Learning lots at the bloggiesta festivities!

Here's my six words for today:
Learning lots at the bloggiesta festivities!

Now to expand on those six words  :)


I decided to skim the mini challenges - old and new - and I got sucked in!

Here are the Old Challenges that caught my eye:
Clean Up Your Feedreader - got rid of feeds that hadn't been updated for over a year, got rid of some that I never really read anymore, got rid of some tags - down to 110 subscriptions, 13 tags.  I know that still sounds like a lot and I may do more cleaning yet, we'll see.

Google Alert Challenge - Never heard of Google Alert before and didn't find the link provided with the challenge all that helpful so went searching for info.   I found a good explanation and instructions on how to Set Up Google Alert Yourself and set one up for my blog address and my blog title.

Elevator Pitch - didn't know what an elevator pitch was but up on reading what it was and trying to work on one I realized that I already have a really short one, at 29 words, in my banner.

Favicons and Gravatars - I had heard bout a favicon before but didn't know how to make one or install it on my blog so I decided to give it a try.  I had much trouble but also had much help from Trish and Jill.  I finally figured out how to do it from How to Add a Favicon in Blogger.  In case you don't know what a favicon is, check out the little icon in the URL box by my blog URL.  Notice that it's no longer the bright orange blogger favicon.  I created my own little J's favicon.  Isn't it cool!?  I didn't do the Gravatar part of the challenge

Anchors Aweigh -  I learned about the importance of using more descriptive anchor words for links.  I'm trying to do better at that. 

Grade Your Blog  - I did a website grader and only scored 57%!  Boy, do I need to do some work.  One of the things I need to do is include ALT text for images.  I never do that.  Another is to add meta tags.  I tried, and tried to do that yesterday but never did succeed.  I kept getting an error message when trying to save it.  Sure wish I knew what was wrong

And the new challenges that appealed to me:

Cheat Sheet - I was sort of already doing this with sticky notes on my igoogle page for daily blog posting ideas, but I like the idea of making a master cheat sheet for blogging codes.

Footers and Copyright - I did not have a footer or copyright on my blog at all but this challenge had me searching to find out how to add it.  I found a website that finally helped me figure out how to add a copyright notice to my blog.  You have to scroll down to the bottom to actually see the copyright notice.  
 
Labels and tags - I had actually already started trying to be more consistent in adding labels to my posts.  I still forget sometimes but I'm trying to stay on top of fixing it when I forget.
 
Backing Up Your Blog - I had never thought about doing it before but it's done now, thanks to this challenge.  I can't believe it was so easy to do!
 
Dead Links - I hate dead links, but they are kind of inevitable. I do, however, think it is important to fix them when you become aware of them.  I tried testing my blog for dead links but got really frustrated with trying to read the results.  I may try again later.  I'd love it if people would leave a comment when they found a dead link, because then I would find out about it and fix it.