Follow Friday Blog Hop

Hi. This is my first Follow Friday Blog Hop. Thanks for stopping by and joining the party. Hop along and discover some new blogs. Follow Friday is a meme hosted by Parajunkee and AllisonCanRead.



Question of the Week: When you've read a book, what do you do with it? (Keep it, give it away, donate it, sell it, swap it..?)

My answer: I love books, so I usually keep them, but I'm going to donate some of the cool YA books I've collected to the library for circulation because I like for readers to discover new books and authors. If I really loved a book, I want others to know about it too, and libraries don't always take the chance of stacking lesser-known books. But I don't chase after just what's popular. I'll pick up anything that catches my attention, especially if it's suspense.

The Rules:

1.(Required) Follow the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts {Parajunkee & Alison Can Read}

2. (Required) Follow our Featured Bloggers - Once Upon A Time & Books Are Vital.

3. Put your Blog name & URL in the Linky thing. You can also grab the code if you would like to insert it into your posts.

4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say "hi" in your comments and that they are now following you.

5.Follow Follow Follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "HI"

6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the Love...and the followers

7. If you're new to the follow friday hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

Weekend Blog Hop

Welcome to Weekend Blog Hop. Thank you for joining us and linking up. We are happy you are here and hope you will always come around. We have had a great week and now it's time for us to increase our followers by Blog Hopping all through the Weekend. Come and make new friends and find some interesting blogs to follow. Happy Hopping.

Please only family friendly blogs only!!!

The rules of the blog hop are:-

1.) Follow clairejustineoxox in number 1 spot on Google friends connect.

2.) Follow Reflexions in number 2 spot the co-host on Google friends connect.

3.) Visit and read some great blogs and follow ones you like.

If you are a new follower please leave a comment so we can follow you back....

Have a great weekend...

Thank you for joining in .....

How Do You Like My New Home???

Hi. Welcome to Gotta Have YA, my new and improved blog. How do you like my digs? Wicked cute, huh? I love my design!!! It was done by Freyja Silver at Silver Designs, so if you're looking for totally adorable designs, check out her site.

I know I don't have many followers yet, and that that looks really sad in the boxes, but I'm in the process of moving from Wordpress to Blogger. I still need to do my link lists, but just about everything else has come together sweetly. Please click the Follow button to keep it from remaining so pitiful.

Why did I move??? Well, WP makes you choose from stock designs, or you can pay, but why pay when Blogger's FREE? And it doesn't allow javascript, so there's only so much you can do with it to make it feel like your blogging home rather than a rental space. Like, you can't put little widgets in your sidebar, especially follower boxes, countdowns or to-be-read books. That's pretty much like not being able to hang pictures, put in surround sound or paint the walls.

I've been at Wordpress since 2008, and although it was nice for the time I was there, I felt it was time to part ways. Blogger offers fun, color and a more visitor-friendly platform. My blog posts may be old, but there are great nuggets in there for writers. Click on my labels if you are trying to figure out what people mean about different points of view, if you need a creative boost with a writing exercise or want to learn all about voice, hooks, the importance of story questions, etc. and how I really felt about Twilight.

For this blog, I intend to make it more YA-focused. Sure, I'll talk about writing and personal stuff too, but I mostly plan engulf myself in YA lit and blog about books and what's going on in the publishing industry regarding this way-awesome genre that sets trends, surprises always and bridges divides. Thanks for stopping in. If you follow, I'll follow back.

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.

Shocker: I Designed a Cool Website

I'd created a writer website with CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer but had to do a system reinstall, losing the program. Plus, to add any little thing on it like videos or flash, you have to buy extra attachments, which is ridiculous. They have so many free builders online, there's no point in buying anything. So, I went on the hunt.

Most of the templates on various sites looked so generic and stock. I tried a few builders (Yahoo and some others I can't remember) but they weren't really what I was looking for.

Then, I landed on Wix.com, advertised as FREE. It's huge array of templates, backgrounds, flash options, animations, customizable features, etc. won me over. So, I tried it out for my Kings & Queens page and loved the whole process. I think I made an awesome site with it.

The site builder was wicked easy to use, and ironically, I didn't even use a template. I got inspired by two of their examples, combined ideas, and designed my own.

Wix is not a perfect hosting company at all. It barely hosts. You don't get an email account or access to your code, nor a stat counter (Google Analytics) unless you pay $8.25 per month (the locked-in price for a one-year commitment), but you can have a free site if you don't care about stats (or their tiny ad bars) (though, their two ads will be affixed to your site) or upgrade to one of their plans. Most hosting sites are in the $4-a-month range.

They do have a $4-and-change plan but their little ads stay on your page. The $8.25 plan no ads, Google Analytics, a free domain and the extra advertising candies that every other host gives out.

For now, I'm online free; stats are not really important to me at this point. But I really don't mind paying $8.25 a month later on if it gets me an awesome site and I don't have to pay for a designer. Plus, I honestly don't need another email account to check, so linking my contact form to my current address totally works for me.

Here's my URL: http://www.kingsandqueensnovel.com if you want to check it out, but please note, it's a work in progress and I haven't plugged in my trailer, picked my set copy and all that jazz. I'm just so excited to show it. Check it out and let me know what you think.

If you pop in, please sign my guestbook, so I know you stopped by and let me know if it's easy to navigate and if everything appears cool on your end (fonts especially). My body text type should look kind of like Courier and all the page headers should look like black punch tape. Thanks a bunch.

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.