Sunday Salon - Sunday 20 September - Weekly Geeks

Well, this has been a spectacularly busy week with not only BBAW (Book Blogger Appreciation Week) happening but also Christie week, during which I've been running a blog tour.
BBAW is over but the Christie blog tour is still happening.

I did feel at times as if I had taken on a bit too much, and ended up posting three times some days, so there's a lot to catch up on. I posted 21 times this week, so I apologise if your RSS reader got a bit full.
I had intended to take part in most of the BBAW activities, had prepared lots of posts in advance, but it soon became very obvious that there was a huge amount going on. The amount of cyber energy being harnessed and excitement being generated was enormous. I found some new-to-me blogs and got some wonderful ideas.
At the same time visits to my blog reached unprecedented volume, and I really haven't been able to reply to comments which is something I really like to do.

Similarly I had done a lot of preparation for the Agatha Christie Blog tour and have been delighted by the wonderful posts that tour participants have been providing. The blog tour has 3 days to go, so do pop in and have a look. Each daily post here gives you where we've been, who today's host is, and where we're going.

At the end of the week my daughter and son-in-law arrived home from Abu Dhabi for a flying visit, so there are family functions too.

So I am looking forward to resuming a bit of normality if I can this week, but things will remain pretty busy for a few days. This week's Weekly Geeks task is to check ourselves for burn-out.

This week's posts:

• BBAW Giveaways - the winners!
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #8
• The Dog Who Came In From The Cold
  - the sequel to CORDUROY MANSIONS (Alexander McCall Smith) begins online tomorrow.
• Awards - Received and Given
  I love these "badges of honour"!
• Splashed and Lovely
  Some generous awards I was given this week acknowledged and pass on.
• Review: TELLING TALES, Ann Cleeves
• ACRC Update - 19 September 2009
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #7
• BBAW: Setting Goals
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #6
• BBAW: A book I discovered on another blog
• Forgotten Book: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #5
• Review: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, Agatha Christie
• BBAW: Reading Meme
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #4
• BBAW: Interview Swap
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #3
• BBAW: Appreciation of Book Bloggers
• Celebrating Agatha Christie Week #2
• Review: INSPECTOR SINGH INVESTIGATES: A Most Peculiar Malayasian Murder
  

Books I'm reading

• now - GHOST LINES, Nick Gadd
• next - A SMALL CASE FOR INSPECTOR GHOTE?, H.R.F. Keating
• in the car - RED BONES, Ann Cleeves
• on line - CORDUROY MANSIONS 2, Alexander McCall Smith

News & Headlines

• Prime Minister's Awards short list
• Books Alive Reading Challenge
• Book Review Blog Carnival #26
• Val McDermid... much in common with Agatha Christie
• Julia McKenzie . . . yet another hat for Miss Marple
• Agatha Christie on AudioFile

Things to do on my blog

• Join the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge
• Contribute to ACRC Blog Carnival #9 by 22 September
• Try your hand at a mini-review #2
  Contribute a mini-review of a book you've recently read to MYSTERIES IN PARADISE. The current edition of mini-review roundup will close on September 24. Not restricted to crime fiction. Very glad to have your contributions.
• Find out about Weekly Geeks, Friday's Forgotten Books, and the FriendFeed Crime & Mystery Fiction room.
• Have a look at Crime Fiction Journeys - all the blogs I'm watching

Features to check:
I'm running a number of widgets that I think add value to my blog so be sure to check them out. I've picked most of them up from what I've seen on other blogs. Here are some to look for.

• Odiogo provides an automatic "podcast" of each post, so you can listen if you'd prefer that.
• Each post now displays a Linkwithin widget at the end, that recommends other posts you might enjoy.
• Each post has a rating system at the bottom where you can give it a star rating - I'm not actually sure where I got that from.
• Blogger Widgets provided me with with"My Faithful Commentators" widget - I'm not exactly sure how that works statistically speaking but it shows who comments most frequently on my blog.
• I use ClustrMaps, Feedjit, and Sitemeter to monitor my live traffic.
• I have a Google translate widget so a visitor can choose the language they'd rather see the blog in, even Arabic and Japanese.
• I have a customised crime fiction search that I created through Google search by listing about 100 blog and book review sites.
• And you'll see that I make extensive use of RSS feeds.

Have you discovered a widget that you think might interest me?