Why I have been away from you...

You might have noticed that I have not been with you for a long time but now I am back. What was I doing then?

First I was planning my research exchange time and then doing it: me and my family spent 6 weeks in Graz, Austria to study social media in automotive industry. Boy was it interesting! It is always to work in foreign country and learn about new cultures. The visit was in November-December so me, an old Christmas fan, was been spoiled by different goodies Graz has to offer, e.g. Christmas fairs. :) Loved it! During the Christmas time I was promoting our advent calendar but the main work was done by Linda, thank heavens we have her onboard!

After we came back to Finland we had of course plenty to do, e.g. meeting the family we had not met during Christmas. But I was busy with other things too.

The loveliest dollhouse blog in Finnish, Nukkekoti Väinölä

Source: maria-malmstrom.blogspot.fi via Johanna on Pinterest

Before I started Mini treasures wiki I had another wiki, Nukkekotiwiki, a wiki about dollhouses in Finnish. After all the time I spend with you the first wiki was lacking my attention so last year I decided to give some love for it too. My idea was to host a contest: the cutest dollhouse blog in Finnish. First I planned to run it after the summer but something happened: a major Finnish blog service called Vuodatus crashed. And it deleted the photos of its users from several years! Many dollhouse bloggers were using Vuodatus so to give them more time to recover I postponed the contest till the end of the year. The deadline for voting was 15th January and since then I have been telling the results day by day. The top ten bloggers are found on a Pinterest board.

Aamulehti interviewed me for CMAD, I am the lady on the right

Source: twitter.com via Johanna on Pinterest

But this is still not all! I am not only the community manager of Mini treasures and Nukkekotiwiki but I run other communities as well. Being a community manager is one of my passions - I want to learn how to do it well and how to get the most out of you. This is the reason I brought Community Manager Appreciation Day to Finland last year. Last year we were about 15 persons in that event but this year we were 150! And I was still one of the main organizers of the event. So you can guess I was busy with that event, I was thinking that it was almost like my wedding (we had the same amount of visitors back in 2000): I had been inviting a big group of people to celebrate a day (party) with me and to hear the speaches we had chosen for them. I WAS nervous but luckily everything went quite well.

So now my life is back to so called "normal mode". Of course I still have a business to run and a family to mother but nothing so special so should be able to spend some weekly hours with you from now on. :) I just wanted you to know why I stayed away from you for such a long time - hope you understand now better.

Mini treasures is not part of my business (yet) but just a hobby. I got the bill from the Pbworks again, 499$ a year. An expensive hobby I have, don't I? If I want to make my living out of Mini treasures we would need to get 100 times as much as visitors than we currently (14 000 montly visitors) have or to get our visitors to buy 100 times more from Amazon using our affiliate links (e.g. Mini treasures store). The combination would be easiest to achieve: 10 times more visitors and 10 times more Amazon shopping. So the next time you are thinking to buy something from Amazon, use one of our links. Consider also if you can promote MTW to your mini friends - it will encourage me to pay the Pbworks bill again next year.

Till later friends, I have been missing you!

MT wiki Prizes on their way!

Well, it is the New Year and time to reveal the prize winners in the Minitreasures Advent calendar
Christmas Gold Glitter Table Centrepiece

Carolyn Brown from Canada is sending Leny Frings from the Netherlands this Christmas centrepiece with lycopodium and faux greens, gold glittered branches and gold glass beads. Green and gold cloissonne beads hold white candles. Accented with silk burgundy bows.

Tea Light Pram

Anne Dourou from Greece is sending Lisa Topping one of these lovely prams.

Christmas Store
Gloria Wright from Canada selected Eileen Morgan from Nanaimo,BC,  Jaz Ash from Australia and Joyce Greenwood from Rugby, England.

 
 Lots of Christmas printies.
 
Tree decorations, stickers and ornaments with boxes.
 
 Miniature nativity figures. Could be used on your own tree - but might make a cute Nativity scene outside on the lawn of one of your houses at Christmas time.


Thank you all for participating and sharing the fun!

Mini treasures on Facebook

If you like Mini treasures on Facebook you might have noticed that most of the updates from Mini treasures are not shown to you at all. This is because Facebook has changed its Edge Rank algorithm to get more money from the Page owners who need pay for the updates to get them shown to more people.

E.g. an update made four hours ago was shown only to 46 of 829 fans and an earlier update to 77 fans. Not much or not enough if you ask me...

On average an update is shown to only 7 % of you.

The result for seeing more updates from pages you actually LIKE is to start using interest lists.  I created a list for Mini treasures updates, feel free to subscribe it or create a list of your own with all of your mini related pages on it :).

The place where you create the Interest list is in the beginning of the page next to Like:

We also have a group in Facebook, you are welcome to join it too. :)

Removed members from wiki - sorry folks!

Yesterday Linda got an idea: she wanted to clean our wiki members a bit and checked the ones who had not been logged in for three years. Then she removed almost 70 members. When I found this out I was really really upset. Pbworks is not showing the correct information always and there were valuable members (and my friends) removed who had been editing the wiki during these years. Even if the people are not logged in for our service they might visit our site regularly (you can read without logging in) and follow the wiki updates from their own emails.

So far our policy has been that only the spammers (you now them, they are marketing rented cars and diets and so on, kitchenware for our 1:1 homes not for our mini projects) have been blocked away. We do not have any activity rules for our members and we will not make them now. We wont start kicking away miniaturists, only spammers!

So what I just did? Invited the removed members back to our wiki. I also invited them to our new Yahoo group which has recently started to help our users with the wiki problems as well as giving us feedback and new ideas about how to improve our services. The rest of you are also welcome to join our group!

I now Linda meant only good with her cleaning and she is sorry too about what happened. Peace & harmony folks, we do want to keep you in our wiki!

Adding photos to Mini treasures wiki with help of Pinterest

I created also another how-to-instructions: embedding photos to Mini treasures wiki with help of Pinterest.

Embedding photos with help of pinterest from Hidden treasure - Piilotettu aarre

You can embed photos e.g. from Flickr or Picasa but Pinterest allows you to embed almost any photo (you can add photos to Pinterest as well). Do not embed photos from other people to our wiki unless you have asked their permission.

How to get started with Mini treasures wiki editing

Just created instructions of how to get started with Mini treasures wiki. You need an account and then you go.

Embedding photos with help of pinterest from Hidden treasure - Piilotettu aarre

Any comments of the instructions?

Miniature advent calendar for this year open for registration

We have a nice tradition with advent calendars in Mini treasures wiki, we have done it already three times and every year we are getting more and more followers. Linda asked to create the page for this year as there are already people asking her when they can reserve their date.

If you want also to contribute to our advent calendar go and reserve a day for yourself. This year we are filling the dates well before the due date in order to avoid the hassle (it has been quite exciting for me to wait if the pages are filled in time, sometimes they werent and then I needed to invent something fast). So we are filling the pages in advance but the secret is safe - the pages are opened to public on a due date only.

What can you add to your page then? Something related to Christmas of course. You can share your project, you can make a video, printables, instructions. Use your imagination and start counting days for 1st of December when we open the first window of the Advent calendar! :)

If you have anything you want to ask about the calendar, leave a comment below and I answer you as soon as I can. :)