Weekly Geeks: Housekeeping

This week take a look at your blogs and do a little generally cleaning. Fix those broken links, straighten out those blogrolls, make some labels. Stuff like that.

Your blog is perfect, you say? How about your email? Time to delete some of those old messages. Have a look at your blog subscriptions in your blog readers. Maybe it needs a good going over. Are you a member of LibraryThing? Add those Christmas gifts to your virtual bookshelves. Upload your audiobooks to your iPod. Download some ebooks.

Nothing to do online? How about looking at your bookshelves at home? Organize them anyway you see fit. (Take some pictures.) Take unwanted books to the used book store or give them to charity. Get a library card.

After you've done your cleaning, write a post about it or vlog or haiku. Just let us know what you did. Come back see what others have done.

I didn’t participate in Bloggiesta, as I didn’t have that kind of time to give to blogging over a single weekend. But I did check out the site to get some more ideas for my blog to-do list. Now the list is so long that the entire rest of January looks set to be one long Bloggiesta for me. (Possibly part of February, too; it depends on how long it takes me to work out how to make what I want to do work with my layout.)

This week I:

• Updated my sidebars.
• Added the books I got for Christmas to LibraryThing, and discovered that some of my older books still need to have their covers scanned and uploaded.
• Cleaned out my email inbox, an act which was long overdue.
• Made good progress in unifying the formatting of all my old posts, including adding ALT tags to all my images.
• Finally started catching up with my review backlog. I did intend to have more ready to go up tonight, but I decided to wind up some loose skeins of wool first. This turned out to be a mistake; one of them got into an extraordinary tangle of Gordian knot proportions, and it took me all evening to sort it out.
• Saved the latest incarnation of the layout.
• Backed up my blog. For - *gasp* - the first time ever. Yes, this is appalling negligence, and no, I won’t let it happen again.

The bookshelf maintenance, though, will have to wait until I work up the courage to cull. I’m considering setting a date and putting a countdown in my sidebar - the prospect of public failure should be incentive to get it done. So too will the prospect of taking the weeded-out books in good condition to a secondhand bookstore I know that takes trade-ins. I’m telling myself that since the new acquisitions will go in the TBR box, not on the shelf (yet), I won’t actually be adding to the storage problem.