Welcome to our 4th birthday party!

Mini treasures wiki will be 4 years on Sunday 14th April 2013. We are celebrating the occasion with several ways:

• we are show-casing the cakes from our Flickr group
• we have a special Facebook event 
• we will be tweeting about our birthday using #mtw4y
• we are giving away the MTW Awards for 25 sites bringing us most traffic
• there are give-away (feel free to donate too by this Sunday, e.g. by leaving a comment on this blog post)

Come and join our party (the main page for the event is of course in the wiki itself) and do not forget to spread the word about it :). Make us a birthday card or leave your kind words in the comment section of this blog. 

The Mini Treasures Daily

A dream has come true again - I wanted to become a journalist and now I am editor in chief in a new eMagazine called The Mini Treasures Daily. :)

How do I have time for yet a new project?
I don't! :)

My social media friends started to use Paper.li already some time ago and I have often been referred in their mags. Before I started using Paper.li myself (that is two days ago) I was always amazing about their papers - how do they have time for that?

My mag is generated every day automatically based on a list I maintain in Twitter - it contains people who are tweeting about dolls, dollhouses and miniatures. The Paper.li services somehow analyzes the tweet they are doing and creates a mag out of them. It always gives the source for the news so people in the mag may get new Twitter followers.

I am now waiting the third mag to be published, the earlier ones can be found from the archive: first and second.

I think this service is new for many of you and it may raise confusion about the rights. Tweets are public and they can be used where ever: you can talk about tweets in your blog, in Facebook, in forums etc. The important thing is the sources - do not take credit from something you have not created yourself.

I hope you enjoy the new mag :). And if you know good tweeps to be added to the list, tell me!

Update:

If you want out of my mag tell me and I'll remove you from the list. Other option is to block me - as I guess I can't list people who have blocked me.

I was asked if I make money with the mag. No I don't but of course somebody is - paper.li is selling stupid ads to mags. I guess if I started paying for the service I could get rid of them. Money makes the world go round and every service provider (Facebook, Twitter, Google) looks for opportunities to make more money from the content we are spreading all over the web or by selling our data to advertisers.

MTW Advent calendar starting - help us!

Hi bloggers, Facebookers, Tweeps and other social media users!

I need your help! The second MTW Advent Calendar starts in two days and I need all the help I can get in promoting it. So please add a button to your blog, share the link in Facebook or tweet about it.

I do not want any miniaturist to be unaware about the fun that is about to start :). I already filled my page (no peeking allowed, I can see if you do and so will the Santa) and can't wait to see what others come up with. :)

Many ways of being part of MTW community

Do you know that anyone can edit Mini treasures wiki?

Do you know that you can add links to your web sites (photo albums, blogs, mini shops and other mini sites)? Start by introducing yourself.

You can also promote other mini things you like, e.g. museums, books, shops, brands, cool projects.

You are also encouraged to
- write instructions related miniature, e.g. in trash minis.
- correct all the grammar mistakes I have made :)

Do you know you can add pictures of your minis? You can add them either in our Flickr group or directly to our wiki. See wiki faq to learn how.

Do you know that you can help promoting MTW? E.g. by
-telling about it to your friends (e.g. in club meetings or forums), use e.g. wiki abc to get you started or ask help from me
-adding wiki link or button for your site
-joining our Facebook page or
-following our Twitter account,

The best way of being part of our community is of course reading the wiki pages - after all the wiki is made for readers. :)

From now on I'll be mainly offline until I go back home. You can follow me either in Facebook or in Twitter.

For those of you who have not visited MTW lately...

Hi mini friend

As it seems you have not logged in to Mini treasures wiki in the last months I am writing you to tell what has happened lately there :).

First of all we got new icons and the whole site looks much fresher now. Go and press the buttons to learn to navigate in the wiki again.

Then we started having theme weeks. During the past weeks we have visited US, Finland, Canada, UK, Germany and the Netherlands. This week we do Spain and after that we go to Australia, Italy and France.

And we have started piloting contests. The very first one is about a hot topic: football (soccer) and it will last one week still - one Sunday we will know the winner. To participate you only need to write a hint for miniature projects related to football.

Start following us either in Facebook or in Twitter .

