Tagged: blogging
Get Your Nominations in for BlogHer 2014!
BlogHer is celebrating its tenth anniversary and you have from now until February 28th to get your submissions in the Voices of the Year and/or Photos of the Year. I’d heard of BlogHer before this year but never really gave serious thought to nominating anyone. But in the past year I’ve read some pretty awesome posts and I want to nominate a few of my favourite bloggers for the chance to have their work featured on the site.
Although the name is BlogHer anyone can be nominated, regardless of gender. There are a couple different categories to nominate people in as well. Under the Voices of the Year (articles) you can nominate people in the Op-Ed, Humor, Heart or Exploration categories. For Photos of the year there’s also four categories: Slice of LIfe, Faces/Friends/Family, Nature and Selfies. For more information, head on over to BlogHer’s information page here. You need to be logged into BlogHer to nominate someone, but you can use your WordPress account to log in as well. Any post published in 2013 is eligible.
So go on and have fun nominating! If you want to view the posts submitted thus far, the page is here and you can vote for your favourite pieces as long as you’re logged in. There’s a People’s Choice category but the rest of the up to 100 pieces chosen are chosen by the committee so it’s not a popularity contest.
2013 in Review (WordPress Annual Report)
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 59,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 22 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
For those of you wondering, yes I’m obviously still posting my own analysis tomorrow but this is a little preview if you’re curious.
Discussion: Blogging Pet Peeves
Everyone reading this now is probably a regular blog reader and not just of The Mad Reviewer. Most people that read one blog read at least a couple of blogs on a semi-regular basis, especially when those people are bloggers themselves. But like books, there are some blogging deal breakers and pet peeves. Here are just a few of my pet peeves:
1. A busy layout. A nice, unique design is perfectly okay but when you’ve got yellow spirals on a pink and purple polka dot background my brain starts to hurt.
2. Not responding to comments at all. I know I’m not always the speediest when it comes to replying to your comments, but I really do try and eventually 99% of comments do get a well thought out reply. But on blogs where the blogger never responds to comments? It just seems like they’re not that interested in what their readers have to say.
3. Bad grammar. Everyone makes typos; that’s pretty much expected when you’re editing yourself. Yet when I encounter a blogger that doesnt like using capitol letters and doesnt spellchek it really starts to get irrtating. Ya know? Its worse when they do things like make run on sentences like this and never seem to know the difference between a colon semi-colon period exclamation point and especially a comma.
4. Bloggers that don’t have a consistent posting schedule. I totally get that life can get in the way of blogging sometimes. That’s okay. Yet when bloggers post every other day and then suddenly don’t post for a week, that gets annoying. I like bloggers with a consistent schedule with very few exceptions.
Really, this could be an entire article but I should stop now. After all, it’s your turn: What are your blogging pet peeves? Why?
The Best and Worst of September 2013
Overall, I’d have to say that September was a pretty good month for me. Although my stats are down from last month because there was no author drama, I’m very happy with my 5,138 views, which is the highest number of views I’ve had in a non-drama month since January. I’ve also welcomed 33 new followers this month and that makes me extremely happy; I pay more attention to follower statistics anyway.
So what were my top articles in September?
1. The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome
2. Why Girls Hate Game of Thrones—A Rebuttal
3. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
4. The Day an Author Suggested I Kill Myself
5. How to Read 100 Pages in an Hour
Every single one of these except #5 has been on the list at least once before. The fact that my article about speed reading is just now picking up steam is nice because I did put quite a bit of effort into writing it. It’s nice to know that I can pass on a skill of mine to other people who read it. The other articles, aside from the author drama one are popular simply because kids are back in school now or because it’s about a popular TV/book series.
So those were my five best articles. What were my five worst?
1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
2. Kaiulani: The People’s Princess by Ellen Emerson White
4. Looking for Alaska by John Green
5. The Time Travelers by Linda Buckley-Archer
Nothing is really all that surprising on this list. They’re all newcomers to the list and are either books that aren’t exactly popular or popular books that are much older. People won’t show much interest in The Hunger Games until Catching Fire releases anyway, so I’m not going to lose any sleep over my review of Mockingjay getting so few views.
Your Shameless Blogging Self-Promotion Thread
Since I have a lot of blogging related things to do today (which include interviews, reviews and actually starting books I have a deadline to read) I’ve decided to turn over the site to you guys. Basically, in the comments below tell us a little about your blog and leave a link to it, even if it’s already linked to in your profile.
Your blog doesn’t have to be a book blog and I won’t be moderating this thread too heavily but obviously blogs with spammy or pornographic content aren’t acceptable. That’s about the only rule aside from my regular be nice commenting policy.
So tell myself and everyone else reading this what your blog is about and why we should read it. Go on! Who can turn down a little self-promotion?