A Common Reader . . .

Monday update

The picture on the left taken on the Sussex Downs on Saturday shows a location which would be perfect for reading - but not in February! 

I've redesigned some elements of A Common Reader, mainly by moving the lists of authors and books to separate pages - this meant cutting and pasting a couple of hundred links and took me longer than I expected.  I was inspired by This article will change your life in Saturday's Guardian in which Oliver Burkeman. He writes of Anthony Trollope:

. . .each morning, before leaving for his job at the post office, he wrote for three hours. ("Three hours a day," he reckoned, "will produce as much as a man ought to write.") So far, so disciplined. But here's the kicker: if he finished a novel midway through a three-hour period, he just started writing the next one.

So an hour or so of cutting and pasting didn't seem all that bad and once I got into it I found it had a sort of soothing quality

I was invited to join the Amazon Vine programme which lets me receive review copies of books offered up by publishers.  The first two came (see previous two reviews) and I'm not sure I want to participate any more.  I like to select my books myself, not from a limited list that Amazon have aquired for me, particularly when one of the books turns out to be the most pointless book I have ever read.

Blogging software

I've been using Typepad to power this blog for the last four months and would like to offer some thoughts on blogging platforms.  A Common Reader was previously hosted on Wordpress, on my own hosting account and domain.  I found Wordpress immensely flexible and powerful, and realised that it is possible to do just about anything with it in terms of presentation and content management.  Its also free in the sense that there is no charge for the software licence, although you have to pay for a hosting account (I use GoDaddy for mine). 

However, the sheer amount of work involved in running it became unacceptable to me, particularly when in March 2008, my Wordpress installation was hacked into and Google banned my site - not exactly something a blogger welcomes!