Blog Housekeeping

Remember a couple of weeks ago I made a list of things I wanted to do around the blog? Well, I've been working through it.

The first point on the list was to update the look of the blog. Well I've been playing around with some things and I kinda realised that I actually like things the way they are at the moment. It's funny how you get attached to certain features that you see almost every day. That gingham background was kind of added as a sort of 'eh, it'll do' last year. Now I'm attached to it and green with white spots just didn't look right.

I've been fiddling around with a word cloud thing for the header, but it's taking some work and I'm not sure when it'll be done, if at all. I'm fussy about things like that. At this rate I might have something to swap it for next year. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm still quite attached to this header, see my above comments about the background.

The About Me page has had a wee bit of work done to it. A teensy tiny bit of tidying up of the text. I still need to add some pictures and I think once I do I'll be able to condense down the text. A picture speaks a thousand words and all that.

My major update this week has come in the form of the third point in the list: Merge my book list pages.

See that! It kind of goes along with my 'make new pages' thing. I sat down yesterday and went through last years book journal, making a list of every book that I'd read last year and organising it into alphabetical order by author. Then today (while spending three hours waiting for a video to upload onto Facebook) I went through all of my reviews of those books and made sure the title linked to the book.

So far I've just done the book reviews from last year but in the coming weeks I'll add the books I've read this year (and as I write reviews for them I'll update the list) as well as the books I've read in previous years. Not all of them have actually been reviewed here, so who knows, maybe it'll inspire me to write reviews for books I read back in 2012... or perhaps I'll just go back and read them again.

Today I also had to do something that I swore I wouldn't do unless it was absolutely necessary: go back and edit a post for a reason other than a spelling mistake. An unfortunate combination of words which appeared in my review for the film Jersey Girl resulted in that post generating rather a lot of traffic for this blog. I can only guess that the people finding the post were disappointed.

I'd toyed with what to do with that post for the last few weeks. I did at one point consider taking it down completely, or at least putting a message at the top to tell people their search terms were disgusting. Instead I chose to remove two of the offending words (the ones which seemed to trigger the most search terms at least), basically rewriting two sentences of the post. I'll keep an eye on things and see if that makes a difference.

I'm also thinking that I might post slightly more frequently on this blog. I just hope that doesn't annoy people too much. I'd considered opening a second blog to save overwhelming this one with posts, perhaps just for book and film reviews, but where would that end; would knitting pattern reviews go on that one or here? What about phone and Kindle apps? Products I buy for my pets?

In the end I decided that as this is a personal blog, and reading books and watching films is something that I do personally for fun, it's all staying here. Since I'm not studying anything this year I have a lot more free time on my hands and blogging is a hobby I enjoy so I'm enjoying having the time to be more active.

I'm open to suggestions though. If there's something you're not so keen on seeing here by all means let me know. Likewise, if two posts a day aren't a good thing then let me know and I can work something out. :-)