Button for Advent calendar

I am so excited about the Advent calendar in Mini treasures wiki - already one third of the windows are reserved - and I introduced the concept only 2 days ago. :) Take this button and add it to your blog or web site to promote the Advent calendar - this year the Christmas eve will come too fast, I can assure you. ;)

Advent calendar

I have loved advent calendars since I was a kid. I never stopped buying one for myself and recently I have had miniature calendars, some got from swaps, some bought (Lundby has made cool calendars). Three years ago I introduced a picture calendar in Nukkekotiwiki and it was really popular among the miniaturists. We have had it for 3 years now and now that we have the new wiki I am bringing the concept there too.

The idea is that people reserve themselves windows and then they fill the page with something related to Christmas miniatures.

Read more from Advent calendar and join - it will be so fun!

PS. Before Christmas there is Halloween, check the tips&hints for your projects.

Adding a calendar to your page

Linda from Little Roomers shared a great tip : how to add a calendar gadget to your dollhouse blog. Good idea!

So add a gadget called Feed in your Blogspot blog and give this url: http://30boxes.com/rss/7946313/Minitreasurespbwikicom/338680de87dc957a06229c787d3fac97/0/ so that you will always now what is happening in the mini world :). (Don´t forget also to add the happenings to the calendar).

Another Feed you could add is the recent changes in the wiki feed: http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/rss.xml .

Translation help needed

It would be nice if the Mini treasures Flickr group´s rules could be translated to as many languages as possible. The rules are simple:

"The Mini treasures group pictures from Flickr are shown in the slide show on the main page of the wiki (minitreasures.pbworks.com) and some of the pictures may be added in the sub pages as well.

The Flickr photos in the wikis are embedded which means that if you move your mouse over the picture you will see the originator and if you click it you will be able to add the comments/favorites in Flickr.

Only Flickr group members can post pictures to the pool."

You can add your translation here or in the comment section of this blog entry. Thank you for helping :).

PS. The pictures in the pool are so cool, you never know what the next picture will be about. :)

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 :).

Promoted the wiki in forums

I have not been active in forums lately but today I wrote to four dollhouse forums (2 in Finnish, 2 in English) to promote the wiki. If some of you want to forward my email to your own forums, here it is:

Hello

In April I set up a wiki in English. It is called Mini treasures wiki http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/ and it is meant for everybody who loves miniatures or dolls. The dollhouse hobby starts to be so popular that we have a need to find the miniaturists who do similar stuff than us and for finding those people we can use the wiki.

Maybe an example helps you to get the point. Let´s say that there are 10 miniaturists in the world who are working on Patrick Swayze theme box. Some of them are blogging (one in Spanish and one in Finnish), some of them are active in Flickr or Youtube while some only read messages from forums. It is hard to imagine how they will learn about themselves, a Google search is not helping that much.

But what if they were all familiar with our wiki. One of them starts a new page for Patrick Swayze and adds links to her Flickr album. The others notice a new wiki page and start contributing, they add links to their blogs and YouTube videos and they can also use the comments section of that page to communicate. A lot of inspiration in miniatures comes through pictures, not through words so for them it doesn´t matter if they understand each others languages.

One of them finds a doll maker who is making Swayze dolls and shares that in the wiki - the others are now aware of the doll and might want to buy one too.

At the moment there is not a page for Patrick Swayze, but there´s soon 450 other pages.

Maybe you are collecting miniature frogs or are passionate with cushions, maybe you do Harry Potter scenes or build a sushi restaurant. The wiki offers you colleagues, tips and ads for theme related miniatures on sale. And the usage of the site is free of charge, also for the sellers.

I hope you have wonderful time surfing in the wiki :).

-Johanna
Mini treasures wiki founder

I am hoping we can get a lot of new readers & contibutors in the wiki. :)

Mark your favorite wiki pages (star)

I have seen the Starred pages feature in the wiki but I never looked what it is until now. It means that you can (book)mark your favorite pages with a star, so that it is easier for you to find them later. I guess we start to need the stars now that we have over 400 pages... :)