Welcome back! :)

Mini hugs,
Johanna Janhonen

Adding Twitter feed to Pbworks

I have tried to add the RSS feed from @minitreasures Twitter tweets to PBworks (minitreasures.pbworks.com) with no luck so far. I need to find e.g. a Google gadget that is showing feeds. Can someone help?

***

It was good that I asked - after asking I realized I am using the gadget already here (blog). I added it to the wiki and it is working - thsnks for support :)

How to follow the Mini treasures wiki?

I just updated the FAQ of the wiki and realized there are quite many ways to follow the wiki.

1. you can order emails from the wiki
2. you can order RSS feeds from the wiki
3. you can follow this blog
4. you can join Facebook fan page to get notified of some wiki news
5. you can follow Twitter to get these notifications:
* notifications of new blog entries of Mini treasures blog
* notifications of Facebook updates
* some notifications of wiki updates (not all)
6. you can bookmark the wiki and visit it when ever you have time

Now it is up to you to choose the one that suits best for you. :)

It would be nice to hear how you do it?

Interviewing Carol from SPminiatures

Minitreasures has an account in Twitter and I have been trying to find miniaturists from there. SPMiniatures was the 100th that Minitreasures is following and I wanted to make an interview to celebrate it so here we go again :).

Tell a little about yourself: who you are, where do you come from and what do you do? I'm Carol Singer, I live in New Jersey, USA. I'm a retired biochemist.

Do you have any other hobbies than miniatures? My other hobbies are computers and hiking

When and how did you start doing miniatures? I have always loved miniatures. I built a small dollhouse for my daughter when she was little but I was more interested in it than she was. When I was older and had more time (and money) I bought a kit on impulse. A couple of years later the dollhouse store near me went out of business and I bought their inventory, went into business, and started doing shows. This was in 1995. Then the web came along and I started a website. Now I don't have any time to work on the dollhouses because I'm too busy with the business.

What is your latest/next mini project? My latest/next project is to get back to work on my dollhouses.

How did you find Mini treasures wiki and what is your favorite page in the wiki? I don't remember how I found the Wiki page. I like the link to all the blogs.

Thanks for the interview and hope you have fun time in our wiki! And hopefully you will get time for your own hobby too :).

My TwitterSheep

This sheep has eaten the bios of the 100 (!) people Minitreasures is following in Twitter. Looks interesting :).



If you want to see what yours have eaten, check this site.

Figures of Mini treasures

Building up a wiki or a forum is tough - it takes time before people find the place and start contributing. I know that during the fall more and more miniaturists will find the wiki but what´s the situation now when the wiki is 4 months old?

Let´s see. There are

-already 246 pages in the wiki. Sounds a lot but most of the pages contains only few links - I´m hoping that you will add more links about your favorite subjects eventually.

-22 wiki users (=they have signed in) and every day on average 11 wiki visitors.
-54 members in Flickr group
-40 followers in Twitter
-22 so called Followers in this blog (=they have signed in) and on average 6 blog visitors daily
-12 people in the Facebook group
-12 friends in YouTube

When I started the wiki I thought I could make some small money with it (at the moment I´m between jobs) but soon I decided not to "ruin my hobby". So while I´m looking for work I am using the wiki as one of my portfolios. As time goes by I hope the wiki grows to be a real treasure: the biggest and nicest dollhouse/miniature link collection in the world.

If you want to help me in that you can do it easily. :)

-If you have a web site or a blog, add a link to Mini treasures wiki (see buttons here).

-If you have account in Google/Flickr/Twitter/YouTube/Facebook join one of the fan groups (see the links in the main page) and feel free to promote it to your friends too.

-Get yourself an account from the wiki too and start adding some links every now and then. It´s perfectly ok to promote your own stuff there whether you are a seller, a newbie or an artist - the wiki is meant for all of us who love miniatures.

Mini treasures enters Twitter

I have more ideas than time and now I added Mini treasures to Twitter:
http://twitter.com/minitreasures.

Mini treasures is using already quite many services:

the wiki itself is in PBworks
the wiki news are told here in Blogspot
the photo group is in Flickr
the video group is in Youtube
the fan group is in Facebook
and now the Twitter account is for sharing quick notes about the highlights.

The most active of all is of course the wiki, the other places are created for promoting the wiki to all miniature lovers in the web.