Wrap Up for Fall Bloggiesta 2015

What a weekend!  I feel like Bloggiesta has really flown by, but considering I lost pretty much all of today to a migraine, I got much more done this weekend than I thought I would.  High-five me!  Here's how I did with my to-do list:

• Participate in at least 1 mini-challenge & Clean up my blog roll on Feedly - it's getting out of control! - Done!  I combined these two items as part of the Blogroll Overhall mini-challenge.  Since I don't keep a blogroll on my sidebar anymore, I cleaned up my Feedly blog roll instead.  There were a lot of blogs that no longer update, and some that had been taken offline.  With a few exceptions, anything that hasn't been updated in the last year or so got removed.

• Participate in at least 1 Twitter chat - Done!  I participated in Friday's Twitter chat about interactions.  It was very engaging, and left me inspired to not be afraid to seek interactions with my readers beyond comments.

• Finish and schedule my post (posts?) about tools for self-love - Done!  The post is scheduled to go up next Thursday.

• Write and schedule another Witchy Pinterest Finds post - I wasn't feeling particularly inspired by anything I've seen on Pinterest lately, so I decided to put this one off for a few weeks and see what comes up as Halloween/Samhain gets closer.

• Read and comment on other folks' Bloggiesta posts - Done!  I've really enjoyed visiting so many folks' blogs, and whenever I tried to leave comments with substance whenever possible.

BONUS to-do items!  Because I finished most of my to-do list, and felt inspired to work on other things, I also did the following:

• Write up a post with my favorite photos from our wedding - I wrote and posted this yesterday, you can see it here.

• Write up a post with my favorite "outtake" photos from our wedding - It's scheduled to go up on the 28th.  

If you're new around here, I would love it if you gave my blog and/or social media a follow.  Here's a few ways to follow me (all of these are also found in my sidebar):

Follow @xedri

Stormy Heart on Pinterest

Fall Bloggiesta 2015: To-Do List

It's time for another Bloggiesta!  It's been a couple of years since I last participated in Bloggiesta, so I'm kind of excited to join in the fun again.  I've been feeling the pull lately to start blogging more, so I thought I'd give it a go and see what inspiration arises and what I'm able to accomplish myself :)

I'm keeping my to-do list a bit light, since I won't have the entire 4 days free - I have to work tomorrow and Friday, and (health willing) I'm planning to be at DC Pagan Pride on Sunday.  I'm sure I'll still have plenty of time to dedicate to sprucing up my blog, take part in the Twitter chats and mini-challenges, and read all about what other folks accomplish with their weekend.

So, yes!  Here's my to-do list for this round of Bloggiesta:

• Participate in at least 1 mini-challenge
• Participate in at least 1 Twitter chat
• Finish and schedule my post (posts?) about tools for self-love
• Write and schedule another Witchy Pinterest Finds post
• Clean up my blog roll on Feedly - it's getting out of control!
• Read and comment on other folks' Bloggiesta posts

If you're wondering what Bloggiesta is, hop on over to Bloggiesta.com to see what it's all about, and don't forget to sign up for this round!

2015 Witches & Witchcraft Reading Challenge

Here's a fun blogging idea for neopagans - the 2015 Witches & Witchcraft Reading Challenge!

I think I can read about 4 or 5 witchy books this year, so I'm going to sign up and shoot for for the Initiate level.  This will be great motivation for helping me achieve my goal to read 30 books this year.  I'm hoping I also feel inspired to write reviews on my blog of the books I read!  And of course, any reviews I write will also go up on my Goodreads profile.

Here's the information about the challenge from the challenge host, Melissa's Eclectic Bookshelf:

Challenge Levels:

Initiate: Read 1 – 5 Witchy Books
Maiden: Read 6 – 10 Witchy Books
Mother: Read 11 – 15 Witchy Books
Crone: Read 16 – 20 Witchy Books

Challenge Rules:

• This challenge will run from Jan 1, 2015 – Dec 31, 2015. I will be posting a place to link up a sign-up post (below), reviews and a wrap-up post. (Note: You do not have to review the books to participate, but only those who link up reviews will be entered for the prize)
• Grab the reading challenge button (code & button below) and post this reading challenge on your blog to track your progress. Please include a link back to this sign-up post so others can join the reading challenge too. You do not have to be a book blogger to participate- you could track your progress and post reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, etc.
• Any full length book that includes a witch as a main character or includes major witchcraft elements counts. They may be fiction or non-fiction. However, they should not be reference books which are not read cover to cover-I will leave this to your discretion.
• Books can be any format (bound, eBook, audio).
• Re-reads and crossovers from other reading challenges are allowed.
• You can list your books in advance or just put them in a wrap-up post. If you list them, feel free to change them as the mood takes you.
• When you sign up in the linky put the direct link to your post about joining the 2015 Witches & Witchcraft Reading Challenge, not just a link to your blog.
• You can move up levels, but no moving down.
• Sign-ups will be open until Dec 15, 2015, so feel free to join at any time throughout the year.
• Have some Witchy Good Fun !!!

