Book Blogger Hop (13)

In the spirit of the Twitter Friday Follow, the Book Blogger Hop is a place just for book bloggers and readers to connect and share our love of the written word! This weekly BOOK PARTY is an awesome opportunity for book bloggers to connect with other book lovers, make new friends, support each other, and generally just share our love of books! It will also give blog readers a chance to find other book blogs to read!

This week's question is from Angela of Library Girl Reads:

"What is the thing you like most about reading book blogs?  Is it the reviews, author guest posts, articles, giveaways, or something else entirely?"

Really, it's the reviews that I like the most.  They help me make decisions on which books to read, as well as introducing me to books I might not have heard of.

Blog Makeover!

I was tired of the old grey, black, and red theme. When I first made it, I thought it was kind of elegant. But after a while, I started to feel it was a little dark... and depressing. And I was afraid it might suggest that the only books I ever read are emo vampire novels...

I tried a few times to pretty up this blog, but I never really got anywhere. I was even starting to regret choosing a name with "ladybug" in it, because it felt like it was limiting the design possibilities. But all I really needed was some inspiration... and some pretty pictures to work with. So I found some graphics that I liked and made myself a new layout. (The credits can all be found on my About page.)

I feel like this represents me better; I'm really not a black-and-grey sort of person. Plus, I had a lot of fun making it. Collage (even digital collage) can keep a person occupied for hours...

How do you like the new look?

Strange moments in the world of book blogging/marketing...

People really, really want to win a copy of Linger, don't they? When I had a look at my subs this morning, it looked like about a third of the posts were about Maggie Stiefvater's upcoming Linger (the sequel to Shiver). So I followed the provided links and discovered that all of these posts are basically just contest entries (post an ad, maybe win a book).

From a marketing perspective, this is pretty smart. You're getting publicity for your book all over the book blogosphere, and familiarizing readers with the cover so that, when it's released in stores, people will know what to look for. Giving people extra entries for using the book cover as their profile pic on social networking sites? Genius.

From a book blog reader's perspective, though, this is all kind of annoying. Hence my mixed feelings about this. I understand why it's being done, but that doesn't mean it's any less frustrating to sort through my subs to find something to read that isn't -- let's face it -- a form of spam.

I'm curious about how this might relate to the new FTC guidelines. After all, there is an advertising relationship here: people are being compensated (albeit with contest entries) in exchange for posting advertisements. That sounds awfully similar to the main issue that these guidelines were created to address:

... Engle said the revised guidelines are aimed at advertisers and marketers, not individual bloggers. She cited a Procter & Gamble campaign called “Vocalpoint,” which provided “400,000 moms” with free products in exchange for endorsements made via blog posts and tweets.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting jaded. It seems the publishing industry has gone from an industry that once provided a mouthpiece for genuinely talented storytellers into a money-focused industry that will publish just about anything as long as they think people will buy it. Perhaps it's always been that way, but I certainly don't remember reading as many bad books in the past as I've read lately. Typos, plot holes, questionable messages for the target audience... and that's not even taking into account the self-published stuff!

What do you think? Do you like contests that basically force you to become an advertiser? What about publishing today? Have you noticed a downward spiral as of late... or were things always this shoddy and avaricious in the publishing industry?

A New Year...

... and a new look. I know I've changed my layout a few times in the last couple of months, but I was never really happy with it. I finally figured out how to tweak the Blogger templates and use CSS to get the look I wanted, so here we are. A more subtle background, a more subdued colour palette, and fewer ladybugs (it was beginning to look a bit like an infestation).

I'm probably also going to be posting less often from now on. I'll still keep up with memes (Musing Mondays, Teaser Tuesdays, etc.), but only if I feel I can contribute something intelligent. I won't be doing them just for the sake of doing them.

I hope to read more books this year, so that should mean more reviews. I've signed up for two challenges (the 2010 Young Adult Reading Challenge and the 2010 Fantasy Reading Challenge), so expect some YA and fantasy reviews in the weeks and months to come. I started reading my first book last night (it was after midnight, so it counts!).

Will 2010 be a good year for lovers of literature? I sure hope so. There are plenty of cool-looking books coming out this year, so it seems promising. And, of course, there are all those previously released books that we never got around to reading that are sure to be just as great (assuming we haven't read too many spoilers already!).

Layout Change!

I was having issues with the 3-column layout. There just isn't enough room for text and pictures when you've got 2 sidebars (sometimes the text was encroaching on the pictures... which made it almost impossible to read). I hope this will remedy the problem. I've used *.png files, which apparently don't display transparency properly in some older browsers (like IE6). So if the images have funky coloured borders, that's probably what's going on.

The background and colours are easily changeable; for now, I just want to make sure the layout is displaying properly. So if it's not, could you let me know? I'm new to this template-tweaking business.

Is anyone out there an HTML wizard?

I think I may be running up against the limits of Blogger. Either that, or I don't know what the heck I'm doing.

Does anyone know if you can adjust the padding of the post text independently of the wrapper? I've been fiddling with this all day, and I just can't get the text to show up properly.

Blogger, you're killing me!

Is anyone else having problems uploading images to Blogger? I keep getting an error message. I've had to resort to copying/pasting and using *gasp* Photobucket.

I think the ladybug says it best.

Cascading Style Sheets Can Bite Me

Time flies when you're not having fun! Well, I guess working on my blog is sort of fun... but only when it works properly and I don't get a whole bunch of error messages.

I hate error messages.

I think I've figured out how to do what I was asking about in this post (but it may be that I've just fudged it and made it a lot more complicated than it needed to be... I don't know). At the moment, I've got it running on a test site. The graphics and everything are working the way I want them to... but I'm having problems with the basics! Where the date and blog title should be, it says "Undefined". The little bit at the end of each post that says "Posted by" is missing, too (even though I've looked at the gadget and the correct box is checked... so I don't know what the problem is). And on top of everything else, Blogger is putting my name on the top of each post!

I used the Rounders 4 template as a base because it was the closest to what I was looking for. I don't know if that's what's screwed things up, but I couldn't even get those dates and post titles to show up with Minima, which is what I usually use. Something's messed up.

I tried to teach myself DHTML years ago, but the CSS part always confused me. Unfortunately, that's what Blogger uses, so that's what I need to figure out. The trouble is finding things like your sidebar in all that code... You can't just search for the text that's in your sidebar, because that's not part of the template. So you have to know exactly what you're looking for in order to fix it. Unfortunately... I don't.

This ladybug is going a bit cross-eyed. It's time to take a break from this. But if anyone has any suggestions for solving these problems, I'm listening!

I have a question about blog templates...

I really like the look of some blog templates that I've seen, but I don't know what the format is called so I don't know what to search for (I'd like a tutorial on how to make my own... not just templates that I can download).

Examples of what I'm looking for can be seen here and here. Basically, the blog has a bottom edge (I guess the main text area resizes as you add posts?) and a footer where you can add images and whatnot.

Does anyone know what this type of layout is called and where I can find a tutorial on how to make my own?