Quick announcement: my Secret Santa mug from Mug Swap 2011 arrived yesterday! It was a gift from Kris Mulkey at What’s Cooking? This post was written while I was caffeinating myself with it, and I’m so excited. I love it when bloggers are brought together by one blogger getting a simple idea for an exchange of gifts, information or ideas.

thanks, Kris!

Which, as I keep saying, is the principal idea behind lovelinks, and I love the community we’re building each week. Let’s make it stronger by improving our writing, improving our blogging and blog designs, and sharing what we’ve got with as many people as our little arms can reach.

We can only benefit by bringing in new writers, new readers and new topics. And we might as well expand the friendly competitive nature of the project just to make it extra fun. Look: I made you a table.

click to embiggen

Before you say: hey, Erica, I’m not here for the prizes, I’m just glad to be here every week, remember there is a reason why long-time married people make time for date nights. Sometimes you gotta get out of the house, meet some new people, enjoy a nice dinner—where was I going with this? Oh, yeah: you gotta keep things fresh and new and exciting and who doesn’t get happy thinking about a new blog design or a charitable donation?

The chart is fairly self-explanatory, but lemme give an example of how it could work to earn you neat stuff:

It’s your very first time linking up at lovelinks [2 pts]. You write a terrific post about how a limited edition lithograph of Ernest Borgnine affected your high school track and field career, and the lovelinks crowd goes wild. You get the most votes [4 pts + 4 pts], become both the editor’s [8 pts + 4 pts] and lurker’s top pick [8 pts + 4 pts], and on top of it all, you’d convinced your lovelinks virgin food blogging best friend to link up with you [4 pts]. You owned lovelinks that week. And earned 36 points towards a brand new header for your blog.

If you’ve linked up with lovelinks so many times [1 pt], you’ve lost count, and you land in the top ten for the popular voting that week [4 pts], if you’re the lovelinks vet with the highest number of previous lovelinks entries [4 pts], that’s nine points towards a $25 donation to your favorite approved charity.

Let’s try this for a while to see how it goes. As long as it remains fun and no one tries to game or scam us, we’ll have us a good time bringing in new people and broadening our blog circles.

I’ll have a page up for FAQs before too long. No, the points are not transferable between bloggers, but they can be passed on after you die. Don’t die. That will mess up both my accounting and editorial schedules. Thanks.

Lovelinks #34 is still open for linking. Please don’t forget to make the rounds to the linked blogs. You’re being awesome every time you stop by.