Of Spring Flings, Sidebars & Social Networking

SITS Girls Spring Fling Event:
A Blog Improvement Challenge--
Build Your Community &
Improve Your Blog

While working so hard to finish Mom's scarf/shawl before Moother's Day I dropped the ball on SITS Girls Spring Fling for Thursday and Friday assignments.  So my goal today was to catch up those two assignments and do today's which was to declutter our blog.  Thursday was share your Google+ link and Friday was share your Pinterest link.  Though I had a Google+ page I hadn't done a profile for it.  I didn't have a Pinterest account at all.

Earlier last week we shared our facebook and Twitter links.  Those I already had well establishes so those two assignments took only minutes.  Except for the visiting others part.  That always takes me a looooooong time.

But today I spent hours on Google+ and Pinterest.  Signing up for the latter and setting up profiles on both and following and pinning and liking and...


I was so bummed that both JoyRenee and Joystory and Joywrite were already taken as usernames.  I probably spent half an hour just staring at the sighup screen before I finally went with 'storyismyjoy'


Might as well round them all up here:

Joy Renee on Google+
Joy Renee on Pinterest
Joystory fanpage on facebook
Joy Renee on Twitter


For the declutter project I chose to begin with getting rid of all of the old buttons for events and challenges from the past.  But I didn't want to just delete them.  So I moved them into a footer at the bottom of the page in a section I named Once Upon a Time.  That was so easy I wondered if maybe I was about to loose my aversion to sidebar fiddling caused by a frustrating experience every single time I attempt it.

But then of course it happened again.  One of the buttons I wanted to leave in the sidebar above did not reappear after I'd removed the others and saved the widget.  I spent nearly two hours beating my brain over the problem.  If it had been any other button but Dewey's 24 Hour Read-a-Thon I might have given up and deleted it after fifteen minutes.  It wasn't until I did a character by character comparison of the code in the sidebar widget with the code in my last read-a-thon post that I discovered that somehow the url for the image had lost all its capitalization.  Once I'd copied the url again from the post and inserted it in place of the deformed one it worked again.  Now, tho, I'm left confuzzled as to how it happened.  All of the letters were still in place but had converted to lowercase.

So altogether today I must have put in seven hours on the Spring Flling.  Including a few comments left and reading some of the posts on SITS Girls about Google+ and Pinterest.  Some of that time in the last three hours has been about waiting for pages to load and tabs to unfreeze. It must be time for a browser restart or computer restart.  Or both.

My mind feels like a pretzel.

If tomorrow's assignment looks like it will take me more than thirty minutes I might have to pass so I can focus on getting caught up on a crochet project that has to be done a week from today.