Blog Housekeeping

I noticed recently that my blog was becoming slow to load. So today I spent a bit of time on blog housekeeping. I cleaned up a bunch of sidebar items that seemed to be slowing things down, and the blog is loading MUCH more quickly for me.

I also replaced some relatively static lists that I had of books that I was interested in reading with a list that I intend to be much more dynamic. I created a list of those books that catch my eye in other people's reviews (those that I've been highlighting in my "reviews that made me want the book" feature), and added a note for each with a clickable link that goes to the review. (Something that I didn't know you could do in TypePad book lists, but that's working well for me now.) I still intend to do the RTMMWTB features as blog posts. But since I seem to be having trouble getting to those in a timely manner, I'm hoping that this will allow me to highlight great reviews on other blogs more quickly, while also keeping my own sidebars more dynamic. I'll add new books to the top of this list, and have the older ones gradually drop out of sight.

In the interest of more dynamic content, I also added a small Twitter feed (with my last 3 tweets) right below the Between the Roundups Literacy News Widget. I'm testing this out, and will see if I decide to keep it or not.

Next task is to do something with my enormous blogroll. I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, I think that blogrolls are a nice resource that people can use to find new blogs. And I've typically been pretty open about linking to new blogs. On the other hand, I do think that content on blogs should be a bit more dynamic, and that a list of 300+ children's and young adult book blogs is overwhelming (not to mention the fact that I'm sure I have some inactive links in there that need to be cleaned out). So, work still to do there.

But for now, I'm satisfied that my blog is a little more dynamic, and a lot faster to load. Happy Friday, all!