Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Edit: Goal results are below.

I also ended up “meeting” some new book bloggers, though not as many as I’d have liked. I left about 5 comments around the blogosphere.

2010 has been all about changes here at 5 Minutes for Books. We’ve changed up our community events like the Classics Bookclub and the Children’s Classics carnival (now a Children’s Classics Mystery Challenge) and we also tweaked the I Read It carnival. So far, response has been great.

But there are a bunch of other changes I’ve wanted to make to make the site more user friendly, and so I decided to join the Bloggiesta challenge at Maw Books. The idea is to take some concentrated time over a 3 day period (which started yesterday) to catch up on all that bloggy maintenance. It could be writing reviews that you’ve neglected writing, setting reviews to post, or cleaning up and organizing all of those behind the scenes things.

I have my own ideas, but I would love to hear feedback from you if there’s something that you think would make 5 Minutes for Books better. Just leave a comment.

As for my goals —

• My primary task is to make our past reviews easier to search. This is also a mini-challenge being hosted by Beth Fish Reads. One relatively quick fix I’d like to add is a menu on our navbar that will take you directly to categories of reviews. I had thought about just using our tags, but all that does is pull up a list of the reviews in order by date. That’s not very user friendly, is it? So I suppose I can make a separate page for the categories. I’d like to divide them by Fiction, Non-fiction, Children’s books, and Young Adult reviews. Some Questions: How would you like it indexed? I’m thinking alphabetically by title? Would other categories be useful?(edit: I made a plan, and I tried to download the new nav bar, but I think I need to update WP press)
• I also have several reviews I would like to write. I have at least four reviews that I need to get in draft, and if I think about it, I could probably write a few more. I would also like to write two On Reading columns (book bloggers — we are always looking for guest posters!) (edit: I wrote three reviews and no columns).
• I figured out that it would be a lot more effective for me to set up the posts in advance for the regular community events that we host. What’s On Your Nightstand? and Kids’ Picks and I Read It! all happen each month, so I’d like to get those link-up posts ready to go for the next few months at least (edit: I’ve set up posts for all 3 carnivals for at least 3 months — woohoo!)
• Our “Join In” page is out of date, since we’ve changed the way we are handling some of our Tuesday events, so I’d like to update that (edit: DONE!)

Even though I’m late getting started, this is a good day, since I will spend much of the afternoon and evening sitting beside my husband as he cheers for (or yells at) his two teams — the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas A&M Aggies.