Fall #Bloggiesta ... done and done! (+ who won the Inbox Zero mini challenge)

Well, wasn't that fun? Fall Bloggiesta has come and gone once again and I'm chuffed! I got quite a bit done this time around and it's always fun just hanging out with everyone! Thanks to the organizers of Bloggiesta and the always-enthusiastic partipants, we've got another Bloggiesta under our belts!

The big stuff

Inbox Zero mini challenge and giveaway. A few months ago I came across a life-changing email  (yes, I am being dramatic for good reason) and I finally achieved Inbox Zero. I decided it would be great to share the experience and cooked up a mini challenge.

Gauging by the response, many bloggers seem to struggle to tame their inboxes. Congrats to everyone who joined in, who commented, and even shared screen caps of their Inbox Zero (you gotta see it to believe it - check out the comments!)

And now, the winner of $10 worth of digital pretties from luvly.co is ... drumroll please ... Emily Reads Everything. Congrats, Emily!

Blog template overhaul. The week before Bloggiesta, my blog was in a weird state for a bit and I had a transition template that I only just *sort* of liked. I finally decided to just bite the bullet. I'd been stressing about how complicated my navigation was, the state of my overlabeling, the cluttered sidebars (I could go on) ...  and felt I needed a change. It actually feels like a breeze just blew away all this extraneous stuff with my new template. My red-flowered elephant isn't up yet, but makes an appearance in the blog posts. I'm still fiddling with stuff (as always) so you'll see a few tweaks here and there. 

Regular clean-up

Back up my blog. Done. Even better I also backed-up another blog I manage. I took one extra step this time around and uploaded the xml files on Google drive instead of just keeping it on my hard drive. Again, I have to say it to every book blogger: do this every Bloggiesta! It doesn't take too long and it gives you just a little bit more peace of mind.

Get up-to-date with my reviews. I knew this wasn't happening, for this Bloggiesta at least, so I didn't fight it. I did finish one review for an upcoming tour though!

Update my Book Map with old and recent reads.  Done. And only because I've been reading/reviewing far less that it makes it easy to keep up with it.

Clean up wonky posts.
I got a few out of the way, which I just do when I'm prowling around on the blog. I've also decided to delete Amazon as an affiliate (not making anything anyway) and just stick to Book Depository (because that's what I use to buy books online). Plus it's one less thing to link in the future.

Read new Bloggiesta posts. I did a fair bit of roaming around and left comments here and there but felt like I still didn't get to visit everyone! There was so much going on! I couldn't make any of the Twitter chats so I loved that the chats were all summarized on the Bloggiesta blog.

Join mini challenges that I think are fun and useful. Now call me an overachiever; I got 3 mini challenges done.

• Book Vixen's Create a Back-Up Email - how come I never even thought of this? It was so easy that I endded up backing up my personal email on top of my blogger email.
• Doing Dewey's Getting the Most Out of Reading Challenges - I have some version of this already with my own list of bookish links (and a notebook too!) so it was a nice reminder and to get a few more tips. Onward!
• Bay State Reader Advisory's Blogroll Overhaul - I went through my blogroll widget and discovered the following: (1) Some blogs had moved. So I updated the links. (2) That some blogs had not been updated in months. I deleted them here but of course I moved stuff over to Bloglovin because I didn't want to "lose" them. Who knows, they may come back! (3) I'm down to 54 active blogs. I know that's still a lot, but ... leave me alone ;)

Optional:
Host a mini-challenge.
Host a giveaway.
Check out the Twitter feed for #bloggiesta and participate in at least one Twitter chat. (See above)

Lastly, I'll be updating my Masterlist and will be planning my next Bloggiesta to-do list. Ole!

How was your Bloggiesta?