Armchair BEA - The Last Day and one more post

The last day of BEA has an intriguing question for us armchair BEA followers: "Ask the Experts"

Ask The Experts. In your post, ask the visitors to your blog for blogging advice.

My questions:
1. How do you avoid any blogging "slumps", where you stay away from your blog for a week or two on end?
2. Do you find, like I do, that weekends are slow for views/people reading your posts?

My tip:
Get Cross-blog audiences! Guest post, or interview on other blogs to help promote yours.
I feature a blogger interview every month here. 
Would you like to be featured here?
 
Read my first Armchair BEA post here 
Read sample author interviews or blogger spotlights here.

Blogger Spotlight #9: Vix the "pads-brat"

Give us an idea of who you are: 

Hmm, i never really know what to say with these things but i’ll try giving it in a nutshell... My name is Viktoria. In the real world i go by ‘Vix’, online it’s either TToria or Vix. 

I’m a twenty-four year old ‘pads-brat’ (army kid) I come from a long line of soldiers and so i’ve moved around a lot! The country closest to my heart is Scotland. I left home at sixteen, travelled around a bit etc then i bumped into my high-school sweetheart. He went to the same armed forces school as me in Germany. We got married and seven years later we’re travelling around (he’s in the army now too) and raising our five year old son :) I’m extremely close to my two sisters, though we all live in separate countries: England, Scotland an Germany. Moving around is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to working and studying. Thank goodness for the internet and the opportunities it brings! Right now my husband, son and I are in England but the two-year posting is finished in June and so we’ll be moving back up to Scotland. 

As most of us book bloggers would say “I’m an avid reader”, and i’ll say the same. It’s an addiction! I tend to steer clear of horrors though, eek. I hope to write my own novel one day, but i think i still have a lot to learn. It’s something that shouldn’t be rushed. 

Describe a typical day:

 My days are pretty unpredictable at the moment. With us moving soon i’m trying to get the house organised and packed while my son is at school. And obviously reading and blogging fits in with that boring stuff too. 

Blogger Tip #2: Checking Blog for dead links

Did you know your blog might have a bunch of dead links that you are still linking to?
The recent Bloggiesta weekend revealed that I hadn't checked for this ever.

To check for dead links, you can go to http://validator.w3.org/checklink
This will check for dead links in your blog, website or any webpage and give you a complete list. When I tried it, I got about 85 links that the site said I had to manually check - most of those were "Tag searches" and worked fine on clicking.

Blogger Tips Series: 

#1 John Updike's rules for reviews

Blogger Tip #1: John Updike's Rules for Writing Reviews

The From Picked-up Pieces (1975):

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste. 

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis [a summary or abridgement]. 

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)