I've outgrown my blog

When I started my blog in 2008, the purpose was to review and write about the books I’ve read and engage with other book bloggers. It took me a while to find a name for the blog but after some brainstorming and checking with friends on their opinions, I decided on Ulat Buku in the City.

It’s pretty obvious my current blog name was inspired by my favourite show at that point of time, Sex and the City. I was single and living in a high rise apartment right smack in KL city. Ulat Buku means book worm in my native language Bahasa Malaysia. Book worm + living in the city = Ulat Buku in the City. It's not the most creative blog name but hey I loved it and it reflected well on who I was back then. I also created a twitter account to support the blog @msulatbuku.

In sum, the blog name, look, feel and content quite suited me at that point in my life.

However as individuals, we change and evolve as we grow (older? wiser? I’m not sure which to use to be honest LOL) and looking at the blog now I somehow feel that it does not reflect the person I am today.

I’m not a consistent blogger obviously but I love my blog site. I love writing and at this juncture in my life when I do find the time to write, I would really like to write about more than just the books I read. I want to expand my content to also include my experiences at home, my family and some thoughts on my profession as a marketing communications consultant.

On Twitter, I have stopped using the @msulatbuku handle for quite a while now and started tweeting @tashmusa instead. I don’t know why but I just felt that the @msulatbuku handle seems a bit childish now and like my blog, not reflective of the person I am today.

I know for a fact that I want to keep this blog site. I’m too lazy to start all over again with a new blog site. In fact, a couple of years ago I experimented with a new blog site at Wordpress and that did not turn out well for me.

The question that I am asking myself is do I re-invent and rebrand this site? Should I? To be honest, I have not decided. I am still mulling over this but I’m leaning towards re-naming the site simply as Natasha Musa’s Blog, that way however I evolve in the future, the writing and content is from me and reflective of who I am. BUT... I'm finding it hard to let go of Ulat Buku in the City due to sentimental reasons. 

If you are a blogger and you are reading this, have you ever gone through such transition? What did you do? I hope you can share your thoughts and advice on what happened when you outgrew you blog. Drop me a note, I’d love to hear your opinion. 

February Blog Improvements: Part 2

I learned a painful lesson last week: Always back-up your blog so that if you are not happy with any amendments made you can restore your previous blog settings.

I have had the intention to re-organize my blog labels for quite a while now. I did some research and found a couple of sites that provided step by step guides on how I can rename labels in bulk on Blogger. The guide provided by the sites seemed pretty simple but yet I managed to screw it up somehow. Sigh. Only I can screw up such a simple process. 

While I was trying to re-name my blog posts labels in bulk, I accidentally deleted about 90% of my posts from 2011 and a couple of my posts from January this year. Anyway, for fear of losing more posts, I decided to re-label each posts ONE BY ONE! It’s a good thing that I am not a consistent blogger and have less than 250 posts in total. Even then it took me a whole three hours to get it done.

So re-organize labels – DONE!

Other blog improvements:

I’ve added two other widgets on the widgets column:

1. Search widget
2. Popular posts widget

Those were pretty simple to do since Blogger already has the widgets ready so all you needed to do was click to install them.

Ok am gonna lay off working on the blog for the rest of February.

Next month, I’m gonna learn how to install a contact page on the blog and also how to install a progress bar for my 2015 Reading Challenges page. 

I am now a digital bookworm

When I first became a mom, it was really, really tough for me to keep up with my reading habit. My first year as a new mother, I only managed to read two books for the whole year. I tried reading often but I was always too tired to finish a book. At that point of time I was already a member of Audible, Amazon’s audiobook store. I was purchasing books monthly on audible but never really started listening to them because I wasn’t used to “listening” to a book.

About two year ago, I moved in to stay with my mum and dad for a while and they live really far out from my workplace. It took me about half an hour to get to work … on a good day. On a bad day it can be between 40 minutes to an hour to commute to work in my car. I got sick of listening to the local radio station (our morning shows really suck by the way). So one day I decided to download the audible app on my iPhone together with all my audiobooks and just started listening to my first audiobook on one of my long drives to work.

