Blogkeeping

Scott: Whatcha doing?

Me: Oh, just a little housekeeping.

Scott: Who are you and what have you done with my wife?

Me: No, I mean in my sidebars.

Scott: Aha. It all becomes so clear!

Seems like every year as the calendar rolls over, I feel the need to do a little pruning and sprucing here on the blog. For those of you who read me mainly in a feed reader, here’s what’s new: a trio of booklists in the righthand sidebar. One is my running list of 2010 Cybils finalists for the Cybils Shortlist Reading Challenge I mentioned yesterday; one will be an ongoing record of our family read-alouds, including picture books read to the small fry; and the third is my own 2011 booklog. All three of these lists are imported from my Delicious account, if you’d rather peek at them there. The pertinent Delicious tags are cybilschallenge, rillabooks, and booklog, respectively.

This is also the time of year when I take a look at how I’m using social media and try to streamline a bit. I enjoy poking around various platforms to see what they’ve got to offer, but of course for practical use it’s best to keep things simple. I tend to layer and layer and layer and then chuck it all and start afresh. (Jane teased me the other day about my profound devotion to the fresh start, the clean slate. She is so right.)

So—this year I’ve decided I’m tired of having my shareworthy links scattered between Google Reader Shared Items and Delicious. I’ll just stick with Delicious. That means shareworthy links and booklogs are on Delicious now. One-stop shopping.

I’ll keep using Tumblr to record stuff I read online that I don’t necessarily want to share but do want to be able to find again myself. That worked really well for me in 2010.

I’m kind of in love with TeuxDeux, a clean, uncluttered, week-at-a-glance to-do list. You can easily drag tasks from one day to the next or click to cross them out when they’ve been accomplished.

Where else to find me: Twitter. My Facebook author page. And here.