Weekend Coffee Share: Back to Business As Usual

If we were having coffee, I’d be more relaxed than you’ve seen me in weeks. I was up by 6 am today for the first Saturday in over a month. The spring semester is finally done and little people school doesn’t end for a couple of weeks. That means I have a brief window of time to get ahead with some writing and catch up with a few friends.

Getty stock image.

I’d tell you Shawn over at Down Home Thoughts is taking a survey about values for a book he is writing. He asked me to help him spread the word back during the A to Z madness, and I’m just getting around to it. Here’s the survey; I took it myself a few minutes ago.

And I’d tell you I HOPE I am about to turn the corner on the social media organization madness. I’ve just about got Facebook sorted out after months of experimenting, and I plan to get back to Twitter and spend a lot of time looking at blogs and sharing them this weekend.

The summer run of Feminist Fridays are scheduled, and my first three Sandman posts for Comparative Geeks are completely finished. Now I am thinking about when to re-start my Tolkien series at Part Time Monster and try to push it to a conclusion. That series has been good for us, and it’s nice to have draft material of that quality and length to keep working on. But it’s been a time-consuming, never-ending task.

I’m ready to be done writing literary essays on the blogs. They take too long and don’t play well enough for the time and effort that go into them. That doesn’t mean I plan to stop writing about Tolkien, nor contributing to Part Time Monster. I’m just convinced that the way to keep growing, at this point, is to go shorter and lighter with the blog posts.

That’s about all I’d have to say today. There are a lot of people with new things in the works, both for the blogosphere and other social media. But I’ll leave those for another day, and hopefully catch up with you sometime this weekend.

Don’t forget to add your post link to the linky list at Part Time Monster and share it with #WeekendCoffeeShare on Twitter.

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So, That Was Fun!

The A to Z Challenge mayhem is over and I managed to place my reflection 19th on the linky list. Good job, Gene’O! I am up early, did not write a real coffee post last week, and am in the mood to write something in a hurry and publish it. So here goes!

Next on the Blogs:

We’re starting a new monthly feature at Sourcerer called Sourcerer’s Eleven. These are 11-question author/blogger interviews to run the first Monday of every month. It’s a fiendishly clever scheme. The way it works is the person interviewed conducts the next one. First Victim: Luther M. Siler, who contributes to Sourcerer and just released Sanctum of the Sphere, part II of The Benevolence Archives.

Part Time Monster is developing a new feature called Monster Monday. Will be good. Details in the last #WeekendCoffeeShare post if you missed it. Also good: The #LazyLambs Book Club.

Diana’s about to start the next run of Penny Dreadful posts at Sourcerer. If you follow that show, you don’t want to miss them. Last year’s Penny Dreadful reviews were some of our most popular posts of the year. Here’s our Penny Dreadful category archive.

As you may have heard, our friends over at Comparative Geeks are expecting their first child soon. They went out for guest posts to help keep CG running through May and June, and a LOT of good bloggers stepped up, including several Sourcerer contributors. Diana and I are doing a substantial number of posts on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman for them. These will include at least six Thursday Thirteens — three from each of us — plus a few more substantial posts.

There’s so much more I could mention. I have a lot of friends who are starting up collaborative projects in the next month or so, and of course we’ll have a summer run of Feminist Fridays. Stay tuned, and I’ll do my best to keep you apprised of developments. This blog is evolving into a sort of news outlet for my little corner of the blogosphere.

The State of the Network

arrrr, mateys!

April’s been an absolutely crazy month, but the Facebook operation is proceeding apace. I haven’t had much Twitter time lately. I don’t think we’ve lost much ground there, but I’ve got to trust the system I’ve set up to get what we can from Facebook and get myself back to Twitter soon.

I’ve got an app called Buffer now that allows me to schedule 100 Facebook updates for both my page AND my timeline, schedule 100 tweets each for multiple Twitter accounts, 100 Google Plus shares, and 100 Pinterest pins. I can have a different schedule for every day and a different schedule for each social media account. I can edit things that are scheduled before they run and change the queue order easily. It has its own link-shortening system, so I get analytics.

I can follow 15 RSS feeds and share them directly from my Buffer dashboard. And it archives everything, so I can take something I tweeted two weeks ago and tweet it again without a lot of work. It’s fabulous and I plan to leverage it to the hilt just as soon as I have a day to set it up properly.

Here’s where I am with the various networks, and my goals through the end of the quarter.

Blogs — Coffee posts and occasional announcements here. That’s all this blog is good for, and frankly, all I have time to do with it. Sourcerer is all pop culture, all the time and we’re in good shape, content-wise. We may take Sundays off for a while over there, but otherwise, it’s business as usual.

Facebook — The Just Gene’O page is so dead it’s pointless. I’ve connected this blog back to Sourcerer’s page and Twitter account. No more than I post here, and given that Part Time Monster is also publicizing to Sourcerer’s page, that makes the most sense for now.

I’m scheduling three public status updates per day on my personal timeline. These are typically a Sourcerer link in the morning, a link for a friend at noon, and a Part Time Monster link in the afternoon. I’m still tweaking the schedule. I spend most of my Facebook time in groups, and I am planning a somewhat-open blogging collaboration group to go live on Facebook later this year.

Twitter — Along with the publicized links, I’m scheduling three afternoon Tweets per day when I can manage it. Soon, I will mix in some just-for-fun tweets so I’m not just sharing links all the time. I just need to find time to compose them and get them into the queue.

I am coming back to Twitter. I’ve missed the #SundayBlogShares during the last two weeks of April and just in general, that’s where I prefer to interact when I’m not chatting on blog threads. I want a larger following, and I want @1000Speak to have a larger following as well. That means I have to build them.

At this point, no other networks really matter, but I am looking at StumbleUpon and Piinterest. I have accounts on both of those networks, but I’ve not had time to get properly set up on either yet. StumbleUpon is my next priority.

On all these networks, I publish during the day at what I think are the best times to post. Then I answer notifications in the evenings, and occasionally from my phone on work breaks during the day. This is not an optimal way of doing things, but it’s what I can do, and it’s working well enough.

Happy Monday, and don’t work too hard!

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Weekend Coffee Share: Post-Easter Edition

If we were having coffee, I’d be a little later than usual because I just had a Google meetup with several of the admins from 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion. It was nice to be able to talk to so many of the bloggers I’ve been chatting with since January via video. We bounced around ideas, and just in general, had a very pleasant and productive conversation.

I’d tell you I had a great Easter Weekend. I spent lots of time with my family and we celebrated the Little Jedi’s birthday on Saturday. I got some awesome new social media profile images and page art courtesy of my friend Cat of Thru Cat’s Eyes Photography.

Here’s the first of several new images you’ll be seeing over the next few weeks on my various social media profiles. This one’s going on the about page here if I ever have time to do the much-needed revamp of my pages and categories here. That’s my sister Diana of Part Time Monster there with me.

And I’d tell you the A to Z Challenge is going well.  We’re down to only a handful of posts to load and finish at Sourcerer, and we’ve had a fabulous time with A to Z over there. I’ve not done as many visits this week as I’d like, because I had a busy week at work and was sick for a few days late in the week. I’m hoping to catch up on visits from the list today.

I’d ask you how your week has been, and chat for a little while until we caught up. Then I’d have to run, because I’m not going to have a lot of Internet time this week or next weekend, so I have a ton of stuff to take care of to get the blogs and all the social media associated with them squared away for the next 10 or so days.

Happy Weekend! Don’t forget to add your coffee post to the linkup, and share it to #weekendcoffeeshare if you share your posts on Facebook or Twitter.