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. :)

Greetings from Dorothy from South Africa

Do you remember when you first visited Mini treasures wiki? I got a message from Dorothy who fell on love with our wiki and as I was very pleased about her reaction I asked if I can publish it jere. She said YES  - and asked if she could help spreading the word. Please go ahead and tell all your mini friends about our site :).

Dorothy wrote:

I stumbled across your website yesterday - totally by accident - and it's absolutely brilliant! I've been able to delete at least 150 other sites that I had bookmarked because everything I need - links, blogs, how to, etc, is all here in one place. It's so fast and easy to navigate, and everything is so well organised! It must have taken you months and months to set it all up and I truly appreciate your hard work. Definitely the number 1 one stop, all in one, go to miniatures resources site and I love, love, love it! I live in South Africa where we don't have any miniatures shops (not one in the whole country!) so we have either have to make our own stuff or import. Your site now makes it so simple to source ideas or actual products. Thank you so much!

MTW Award 2012 winners now on Pinterest

Source: minitreasures.blogspot.com via Johanna on Pinterest

This morning I did some pinning, the MTW Awards 2012 sites are now found from Pinterest too. Happy surfing and happy pinning too! :)

MTW Award 2012

Howdy hoe!

It is again time to share the MTW Awards. Every year we are giving them to people who are bringing the most traffic to Mini treasures wiki. They make our site what it is by spreading the word and thus they are really valuable for the site. So once a year we are giving the credits for 25 popular mini sites. If you want to see your site in this list next year, start acting now: add links to our wiki every now and then and a button to your side bar.

I left the forums, search engines and social media services out of this list - most awards are given to a blogger.

1. inchscaled.com/
2. poohbeers.eigenstart.nl
3. nukketalo.org/
4. casita-mini-1.jouwpagina.nl/
5. schifka.vuodatus.net/
6. littleroomers.blogspot.com
7. hannajaleijona.blogspot.com/
8. mysmallobsession.com/
9. a-miniature-life.blogspot.com/
10. ilovelittlethings.blogspot.com/
11. debbiestinytreasures.blogspot.com/
12. adventkalender.punt.nl/
13. vesperminiatures.blogspot.com/
14. nuestrasminis.blogspot.com/
15. pubdolls.blogspot.com/
16. fashiondollreview.blogspot.com/
17. stalbertmini.blogspot.com/
18. geekgirlsfinland.blogspot.com
19. snowfern-clover.blogspot.com/
20. nasunnukkekoti.blogspot.com/
21. true2scale.blogspot.com/
22. lastanzadigiuggiola.blogspot.com/
23. narinanapertaa.blogspot.com/
24. klarameijer.blogspot.com/
25. njdminiatures.com/

Thank you for your support and congrats for reaching MTW Award 2012. Here is the award banner for your blog.

I would love to hear from you winners:
What is your favorite page in our wiki?
Any ideas about how could improve the site in future`?

Birthday party & a give-away challenge

 We have found a treasure! A mini treasure! It was done by Finnish miniature artisan Jaana Nykvist-Pekkarinen. She her blog.

She actually made two sets for Mini treasures 3rd birthday. Want to get one? Go and introduce yourself at Wiki members page during the April and you will be part of the lottery.

If you have already done that, don´t worry: if you just update your introduction during April, you will also get the change to win a special prize made just for us :).

Good luck, I am eagerly waiting to get to know you better than I already do. :)

Enjoy our birthday month! :)

April is our Birthday month!

3 years ago I realized there were no English wiki about miniatures so I started one myself. 3 years earlier I had started one in Finnish so I started to translate it but soon Mini treasures wiki grew bigger than the original.

Since then we have celebrated our birthday :).

This year there will be:
- a contest. The people who edit the members page during April will enroll to a lottery (more details about this later)
- 25 MTW Awards winners. It will be given to 25 sites bringing us most traffic (you will find new cool sites among them)
- a possibility to make birthday wishes: tell us a wiki page you would like to get improved.

Do you have other ideas how we could celebrate the event? Since it is Easter month too, we will share also Easter goodies with you :).

1st Mini Treasures Hunt is over

Sometimes you win and sometimes you loose. This happened in our recent contest, Mini treasures hunt. The winners were Marottesud and Tina. The loser was me. 