The first book I really listened to from Audible was The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Really good choice for a first audiobook, the listening experience was great and I have been hooked on audiobooks since then. Thanks to audiobooks, I’ve managed to continue ‘reading’ despite my hectic schedule at home and at work. In fact on days that I am really lazy to read to the kids, we listen to audiobooks together instead…  LOL. That’s me making good use of technology.

I’ve since moved out of my mum and dad’s home, my commute to work is very much shorter now but I still listen to audiobooks whenever I’m in the car. I absolutely love the experience. I plug my earphones to listen to my audiobook whenever I can; when I go grocery shopping, manicure sessions or anything that I do that doesn’t require serious focus or communicating with others. Last year I went through about 15 audiobooks in total and I am hoping to listen to more this year. I absolutely love listening to audiobooks and the technology has helped me ‘read’ whenever and wherever I can.

I also invested in my first e-reader about a year back. Kobo e-readers are not available here in Malaysia or at least I couldn’t find a reliable source to purchase from. Fortunately for me, I managed to trouble a friend to buy it for me in Australia. I’ll explain my choice of a Kobo over a Kindle at another time; this topic deserves its own post. Again, it took a while for me to get used to reading on an e-reader. Transitioning from a traditional book to an e-reader took me about 6 months. The first time I held my Kobo and tried reading from it, I actually missed the weight, feel and smell of an actual book.

Late last year, during a long holiday I decided to start reading off my Kobo. I’ve since read five books and am now on my sixth book purchased from Kobo.

I am now so in love with my Kobo that I don’t leave home without it. It’s light and small enough to carry around in my handbag. At night if I want to continue reading, I don’t have to leave the lights on and disrupt my husband; who really can sleep through anything to be honest, lights on, off, loud sounds, an earthquake even probably… so the function isn’t that important to me but it’s quite nice to have. I can read anywhere I want and whenever I want; in between meetings, lunchtime, when I’m waiting for people. I just whip out my Kobo and start reading.

But… the coolest thing about going digital is that I have over 500 books with me ALL THE TIME; a combo of my list of audiobook and e-books in my Kobo and Audible library. That’s seriously cool, no?

I still buy books of course, but not as often as I use to. The only thing that I need to research on a bit is whether I can still get tax refund from audible and kobo bookstore purchases in Malaysia.

Anyway, I’m proud to say that I’ve finally gone digital and I’m loving it!

February Blog Improvements

I recently decided to come back and blog on this site which has been left idle since 2011. Because of this, I felt that I needed a new look and feel that would be more suitable with the current times. I wanted to improve the blog design, layout and navigation. So in the past two weeks I was working to improve my blog somewhat. This will obviously be an ongoing project as I won't have the time to update everything at one go. These are the improvements I’ve done so far:  

Blog design

My previous blog design was implemented sometime in 2010 and I thought a refreshed look was much needed to suit my current style. I cluttered my layout with so many widgets and links to multiple sites that honestly would not benefit anyone who visited my site.

I worked with a designer I found on Etsy and requested for a design that is cleaner and minimalistic. The current design that you see is the new look. What do you think?

Pages

I’ve also created different pages with information that is more relevant to the blog’s purpose. Pages I’ve created:

1. An about page – This page gives a little more detail of who I am and the purpose of my blog.
2. Policy – When I did research a lot of the bloggers advise that one should have a blog policy featured. My policy page is really a brief outline of my blogging principles and also just a few words to say that the blog content is mine nothing fancy.
3. 2015 Reads and 2015 Reading Challenges – The whole purpose of my blog is to keep track of my reading habit and connect with other book lovers in the digital sphere. So I thought creating pages of what I’ve read and the status of my reading challenges so far would be of interest to other book lovers. The 2015 Reads page also links all my latest reviews for the year.

Widgets Column

As I mentioned earlier in this post, I use to feature so many widgets on my widget column. I’ve decided to review which widgets would be useful to keep and what should be deleted. I used to have widgets like number of people who visited the site, number of google followers, a live twitter feed, a grab button and also a Shelfari bookshelf that allows people to see the books I’ve read in the past.

First off, I don’t think people care how many visitors and followers you have on your blog except for you.

Secondly, if people wanted to read your Twitter feed or find out how many books you've read, they can follow you on Twitter or Shelfari.

