Bloggiesta finish line

Oh no, is it over already? 🙁 But so much more blogs to read, people to meet and things to do! Oh noes!
Doing these things when chronically ill is quite hard for me, there’s a set date and ‘time’, it requires lots of energy for doing stuff, keeping track of stuff and keeping in touch with people, because above all this bloggiesta to me was about being social! Networking!
I often lacked the energy to focus on a screen or plain sit up, Friday was a very busy day for me – bring Darwin to the vet (8 am), go to the library (only to find out it’s closed in the morning), rush home to meet up with the plummer, get some food in, clean the house, calm down, back to the vet, quickly back home an prep a room for Darwin to stay in whilst I cycle to the busstop to take the bus to Pijnacker to meet up with Saskia who is sponsering part of my flooring, back on the bus, IKEA, rush through that, go to Rotterdam with Marius by car to pick up more flooring from Daniëlle, back to my place, move packages of flooring indoors, wave Marius goodbye and collapse. No wait. Walk to busstation to pick up bike, get groceries, make dinner, eat, collapse, 10.30 pm. That would be a rough and busy day for everyone, with my chronic fatigue and 6 times slower healing I have been basically exhausted, started to ‘wake up’ sunday afternoon with most of #bloggiesta (damn right, so active on twitter bloggiesta now has an auto-type of hashtag 😆 ) already passed. But, I did manage to speak to a lot of people and do lots of things!

Such as:

• Comment on LOTS of blogs, and thereby finishing one of the mini-challenges. I completed most of the mini-challenges, but as expected not the pages/freshen up content ones. I’ll be doing that this week and more later. These were mostly for Uit een Doosje and Met de Paplepel anyway, but still. I need to at least check up on the ‘About me’ and contact page.
• Add social media buttons! Now you can stalk me to the extreme!
• Made a pinterest button. These are still all temporary, but there wasn’t any in the icon set I got, and I needed one!
• Rearrange my sidebar to be calmer to the eyes 😉
• Added Goodreads challenge and ‘what I’m reading’ to the sidebar. The ‘what I’m reading’ doesn’t seem to update automatically with Goodreads – expected as much when I saw the code – so I might look into that again later 😕 mile:
• Made a header for UeD, didn’t work, appears to be the (downloaded) theme not functioning there.
• Removed the direct click-through from Cy-V.nl to here. Friends know where to find me and others can ask. Makes stalking my personal life a bit harder, at least until I sorted through my 7 years of blogging to check if there’s something I don’t want everyone to see.
• Decided I don’t want my personal blog to completely match the cooking/bento-blog’s identity, though I will do color-hinting.
• Removed the searchwords embedded in my frontpage!
• Got a star rating plugin for book reviews etc [Rating:4.5/5]
• Made my first bookreview!
• Installed GIMP and blew the dust of my Bamboo pen and tablet.
• Learned to use the ‘pen tool’
• Found lots of new blogs!
• Got tips for sorting my google reader! For example: very simple, add the blogger’s name in parentheses behind the blog’s name! So like this ‘Uit een Doosje (Samantha)’! Makes it easier to remember people and comment on their blogs!
• Made a partial vlog, still needs to be uploaded
• Got all the blogs connected to bloglovin!
• Added buttons/banners for blogloving to all the blogs
• Got the bloglovin app

And probably lots more but I honestly can’t think of more.

Still want to do:

• Get that ‘Spamantha’-title thing up top mintgreen/turquoise. It’s been bugging me for ages that it’s not a picture but generated and does not respond to color-code
• Sort out the categories and tags. 🙄 It was the big elephant in the room but this and the going through posts would take me the entire weekend. I decided to do everything else first. It’s done partially, I got most of the tags and categories, it’s the sorting through that’s the ‘Ugh’ here!
• Make a better ‘about me’.
• Check if use pictures of external sites and change to own-hosting.
• Check all pictures for alt-text, these texts are recognized by programs that read out website to blind people, so they can enjoy it too.
• Change ‘open in new tab’ links to regular links. Will probably not do this here until I did EVERYTHING else. I mean. 7 years of blogging to go through. Sheesh!
• Import blogs from VrijVreemd. Wasn’t able to do that because that option wasn’t there 😕 hock: . Luckily it’s a friend-hosted blog so that will be sorted out. It was on my last bloggiesta list a year ago though!
• Check blog for things that are public yet you don’t want everyone to see.

So basically I still have to do the ‘go through all posts made since 2005’ thing. Yuuuup!

Still think this was a very succesful bloggiesta! My main goal was to meet more people, discover more blogs, and of course do those mini-challenges because dang, some blogs needed those! The next 28-30 September, by then I’ll hopefully be working on the 4th blog that has been gathering virtual dust for a year already!