Prize:
Witchy book of choice up to $10 from The Book Depository!

Participants who have officially signed up by linking up a sign-up post declaring their level will be given one entry for every review they link up. The more reviews you write and link up, the more entries in the contest! Link up your reviews on that month’s Review Link Up Post. Winner will be chosen on Jan 11th 2015 to give everyone a chance to link up their end of year reviews. All Review Link Up Posts can be accessed from my menu bar under my header!

Ready to participate with me?  
Sign up on the 2015 Witches & Witchcraft Sign-up Post, and then link up your January 2015 book reviews here.

I won the PPBH Brilliant Blogger Award!

You guys, I'm so excited!  I got a message a couple of days ago from Kourtney over at the Pagan Pages Blog Hop telling me that I am the January winner of the Brilliant Blogger Award!!

Each month's winner of the award (you only get to win once) has the most number of qualified links posted in that month's link ups.  You also have to have the PPBH button displayed in your sidebar and be a follower of the PPBH blog.

To help other bloggers get to know me better and learn a little about my blog, Kourtney asked me a few questions about myself and my blogging habits.  You can go check out my answers over at the PPBH blog.

Totally Awesome Blog Hop

I just entered my link into this months' Totally Awesome Blog Hop over on ChantillySongs.  This is a great hop with lots of participants that into things like music, vintage clothes, and crafting.  It's a good way to get your blog seen, and to find out about other blogs you might not have read before.

Go check it out, follow the 4 hosts, and enter your link! And then check out other bloggers when you're done. February's hop is open until the 25th.

Fall Bloggiesta Wrap-Up

What a great Bloggiesta weekend!  I got all but one of my to-do list items accomplished, and I had a good reason for missing that one:

• Re-record my Brighid chant so that both parts are in one recording - this didn't happen because of allergy issues that left my voice in pretty rough shape all weekend.  I'll record at a future date when I don't sound so much like Eartha Kitt.*
• Clean up my Google Reader subscriptions list (again...)
• Look into installing Disqus for comments
• Contact Jen about getting her ad for my sidebar
• Comment on lots other participating blogs and make new blogging friends

I also completed 3 mini challenges:

• Blogging Notebook
• Grade Yourself!
• I learned how to create blog templates in Blogger in the Organization and Scheduling Posts mini-challenge

Due to bad timing, I missed all of the Twitter parties.  Too bad!  Those are really fun.  Next time, next time.

If you are here via Bloggiesta, I hope you stick around!  My blog focuses on neo-pagan music (music by and for the neo-pagan community).  I post a weekly feature called "Monday Music Break" that highlights music by pagan artists on both the local and national scale (I usually feature one artist per week).  I also post the chants I write.  On a more mundane level, I post about general lifestyle stuff, like things from pinterest or pretty nature photos.  Although my blog is pagan music blog, I don't ever want to be pigeon-holed to a purely pagan audience, as I believe the artists I feature can have a much wider appeal - that's part of the reason I started the blog in the first place.

I know most of the bloggers participating in Bloggiesta are book bloggers.  While I am not a book blogger, I am a bibliophile, although perhaps not as avid a reader as I was in high school and college.  I joined Goodreads awhile back so I've been posting reviews of all the books I read on there.  Here's the last few books I've read, if you're interested:

Colleen's bookshelf: read

Dreaming in Cuban

by Cristina Garcia

This book was lovely - poetry in novel form!

The Evolutionary Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

Thirteen Reasons Why

by Jay Asher

Oh my god. Phenomenal. This book tore me to pieces, slowly with each flip of Hannah's tapes. I still can't believe I didn't cry until the very end. I felt like I could empathize with every false rumor, with every fake friendship, wit...

The Secrets of a Fire King: Stories

by Kim Edwards

I wasn't a fan of all of the stories in this compilation (especially not "The Rat" - EWW), but I appreciated the compilation as a whole, and I feel like I have a better understanding of Kim Edwards as a writer.

Forever Free

by Joe Haldeman

This is a sequel to The Forever War, and was definitely as good as the original. It was nice to see what happened with Mandella and Marygay, and how they and their fellow vets handled life in a world ruled by Man. Even though this book...

* "Why do we even have that lever?!"

Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Grade Yourself

 

Smash Attack Reads (which, by the way, is an awesome blog name!) has a really helpful Bloggiesta mini-challenge, Grade Yourself!  It guides you through using a website/blog grader that also gives useful hints on improving traffic and, if your website is for a business (mine is not, obviously), increasing revenue.

