking for ages of putting up some sort of self-portrait, and I finally sat down with camera, paper, and pencils and got to work. I’m quite pleased with the result, though I should point out that a. it’s somewhat idealised (but then what self-portrait isn’t?), and b. it was taken from far and away the best photograph I could manage. I don’t usually look that good!

Update your Blogroll — Blogging Startup has a good series on blogrolls starting with “Does My Blog Need A Blogroll?” — check out some of the other entries, they’re pretty short and interesting

This is an ongoing project for me. One of things on my to do list (right) is to add twenty new blogs - I’m six down, fourteen to go. What this task had gotten me to do is a bit of weeding out of the ones I read least.

Create a link to your Archives on your front page (there are a lot of widgets for this, or you can find other ways to do it — either way, it’s important to do so people who want your archives can find them to get a sense of what they can expect from your blog)

One point for which I had to do nothing!

Add a link (or make sure a link is there) so readers can subscribe to your blog via RSS

I added Blogger’s feeds widget to the sidebar (left) - presumably that includes a system that uses RSS. Since my net knowledge begins and ends with the HTML and CSS I’ve picked up during blog customisation, I’m a little hazy on this point.

Get to work on other basic blog maintenance you’ve been meaning to do

When I first saw this, I thought I didn’t need to worry about it as everything had been taken care of in January when I switched from template to layout. Then I read the comments on the task post - specifically the ones referring to cleaning up tags and putting in a way to search reviews - and thought, Oh, bugger. That was last week and since then I’ve spent almost every free moment I possess going through my entire archive, adjusting tags, standardising post formatting, and collecting review URLs for indexing. I’m still not done, but I’ve put up what I’ve got so far. There are now links in the left sidebar (below the archives) to the in-progress index pages, where reviews are listed by author, by title, and by grade. Once completed, they’ll be updated weekly. I’ve also written an index guide, explaining the finer points of the way they’re organised.

When this is done, I’ll be exhausted!