Yay! It’s time for Bloggiesta! Bloggiesta is a three-day party for making our blogs (and on-line life) prettier and more functional. There’s still time to join us! The starting line posts are here: Bloggiesta September 2012: Starting Line.

I loved seeing all the Bloggiesta starting posts in my feed reader this morning. First on my list: go leave some cheering comments on other blogger’s starting lines. Fortunately, there’s a mini-challenge for that: Bloggiesta Mini Challenge: Bring the Hits: Building a blog audience.

After that, I’m going to start with a list of things I want to do to follow up last night’s Diversity Book Club meeting. It was our annual potluck and selection meeting and it was so much fun! We have a great list of books that I’m really looking forward to reading. Here’s what I’d like to get done in the next few days:

• DONE Return the meeting room key and schedule the space for next year.
• DONE Meet with the librarian to set up meeting dates for the next year and to discuss possibilities for an African American Read-In sponsored by our group and the library. Also, find out who I need to talk to for getting the books we selected purchased by the library.
• WAITING Form a committee for planning our African American Read-In and set up a research and brainstorming meeting.
• E-mail the schedule of books to our participants
• WAITING Recruit someone to lead the discussion for the one book that hasn’t been claimed.
• Set up a plan for publicizing the meetings for the next year.
• DONE Write a blog post with the books we selected and the long list of books we discussed. (It’s here: Diversity Book Club book lists)

Okay, on to the more conventional Bloggiesta items. I’d like to do every single one of the current mini-challenges, but I’ll start with these:

• Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: CHANGING YOUR RSS FEED because I set up a Feedburner feed in a previous Bloggiesta and now I need to do something else.
• Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Let’s Get Personal because I need to change my About page to, yeah, make it more personal. I wrote it when I was a new book blogger and made it sound more erudite and serious than this blog turned out to be. Heh.
• bloggiesta mini-challenge: organization and scheduling posts because I’m not happy with my current method.
• Bloggiesta! Blogging Notebook and Calendar Mini-Challenge because this will help, too.
• 20+ Discussion Post Ideas For Your Book Blog {Bloggiesta Mini Challenge & GIVEAWAY} so that I have something to put in the above schedules, notebooks, and calendars.
• Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Six Techniques that Will Revitalize Your Old Content now that I have enough content to revitalize.
• Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Review Catch-Up since there are two books waiting and a third that’s very close.
• Tips on Thursday: Bloggiesta Edition because I totally cheated and read this early, using it to set up the fine print for the two giveaways that are currently running on my blog: Interview: K. Hollan Van Zandt, Author of Written in the Ashes and Giveaway and Evernote — A Bloggiesta Fall 2012 Mini-Challenge.
• How to Give and Get Great Guest Posts because I have a note in Evernote that says “guest posts drive traffic — figure out how to make that work.”

Here are the flash-back challenges that I still want to get to:

• {Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge} What is Windows Live Writer and How Can it Help You? at The Reading Housewives of Indiana
• Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge–Make some pages! because I want a page for books that support my healthy lifestyle. Maybe, I’ll make a compliments page — pulling out the nice things people have said in comments. What a mood booster that would be!

Finally, there are some other things I want to do that don’t quite have a matching challenge, but do have some resources by bloggers to help me out.

• Work through Security chapter of Head First WordPress book because that’s been on my list for awhile. And then, Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness wrote about her security problems: PSA: The Story of My Hacked Blog. Between those two resources, I should be able to get something done.
• Look into Click to Tweet, like Julia Tomiak did in this post: Why Banned Book Week Has Me Thinking, because I thought it was a fun way to make a post interactive.
• Test Your Website Load Time – Google Does! because The Redhead Riter says so.

There’s more. But it’s on scraps of paper and I don’t want to look at them just yet. So, “look at the scraps of paper and figure out what I need to do” is also on the list. Or maybe, that should be “put the things on scrap paper into Evernote so that next time I’ll see them when I’m making a Bloggiesta post.”

Here’s to a happy and productive Bloggiesta!