I ran my blog through the website grader and got a score of 79.  Based on the action items it came up with, I have a small to-do list for improving traffic.  I decided to share it in case it may be helpful to some of my other readers:

1. SEO: Add alt tags to my images.  This helps bring traffic from things like image searches on Google.  Update - all done!  With almost 100 posts, most of which have at least one image, it took over an hour to do this, but it was worth it I hope! 
2. SEO: Figure out if/how I can add page descriptions to each of my blog pages (Pagan Musicians, Chants, etc.)
3. Social Media: Add twitter/Facebook/G+/etc. share buttons to individual posts.  (Anyone know how to do that?)

I think I may have to do a little more research on this SEO (search engine optimization) stuff!

     4.  Update #2: After some quick research on SEO for Blogger, I'm adding another one that will be ongoing - adding search descriptions.  An explanation of search descriptions is here: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2472666

     - You can add a search description for your whole blog.  Go to Settings -> Search Preferences, and click in the text box for "Description" near the top.
     - You can also add search descriptions for each entry - in the post settings, click on "search description" to bring up the search description box

Fall Bloggiesta Kick-off

Here we go!  Bloggiesta time!

 

September 28-30, 2012

I have a very full weekend ahead of me - I have to work today, and then after work I will be driving the 3 hours north to my parents house in the Philly 'burbs.  Tomorrow night is a big family party to celebrate my Dad's 60th birthday, and the 60th birthdays of three of his lifelong friends, so between the party and helping my Mom get ready, most of tomorrow is out.

Phew!  I don't know about you, but I'm tired just writing that.

So, I cheated and got a head start on my Bloggiesta to-do list by taking care of a few things earlier this week.  I figured that way I could focus what little free time I had this weekend on things like mini-challenges, Twitter parties, and checking out/commenting on other Bloggiesta participants' blogs.

Are you doing Bloggiesta this weekend?  If you're not, you totally should - it's so much fun, you learn a lot, and you make lots of blogging friends in the process! :)

Bloggiesta Fall Edition To-Do List

 

September 28-30, 2012

I had such a great time participating in Bloggiesta last spring and got some great new readers in the process, so I decided to take part in the Bloggiesta Fall edition, which is in a couple of weeks.  My participation will be a bit limited, since we are having a big birthday party for my Dad and 3 of his friends that Saturday, so I decided to keep my to-do list short and sweet:

• Re-record my Brighid chant so that both parts are in one recording
• Clean up my Google Reader subscriptions list (again...)
• Look into installing Disqus for comments
• Contact Jen about getting her ad for my sidebar
• Comment on lots other participating blogs and make new blogging friends!

Who else is doing Bloggiesta in September?  You can find out all about it and sign up over at There's a Book.  Go for it!!

Bloggiesta Update

I've completed all but one item on my to-do list for Bloggiesta! 

• Spruce up my sidebar - done!  What do you think of the new photo I added for the "about me" widget?  I used Fotoflexer to edit it.
• go through all of my recorded chants to review sound quality and determine which need to be re-recorded - done!  A couple of them need to be re-recorded, but most had better quality than I remembered (given that I recorded them on my crappy computer microphone)
• Create a chants page for posting chants - done!  It's empty right now, but I will be posting one of my chants later this week.
• ADDED: Create a new page for the Monday Music Break - done!  It made sense to add this as a to-do item, to make it easier to find all the entries for this feature.
• Clean up new site design - postponed.  I didn't really time this weekend to devote to my site design, but I'm happy with the way it looks for now.  I'm open to comments about the background, header, etc. to help me make it more appealing.
• Do a couple Blogiesta challenges - done!  I completed 3 4 mini-challenges, and they were all really helpful.
• Clean up Google Reader and Twitter Follow lists - done!  This definitely needs to happen every 6 months or so.

I also took part in this morning's Bloggiesta Twitter party.  I feel like I learned even more, and I had a good time networking and sharing ideas with other bloggers.  If you're on twitter, I'd love it if you'd follow me!

Follow @xedri

Did you participate in Bloggiesta this weekend?  How did it go?  What did you accomplish?

Bloggiesta Mini-Challenges

Here's the mini-challenges I've been working on for Bloggiesta.  I'll keep updating this as I complete them.

 

Mini-Challenge #1: Sidebar Help...What do you REALLY Need?

I worked on this all yesterday afternoon  I changed that ugly "about me" widget and email link to a new picture with actual text about me.  I also removed the RSS feed widget, and added those square buttons for RSS, Pinterest, and Twitter near the top.  I wanted to add the archive back, but I think I'd rather make a separate page for that so it's easier to navigate.

 

Mini-Challenge #2: Make some pages!

