Weekly Instagram Diary & PUB 101 Peer Review

On Sunday afternoon, my photographer friend Lydia Ko (who will be shortly setting up a website for her work) decided to take advantage of the lovely weather to conduct a fun photoshoot at Deer Lake park.

Enjoying the gorgeous scenery while my photographer set up her equipment.

After the shoot, Lydia was kind enough to reward me for my hard work (just kidding) with a nice iced capp!

I was feeling a bit lazy and uninspired earlier this week so I motivated myself to be more productive with this quote.

It's pumpkin season at work!

Greatly enjoyed meeting up with this lovely lady not once but three times over this past week. 

Tried out Boiling Point hotpot restaurant for the first time and fell in love with its delicious offerings and affordable prices.

This cute kitty was waiting for someone to play with every night. Luckily for me, I was suitable enough to fulfill this role. <3

For my weekly PUB 101 post, continue reading past the jump!

For this week's Publishing 101 post, I have the pleasure of reviewing the lovely Nadine's blog Cheery Chapters: Books, cats, and all those facts! Before I began my examination, I went straight to the source and asked Nadine what she wished to accomplish with her site. According to this bright individual, Cheery Chapters is meant to be an outlet for her musings on media and culture; specifically, she wishes to share her favourite books, films, art, and creative writing. As someone who grew up immersed in the arts (my entire family loves to play some form of musical instrument, drawing and painting, and engaging with literature), I can more than appreciate the proposed content of her blog. After reading her first post "Tracking 101", which listed the three tracking apps that she would be using for PUB 101, I was already excited for what future content would soon be posted on the site. For instance, I enjoyed learning about the diary app 280daily as I was intrigued by the possibilities of archiving daily events in a mere 280 characters (which would most certainly make for a fun, easy, and quick reading of your past doings). I also liked her use of a personal expenses tracking app called Spending Tracker; Nadine described that the app as having the "standout feature" of easily composing a pie chart or graph of your data if you rotated your device. Lastly (and personally my favourite), Nadine wrote about the site and app GoodReads, which allows you to track the books you have read, to check out recommended books that suit your own tastes, and to set goals for your reading list. Since, I am also a huge bookworm and have a sizeable personal library at home, I would love to hear more about Nadine's favourite reads- both past and current!

In addition to her first post, Nadine chose "The Adele Theme", a simple yet pretty concept that I could appreciate as it had lots of relaxing-to-look-at white space. As well, I liked the minimal yet pleasant details of the theme, such as blush-coloured dots and black ribbon banners for the post and tab titles. In terms of additional blog features, Nadine has thus far created an "About" page and has added gadgets for "Archives," "Blogs I Follows," "Goodreads," and "Recent Posts."

In relation to potential improvements, Nadine should definitely try to post another blog post soon regarding her blog's purpose and perhaps introduce herself more thoroughly to her readers. I would also love to read a post about her favourite books, movies, or other art-related topics! Also, she could write a more details "About" page that would give her audience a bit more information on the blog's creator.