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.
Posts