I wanted it to be easier for people to find my chants when I post them, instead of sifting through entries, so I made a new page for my chants.  It links to the as-yet-unused "chants" tag.  I did the same for my Monday Music Break feature.  Right now I'm not seeing the bar at the top for the "home" and "chants" pages, though.  I'm sure I'll figure this out soon.  Figured it out!  Hurray!

Mini-Challenge #3: Google Forms
I haven't had any luck soliciting suggestions for pagan musicians for the Monday Music Break (my knowledge only extends so far!), so I thougI ht a form that doesn't require publicly commenting might encourage folks to send suggestions that way.  I read through the challenge and instructions for using Google forms, so now I know how to use this platform if I decide to use it.

Mini-Challenge #4: Twitter and Your Blog
I signed up with dlvr.it to automatically post my blog entries to twitter.
Although the challenge recommends having a separate twitter account for your blog, I already have an established (small) group of people that follow me on twitter, and I honestly don't really use twitter much for my personal use anymore.  So my old twitter handle now belongs primarily to my blog :) 

Follow @xedri

Bloggiesta List

I just found out from Chrisbookarama about a blogging party/blog hop for this weekend called Bloggiesta.  (Ole!)  The party is being hosted by It's All About Books, led by their fearless mascot PEDRO (Plan, Edit, Develop, Review, Organize).  The idea behind Bloggiesta is to keep PEDRO happy by spending these next three days working on perfecting your blog and connecting with other bloggers doing the same thing. I think it's technically designed for book blogs, but a look around the rules and mini-challenges has me thinking I could benefit from participating, too.  After all, my 30 before 31 list includes making my blog more awesome.

So, basically, you come up with a to-do list for your blog, and participate in the mini-challenges on their blog.  All the details for participating are on It's All About Books at the Bloggiesta Starting Line.

Here's my to-do list.  I may revise this over the weekend as I decide what's workable, and I'll try to post updates about mini-challenges over the course of the weekend.

• Spruce up my sidebar
• go through all of my recorded chants to review sound quality and determine which need to be re-recorded
• Create a chants page for posting chants
• ADDED: Create a new page for the Monday Music Break
• Clean up new site design
• Do a couple Blogiesta mini-challenges
• Clean up Google Reader and Twitter Follow lists

  Cheers!

Follow my blog Friday

The Domestic Pagan is hosting a weekly feature called Follow My Blog Friday. It sounds like another kind of blog hop, although this one has a weekly theme that you can write about and then link back to.

This week's question is: How did you first get interested in Wicca, witchcraft, or paganism?

My story will probably be very familiar to "recovering Catholics" like myself.  When my grandfather died in 1996 (I was 14) I decided that I didn't believe in God anymore.  I spent most of high school as an atheist/agnostic.  Of course, my parents forced me to go to church this whole time to give me a "foundation"- whatever the hell that means.  By senior year I had seen movies that approached god/the divine from a non-Judeo-Christian standpoint (like The Craft.  Oh stop laughing, I'll bet lots of you got interested in Wicca because of that movie, or similarly cheesy witchcraft shows like Charmed ;).  I started to feel that maybe there was something out there, like The Great Spirit or Gaia.  In college, free from my parents' religious reigns, I started poking around the web and the library for information on alternative religions, and found Wicca.  I started journaling in a book of shadows, meditating, and celebrating the sabbats in small ways.

I got more into Wicca when I transferred to the University of Delaware and joined a club for pagan students called "Students of the Earth" (as opposed to "Students 4 the Earth," the environmental club on campus.  We got lots of confused people in our meetings).  Many of my closest friends in college were in this club (sadly, we don't really keep in touch anymore except via Facebook).  Two of these folks introduced me to the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, the Wiccan tradition to which they belonged and to which I now belong.  I experienced my first cast circle in the club, studied Cunningham's Guide to the Solitary Practitioner, which we dubbed "Wicca 101, and had lots of deep conversations about magick and spirituality.  Students of the Earth and my introduction to the Assembly is the reason I have become heavily invested in my spirituality over the year.

Here's the participants in this week's Follow My Blog Friday.  Please go check them out!  When you're done reading, you should totally join the hop and write you own post answering this week's question, and then go on over The Domestic Pagan and add your blog post with the linky tool.

Pagan Pages Blog Hop

I heard about a new trend in blogging called blog hopping. In essence, someone hosts a blog hop, collects links from other bloggers, and then distributes a code to participants to share on their own blog to show the links.

A quick search for "blog hop" and "pagan" brought me to the Pagan Pages Blog Hop.




I just submitted my blog to the New to PPBH category. I haven't figured out where to get the code for this blog hop yet, so go on over and check out the other links.

And if you know of any other blog hops you think I should participate in, please let me know!