Daily Thoughts 5/18/2010

Jan Baptist Weenix Portrait of Rene Descartes, Circa 1647-1649

Daily Thoughts 5/18/2010

I spent some time in the morning changing the layout and background of my blog. I am using Blogger in Draft which allows a variety of new features and upcoming templates to be used for blogs. It is a kind of beta testing tool for new features. http://draft.blogger.com/ . I am hoping that it makes my blog look better.

I also spent some time going over Bookletters http://www.bookletters.com/ with the childrens room so we could have some book widgets for the childrens area. Also, there are two new biography signs in the biography area. I am going to work with a colleague on creating a few dewey decimal banners to put up.

We are working on shifting in the storage area and I have started weeding in the short story collection. Things are moving along smoothly. Things are starting to look a little more organized. Tomorrow, I have the graphic novels club.

Guy Gavriel Kay has a new novel coming out Under Heaven which is a fantasy set in ancient China during the Tang dynasty. It should be quite intriguing.

Looking forward to going to the Book Blogger Convention on May 28, 2010 after the Book Expo America convention. http://bookbloggerconvention.com/in-the-news/

Publishing A Blog With Blogger-- Elizabeth Castro-- Review

I decided to look at a practical book for a change. This book is part of the Visual Quick Project series published by Peachpit Press. There are not a lot of reviews of practical books. The exact title is Publishing A Blog With Blogger by Elizabeth Castro. This book was published in 2005 so it does not match the CSS code used currently. This makes its usefulness rather limited.

However, it did explain most parts of blogger and how they worked. I got a better understanding of the basic structure of a blogger blog. It also allowed me put in a footer to my blog. You can see the Mother Goose nursery rhyme at the bottom of the page.

I also figured out how the about me picture came into view. You have to add it to your profile then it appears on the main page. I thought the process was different. I added a picture by Aubrey Beardsley, Le Mort D'Arthur to my biography section.

This was a very quick book to read. It had photographs of blog pages with highlighted explanations on them to explain how to do different things in blogger. I wouldn't recommend the 2005 version. It is outdated. Hopefully they will come out with a more recent version.

This is the state of many books at the library. Technology changes so fast that they can't write a book quickly enough to keep updated. There is usually about a year between the initial manuscript and final publishing. While this is fine for fiction titles, it is not so great for technology titles.

However, I find most web tutorials to be a nightmare because they are poorly written and edited. Often simple mistakes can make the task they are supposed to help you with nearly impossible. So far, this has been the case with converting my web page from a two column blog to a three colum blog in blogger. It would have been nice to have an ebook which was tightly edited explain exactly what I needed to do. Instead I have run into a lot of web sites that have not gotten me where I want to go.

I hope I am not annoying people. I also have Startup Start Your Own Blogging Business printed in 2007 on reserve at the library. It is published by Entrepreneur Press which does a series on starting small busineses like Start Your Own Laundromat, Start Your Own Arts And Crafts Business, and Start Your Own Photography Business. This series is pretty basic.



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