Hey, if you’re reading this in a feed reader click on the link and come see my new theme!
Yeah, I’m a restless soul, always looking for change and variety. I suffer from wanderlust, and I can never be happy with the same blogskin for more than a few months. This new version of Bookworm has bright colors, a one hundred percent liquid layout AND rounded corners (requiring a little extra markup but who cares), and an old-fashioned sidebar with everthing in it. Although I do prefer the cleaner look of blogs that have links & archives tucked away on separate pages, or sidebars down on the bottom, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that it really is better to have that stuff where people can see it right away. (Do you agree? Disagree?)
I wish that when I would drop out of the blogosphere everyone else would too. I mean jeez, a few days with too much to do and no childcare, and what happens? My Bloglines is overflowing with unread posts. I hope to catch up within the next few days.
This week’s challenge is to encourage other bloggers who have reviewed the same book you did to send you a link to their post; then you include those links at the bottom of your review. My first thought was: what a great idea! And my second thought was: what a housekeeping nightmare! I imagined myself compiling a list of all the books I’ve ever reviewed and posting them on a separate page. That would make it really easy for other bloggers to tell at a glance whether we have any in common. So I clicked on my own “reviews” category archive, and my goodness, what a mess.
Have you heard about the Weekly Geeks challenge yet? Each week Dewey at The Hidden Side of a Leaf will post a theme or idea for a blog post. If you want, you can write a post in response to the challenge, and at the end of the week Dewey will collect them all and write up a carnival-like post about them. A lot of people have signed up already, and I think it’s gonna be fun! If you’re interested, you can sign up here.
Normally I would wait a few weeks before upgrading, to give the bugs a chance to sort themselves out. But I couldn’t wait to take WordPress 2.5 for a spin — so here it is, on the very day it was released. So far, everything seems fine. My plugins are working, as far as I can tell, and the site looks normal — except for the admin area, which is quite different. It will take some getting used to.
I just learned about this new service that “enhances” your blog’s content, called Zemanta. You type in your blog post and it does your research for you, resulting in a selection of relevant links, articles, and photos that you can then insert into your post. When I first saw this (via Weblog Tools Collection) I thought the whole idea was pretty goofy. But then I guiltily remembered all the times I haven’t bothered to add Amazon links to the books I’m writing about, let alone links to support my arguments. So I decided to try out the demo.
