Morning Thoughts

A lot of the teenagers have been coming in to read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. He also wrote The Kite Runner which was another bestseller. This is being assigned to read in the high schools and colleges. I am going to read it because part of my job is to be in tune with what people are reading. I am not sure that I really want to read it. But, it is often hard to tell what will be decent that the larger population reads. Teachers are trying to find more contemporary books for people to read other than the classics.

Someone called in and requested A Thousand Splendid Suns for pickup. I have The Kite Runner on my desk. I am going to read it on the train home today. I read a bit of The Kite Runner on the train. For a bit, I pondered stopping reading the book, there are definitely pieces of the book I don't like. I thought it would be more exotic. I thought too much of the book was predictable and showed a stereotyped view of Afghanistan. I think I will finish reading the story. I am definitely not going to review it.

I was also looking through Locus Magazine. David Drake came out with his sixth book in the Lieutenant Leary Commanding Series, or RCN series. I rather like that the two main characters Lady Adele Mundy and Lieutenant Daniel Leary are close friends, not lovers. This does not usually happen in most military science fiction titles.

I ran into the usual request for me to get my own url. Supposedly, if you have your own url you will get more traffic, be more professional, and have greater control over your blog. I am using blogspot. I think there are different purposes with different blog services. For example, Livejournal, is a site specific designed for keeping a blog as a kind of journal. Ellen Datlow, a major science fiction editor has a blog on Livejournal which is very much in the personal journal style. http://ellen-datlow.livejournal.com/ .

Blogs and blog services serve very different purposes. For example, Typepad charges a fee to use their blog service. They offer a variety of special widgets and services found nowhere else. It seems that many professional publishers use typepad. Joe Wikert's blog, Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog uses typepad http://jwikert.typepad.com/

The main reason, I would switch from Blogger is if I needed my site to become much more general than just a blog. Jeff Vandermeer started his blog on Blogspot. http://vanderworld.blogspot.com/ . Then when he needed to have his blog become a general website about him, he purchased his own domain name. http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/ . This is a good example of a change from a blog to a more general site.

One of the main reasons that I use Blogspot, is that it allows me to use a variety of advertising and similar materials. Wordpress is not as geared towards advertising or commercial use as Blogspot. In fact, there are terms of service in Wordpress which limit advertising. Adsense is a major product of google and people are encouraged to include it in their blogs.

Another reason is that I am learning how to do blogging. I get suggestions on how to improve my blog and it is fairly easy to go into the CSS and change things in Blogspot. I added a footer, put in metatags, and now am considering altering the anchor text in many of my images so they will be more easily picked up by search engines. This is SEO (search engine optimization) stuff.