My Blog Review

After looking at multiple blogs on our class assignment list, I decided that I enjoyed reading Joyce Valenza’s NeverEnding Search (http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1340000334.html) the most. I felt that a few of the other blogs I looked at from the list had too many links to follow and not enough explanation as to what the links were. Joyce’s blog was different. It had great links and blurbs about what you were clicking on. It also included posts that were useful to both librarians and teachers. One example of this is the link to Reader Theater scripts. I’ve had quite a few people at the library where I work ask me where they could find information on that topic. Now I have a great link that I can pass on to others.


Her blog is very easy to follow. It has a simple white background and she has all of her posts and comments archived on the right hand side bar. She has a picture of herself at the top of each post so it was easy to tell when a new post started. The very top of her blog page however, looks like one big advertisement for Library Journal. There’s no personal feel to it at all. There are many links to Library Journal related sites. I liked the links to “Library News” and “Blogs” (blogs by other people related to Library Journal) the most.


Joyce has a lot of good posts (some are opinions, some are focused on advocacy, and some are just news stories) but her blog seems kind of boring. The white background makes things easy to read but it also makes things look boring. There’s no flair to it at all. Her side bar is organized well and holds a lot of archived information, but it looks like just one long boring list. I know that this is a “professionals” blog, but she could still put some color into it. Many libraries that have blogs at least use some sort of background color.


Overall, I found this to be a useful blog mostly due to the library news it provides and the helpful links that are posted on it. It’s one that I would definitely save to my “favorites”.


On a side note: Another great blog I follow is http://heyteenager.blogspot.com/ . It has all sorts of author interviews, tips for being a YA author, book giveaways, reviews, guest blog posts, and other random fun entries. It is one of my favorite blogs to read.

Also, for anyone interested in YA, this is a great resource http://yabookblogdirectory.blogspot.com/ . It contains links to many other YA related blogs. It’s a great way to find book reviews, library news, and more related to YA.

My Experience in Blog Making

Creating this blog wasn’t too difficult. That is because about a week ago I started building my first blog and from that experience had figured out some of the basics of blog building. My first is a book review/random fun blog that I made since my friends and I love sharing YA books that we’ve read but don’t always have time to talk about them. We thought using blogs would be a fun way for us to share our thoughts and maybe later we could combine our review entries and share them with students or patrons at the libraries we work at. I must have spent at least 10 hours playing around with that blog and I still haven’t gotten very far on it. I found a lot of fun things to add to it though like an iPod that plays YouTube links. (You can find the iPod at http://www.mixpod.com/ .) I left a link to my book review blog on the side bar of this blog just in case anyone reading this is interested in checking it out once it gets farther along. I have blog links to a lot of really great YA book review sites on my other blog too which might be worth taking look at if you have time!


By the time I started this blog I already had a pretty good feel for how things work, which made putting this together very easy. I did, however, decide to play around with a few things to give my blog a bit of uniqueness to it.
First of all, I wanted something different than the generic templates that Blogger gives you, so I went searching for a unique background. I used the site http://www.pyzam.com/ and found this particular wolf template. Pyzam gives you step by step instructions on how to do the transfer, so it was really easy to transfer the html code from that site into Blogger.


For the header at the top of the page I used one of the pictures I took on vacation and tweaked it using the photo site http://www.picnik.com/. I figured that by using my own photograph there would be no copy right issues. The only problem I had was trying to size the picture correctly. I found myself loading the picture into Blogger, finding it was too large for my page, going back to my saved picture to resize it, and then reloading it into Blogger multiple times. After several tries I finally got it to a size I liked.


I left the followers tag up on my side bar just in case someone wants to follow this blog. I’ll think about adding other gadgets as time goes on but right now this is just a blog for a school project so there really isn’t a need for any of that. Most of the fun gadgets I find will be on my other blog page.


Over all, I think that once you get started, blogs are pretty easy to make and maintain and can be quite fun and useful.