I planned a new consept with Linda. It was a supposed to be a learning experience - a fun contest. I wanted to run it during the spring and with 10 participants. I promoted it in different channels but got only 2 members to enroll. I waited several weeks snd then decided that ok, lets do it with 2 partipants then. 

so now the hunt is over. We managed to improve a page about Troll dolls: http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/troll_dolls . So actually there is a third winner: everyone who are is interested about Trolls got a better wiki page to stydy :).

But now I am curious: what could we have done differently to get more participants? Were you tempted to enroll? Why didnt you?

I want to learn from you as there will be more contests in future, one already in April.

ps. this blog post was written with my mobile phone (that is why there's  no photos or tags).

Mini treasures at Pinterest

Many of you have already heard about Pinterest. It is a new social media service where bookmarks to cool sites are marked with photos (or videos) which makes it a huge pinboard. Mini treasures has a board there too and it is BIG. :)

In fact we have already two boards. The first one is for miniatures and the second one is for prints. I wonder if we need more boards. What do you think?

We have a good group contributing to our board already but if you want to join us, just tell me and I will add you there too :).

Happy pinning!

And some goodies from our board to make the-non-pinners interested :).

Source: jakdawsattic.blogspot.com via Linda on Pinterest

Source: ortensia-azzurra.tumblr.com via Deanne on Pinterest

Source: honeyandfitz.blogspot.com via Debbie on Pinterest

Source: tpettit.best.vwh.net via Debbie on Pinterest

Source: miniworld-sp.blogspot.in via Linda on Pinterest

Source: vesssper.deviantart.com via Debbie on Pinterest

Maintaining our wiki

Mini treasures wiki is free for users to read and edit. Even the miniature sellers can add a link to their shops for free.

But it is not the whole truth - Mini treasures wiki is not free for all: I need to pay for the maintenance every year. And every year it is a bit more expensive.

I just paid the bill again. If you want to participate the costs consider jumping to Amazon via links in Mini treasures wiki or use our new Mini Treasures Store. The most popular item so far is this set bought by 11 people:
  .

Thank you for all who have used this supporting opportunity already :).

If Amazon is not for you but you still want to participate, you can always donate a prize to one of our contests or spread the word about our wiki.

Hope you enjoy our wiki as much as I do :).

How to get started with Mini treasures wiki

The first lesson for the Mini Treasures Hunters is here. You can read the wiki without logging in but once you want to leave a comment, edit a page, give a star to a page or get emails from the wiki changes you need the account. Here is how to do it:

Starting with MTW

View more presentations from Mini treasures.

Mini Treasures Hunt is open for enrollment

A while ago I promised you a fun wiki course which is a contest at the same time.

We are organizing it because there are people who would like to contribute more in our wiki but don't know how exactly to do it.

During this 2 week course you will together with your new partner learn the wiki editing tricks in a fun and exciting way. And 2 of you will get this wonderful and one-of-a-kind set including a seat and the accessories donated by our wiki member Anne from Greece.

Come and have fun with us!
Read more about the rules from here.

MTW highlights 2011

Want to know how the last year went for Mini treasures? Here you are. The year was exciting and one of the reasons for that was that Google fell in love with Mini treasures wiki (as some of you have too).

I hope this year will be even bigger and I hope you all are helping us to grow. :)

MTW stats 2011

View more presentations from Hidden treasure - Piilotettu aarre.

PS. In few weeks we are starting a wiki editing course. It is not a typical one but a contest at the same time. We are taking only the 10 participants in. So if you have wished you knew how to edit our wiki now is your chance. I promise it will be the most fun and exciting course you ever take, do not miss it!

Happy new year mini friends

Click the photo to see the details

Hi friends!

We had such a wonderful mini year :). The year 2011 ended with our popular advent calendar, every day we saw a mini surprise. Managing the calendar together with my personal rush hours (with kids, Christmas & my own business) took the juice out of me so I decided to keep some distance with MTW: I was away about 2 weeks. I guess that is the longest time ever since I started almost 3 years ago. But now I am back and soon I am going to introduce you a brand new activity. It will be lots of fun, be prepared.

Now I wish we will have another great year together with lots of shared mini treasures. :)

Yours, Johanna