Thirdly, no one wants your grab button or at least I don’t think they ever wanted mine. I assume if people like the content of my blog they can subscribe to my blog via the multiple widgets available to get updates on what I post.

I think the new widget column looks much cleaner than the last one I had. What I feature on the column now is:

1. About Me –Previously, I blogged under the pseudonym Ms Ulat Buku (don’t ask me why, I just thought it was cool at the time). The updated version of the about me section reflects the real me. It has a short summary of who I am and automatically links to my google+ account and a link to a more detailed background of myself on my About page. I think this is better because all my other social media sites uses my real name and not a pseudonym. Hopefully it makes it easier for people to find me if they wish to link up.
2. Social media links – the designer I hired designed all my social media links. This link is so much better that featuring my twitter feed or shelfari bookshelf.
3. Subscribe to - allows visitors to subscribe to my blog and get updates on posts and comments. 
4. Currently reading, currently listening to widgets – so that visitors know what I’m reading right now.
5. Archives and a labels widget- so that visitors can click and read what I wrote in the past.

Obviously, there is still much to improve on this 'ol blog of mine. 

For example, I’d like to develop a contact page, add a search widget, post sharing options etc. All this will require some time for me to do. So it will be a slow process but am gonna chronicle all that I do so that I remember what I've learned. 

If you have recommendations on how else I could improve my blog, please do provide some feedback. I’m open to ideas on how I can make my blog nicer and easy to man oeuvre.

Why I prefer blogging on Blogger

Sometime in 2013, I got the idea that I wanted to be a professional blogger. Yes. Me.

So to kick start this big dream of mine, I decided to create a blog using the WordPress platform because most professional bloggers I know created theirs on WordPress. I thought having a WordPress blog of my own would be impressive. I even have my own personalized domain name. (Reminder to self: cancel domain name!)

I don’t know what I was thinking really. Becoming a professional blogger is hard work. Like really hard work.

#1 Your blog content has to be good. Good enough so that readers are engaged and learn something new that would benefit them. In order to come across as a specialist in the field you blog about, you really have to spend a lot of time researching so that your content is unique and educational.

#2 You have to be consistent with updating your blog and aggressively promote your blog.

#3 You have to maintain your blogs appearance to keep it updated and mannnnn WordPress can be tough if you hate dealing with technical details like I do.

I, obviously, did not have the patience nor the time to keep up with my WordPress blog. Trying to become a professional blogger took the fun out of blogging for me. Suddenly I felt under pressure preparing my blog content because I needed to showcased what I specialized in. I started writing in a different voice and it didn’t feel like the writing was mine. Anyway I digress, sorry. I tend to do that a lot now.

It was during this time that I fiddled with WordPress. Whilst WordPress has its plus points I really didn’t want to spend too much time trying to understand how to use the platform to make my blog better. And trust me, if you are new with WordPress you need to spend A LOT OF TIME trying to understand the platform and how it works.

I realize from this experience that I love blogging for fun not to showcase my professional knowledge. I love writing and sharing my personal thoughts online and not my professional experience. I blog also because I wanted to connect with people who share the same interest I do. More importantly, I didn’t want to be bogged down with technicalities of how I can use the many plugins available to improve my blog. And since I now realize that I hate dealing with blogging technicalities, Blogger is a better platform because its easy to manage and it suits my objective.

Blogger to me is:

# Really easy to set up.

# Easy to customize. There are more blogger templates available out there that is free and/or cheaper than a WordPress template. Though I have to admit WordPress templates are much nicer.

# The Blogger dashboard is easier to manoeuvre (but this could be because I’m used to Blogger having been on it since 2013)

As much as I love Blogger there is one thing I’ll miss from WordPress and that is the ability to share post to more social media sites. Since I only recently came back to Blogger I can see some updated features but not many. I noticed that I can now automatically share blog posts on Google+ but not any other social media sites. Or is there an updated sharing option on the Blogger dashboard that I haven’t noticed yet?

Anyway, I’m happy with blogger for now. I can write as and when I please. If anyone reads this blog, great! If no one reads it, no problem! I can write whatever I feel like writing with no pressure. More importantly, I can maintain the blog without worrying to update this plugin or that plugin to keep it updated. Bliss.

For making my life easier, thank you Blogger! I absolutely love you!