Thursday, July 16, 2009

Daily Thoughts 7/16/2009 ( America Reads Spanish )

Sebi Ryffel from Los Angeles took this picture under a creative commons share alike license on July 17, 2008 Entrance pathway to the Rose Garden, Temple of Love, at Huntington Library ( a botanical garden, art museum, and library).

Daily Thoughts 7/16/2009

This morning I read some more of Say Everything. I just finished reading a section on the founding of the company Blogger by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. At one point, Blogger almost shutdown, it was being run out of Evan Williams's living room. It is very much a story of audacious risk and success. It shows how it is possible to start a company with very little, run it out of ones basement and then turn it into a successful web business. It is a very good example of "bootstrapping."

I have been thinking of switching this blog to wordpress.org. However, I am following my ideal of not spending money to blog. I found out that Wordpress charges to have the ability to post videos. Wordpress considers this a value added service. I don't, I like posting videos. This leaves me with sticking with Blogger. If I wanted to spend money to blog, I would probably be using Movable Type.

I like the new Peace, Love, Books poster for the American Booksellers Association. http://www.redbubble.com/people/indiebound/art/3349361-2-peace-love-books

I am looking through a site called http://www.americareadsspanish.org/ to find titles that are popular in Spanish which have been translated into english. There are two new authors which I have found which look interesting, Don Miguel Ruiz and Rosa-Mendoza Gladys.

On the way home, I read some more of Say Everything. I have hit the halfway mark. At this point Scott Rosenbergy mentions Cory Doctorow and The Clue Train Manifesto obligatory subjects for books on blogging. I think The Clue Train Manifesto is rather silly. I am not a huge fan of Cory Doctorow's blog Boing Boing. I however, am a fan of his novels. My favorite was Eastern Standard Tribe. I also like his essays which appear in Locus Magazine. Say Everything is turning out to be a very entertaining book.

2 comments:

NathanKP said...

I think that you should stick with Blogger. You've been here at this address for so long that is what all of us visitors are used to. If you moved it would throw everything off.

Blogger is pretty good.

You just need to try to find a juicier template for you blog.

Another major improvement would be to add more descriptive titles to the articles. "Daily Thoughts" is not something that most people search for on Google, so you miss out on a lot of traffic that you could be picking up that way.

Just a few thoughts.

Book Calendar is a good blog, and very long lived. You have good perseverance to keep writing for so long.

Book Calendar said...

Hi, Nathan, the problem is one of CSS, I have to learn some more to get it right. I have been doing pretty much everything myself to learn. I'll probably rewrite some of the headlines soon. I have been using the blog as a motivational tool. I think I need a little push every day.