NEW YEAR, NEW IMPROVEMENTS!

Hello everyone, I have come out of a New Year induced retreat to as they say “clear the cobwebs” which have gathered on my page. Speaking of cobwebs, I was away for the Christmas and New year holidays and was welcomed by dusty furniture when I returned to my apartment. It took sheer will power to mobilize my tired bones to chase dust out of every fabric, nook and cranny of my house but once done, it was worth every aching muscle. 

Like my ordeal with the house, a retreat gives you the opportunity to look inwards and assess what needs cleaning, what needs to be thrown away and what needs to be added. And while it can be tasking, it is well worth the effort and time. My blog has also benefited from my spring cleaning.  If you were here last year, you’d notice the changes in the side bars like my new twitter handle to the left and I even included a “user manual” and “contact me” tab at the top of the page. If it looks the same to you, never mind! But after a few hours of HTML codes, google searches and navigating the dashboard, I succeeded in: 

•        Putting up some new features.
•        Getting rid of clutter and organizing information into pages and segments on the sidebar.
•        Assessing the general direction my blog has taken in the past years
•        Putting together a ready list of things I would like to do with it this year

So there is a lot to look forward to. Reading my list once again presents an analogy. The beginning of the year is a good time to adopt some things, get rid of others, assess our direction and put plans in place for what we would like to do in the year. Sometimes, it’s not even about doing anything new, it’s just about continuing what we have been doing and doing more of it!

In other news, one of my favorite bloggers staged a return to blogsville. Hers was one of the blogs I used as a benchmark when I started mine more than three years ago but while my archives grew hers stalled from a very long hiatus. Needless to say, I was disheartened but couldn’t give up on her blog for the love of her interesting posts and really great writing, so I did what a really big fan would do and added her dormant blog to my blogroll. I was absolutely delighted when she revived it with a revving 15 posts in January alone. Welcome back Adaure Achumba, be sure to check her out here.

In the spirit of improvements, Teralyn Pilgrim is hosting a “critique my blog” blogfest on her blog as an avenue for all listed bloggers on her blog hop to get feedback on their blogs. Read more about it here. Still in the spirit of improvements, i would like to know what you think of this blog, suggestions you have for improvements and things you’d like to read more of this year. 

Quick question: I considered including photos in the posts and experimented with this post, don't think I like it though, what do you think?