Bloggiesta: Finish Line

I'm a little early posting my wrap up, but I can't take another minute of fixing things!  Yes, I'm ready to get offline and go for a walk tonight, and then do some reading.  I do have to say thank you though to Natasha, and all the bloggers out there for your association.  I really do look to you all as good friends, who I get inspiration from, and book stacks that rival my library's!  Thank you for your encouragement and friendly comments and greetings.  During the school year, I feel sad that I fall out of the loop, so it's nice to catch up with everyone this time of year and to feel a part of this great community.

Okay.  I'd like to first acknowledge a couple of mini-challenges I completed.

1. Over at 2010 Blog Improvement Project, I went through and drafted up my original to-do list.  As I got started, I used some of the items on some of the checklists to consider what posts received the most comments or traffic, and why.  Listen, I realized that my overall goal is NOT traffic driven.  My overall goal is to read and then write honest and engaging reviews, as well as to engage in conversations that are pertinent to readers and/or the blogging community.  It seems to me, that books that were packed with issues, received the most comments.  Also, books that I wrote passionate reviews about.  What did that tell me?  I need to make sure that I allow my voice to come through in what I write.  It's not going to every day, but that's what I learned from my evaluation. 
2. I also worked on my Review Policy, and used Girls Gone Reading as a guideline to reconsider what I include.  I tried to keep my review policy succinct.  I'm not sure how many publishers are currently going to each blog to look at this review policy?  I get SO many emails now-a-days, with books up for review, and I doubt they actually have even looked at it.  So, here is what I did.  Using the suggestions, I bullet-pointed many of the main points that a publisher might seek out.  Unlike these wordy posts I'm putting up over the past couple of days (ha, ha), I decided to be succinct in what I would do, accept, and like.  I hope it works!

All right!  Time for this wordy girl to get to my statistics, and to show you my final list!

Time Spent:  17 Hours...Can you believe that?
Mini-Challenges:  2

• Last year I spent 10 hours. I think that I'd like to at least match that or work up to 12 hours?
• I'd like to catch up on my Google Reader. Although I have lots to do here, I often feel like this time of year is my only real time to reach out and visit and comment on other bloggers' sites. I'd really like to see what's going on with all of you, my blogging friends! Sounds silly, but so necessary to the health of my own blog.
• Write four book reviews.
• Finish working on the new pages I've created.
• Write up a better Review Policy.
• Fix the "About Me" page with better information that is professional, yet friendly. :)
• Figure out how to fix a few problems this new page has, such as everything being centered automatically.
• Create blog rolls. I have SO many blogs that I follow on my Google Reader, but only reflect about 10% of them on my actual blog. I'd like to include a scrolling blog roll for others to look at if they would like. ***Does anyone know if there is a good way of listing all your blogs that you visit?***
• Work on tags so I don't have duplicates.

I still have some things to work on, as you can see, but with 17 hours under my belt, 3 1/2 of which went into a blogroll that failed and had to be retyped, I feel good about what I accomplished.

Thanks again to Natasha for putting this together, and to everyone who has stopped by to give me encouragement.  You all are the best.  Let me know what you think, and if you see any issues with links, etc.  Now, I'm off to go for a walk!  Aloha, and Mahalo!