This week has been (and just about still is) Book Blogger Appreciation Week, which is a fab event for, you know, book bloggers. I sadly have been far too busy to take part properly but I wanted to say a quick hello and thank you to the book-blogging community. You’re ace.

Though I haven’t been able to post on this every day, many many people have done just that. You can find out more and follow some or all of the links to their posts here. Each day this week had a theme for discussion, and today’s is “blogging”.

I didn’t intend to start a blog. No, really! A few different things led me to the idea of creating a website and my initial idea was almost a database of short book reviews, but as I started the design process I looked around the interwebs and realised that a book blog made total sense. And there were lots of them about to share thoughts and ideas with.

Although I was reasonably web-savvy (and had the huge advantage of knowing HTML, thanks to my day job), it’s still a pretty steep learning curve, this blogging thing. I am always learning new things and the main way I do that is through my fellow book bloggers (and indeed some non-book bloggers, who are also great). I can’t join in every meme, readalong, challenge or giveaway but I do tip my toes in. I love that there is such a huge, active community with so much going on.

We’re supposed to include in this post “essential tried and true practices for every blogger and new trends or tools you’ve adopted recently or would like to in the future”. My tried and true are:
1. Follow, read and comment on lots of other blogs that you like.
2. Install Akismet (for WordPress) to catch those nasty spam comments.
3. Don’t be afraid to tell people you know that you have a blog (unless it’s anonymous and/or deeply personal, I suppose!) – most people are really interested and will stop by to have a look.

As for new trends or tools, I recently took part in a couple of blog hop giveaways, which were fantastically successful. It’s a great way to reward your readers and being part of a blog hop rather than just hosting it yourself means that it’s likely at least someone will enter!