Soldiering On

I’m beginning to feel like all I do revolves around List Books, my site for selling you second hand books. The idea was to launch it and leave it, but nothing is ever that easy. Problems and glitches need to be ironed out, things need to be improved, there are feature requests to include and the never ending task of publicising the site (to be successful the site needs people to post books and people to buy books, both of which requires lots of visitors). I probably need to be a little more patient, the site was launched less than a month ago, but there seems to be a growing list of things to do. It’s consuming most of my spare time at the moment. The heat isn’t helping either, I always find it harder to concentrate when it’s warm and I’m more inclined to sit about with a glass of something cool. I’m particularly affected by heat, no real idea why, I’m certainly not a sun worshipper and you don’t tend to find me sunbathing, I’m more likely to be relaxing in the shade. Anyway, that’s the reason I haven’t been posting as often or to my usual high standards, assuming you’ve noticed.

It’s not the only thing I’ve been up to though. I’ve been juggling a few sites about on their web hosts, most notably Viewfinder Design, which has been a little neglected and I need to get back on that at some point, but I also wanted to move my film blog to my own hosting and domain name so I had more control. The result is A Screen Near You, which carries on in the same vein, but also allows me to add things like movie quotes (there are so many great lines in films you forget sometimes). I’m not happy with the styling of the site, but it’ll do for now, the important thing was to get the content up and make is useable. There’s plenty more things I want to do with the site yet, including some articles on film theory and cinematic rules to try and open up the film mystique to a wider audience. I’d also like to find other film nerds who are interested in writing some articles.

I’ve also been thinking of making changes to The Digerati Peninsula. The redesign is still on hold until I can find adequate time, but I’ve been thinking of changing the way book recommendations and reviews are handled on the site and, thanks to a plugin I found while building A Screen Near You it might not be as hard as I was expecting. So I’ll probably try and implement that a little quicker than I had previously intended too. Hopefully that’ll make the Reading page a lot more useful for you guys and a little easier to update for me (not to mention keeping all the reviews I write rather than dumping the old ones as I have been).

For those of you who are keeping track, I’m still working in Holland, but it’s coming to an end and I should be heading back to the UK for good come the middle of August (this looks fairly certain but, based on previous experience, I know better than to count my chickens before they’ve hatched). I’m not sure if I’ll miss the place, part of me will be sad to go, but a larger part wants to be back home.

Hopefully that all made sense to you guys (I’m using that in a non-gender-specific way), I’m not sure if that was an update for you (something I don’t do that often) or a head clearout for me. At least you know what I’ve been up to, so you can see why updates may have been a little erratic of late. On top of all that, I’ve got a few sites that could do with updating, ideas for half a dozen new sites, plus I’m supposed to be writing (you may have noticed a distinct lack of short stories being published on this site for some time, I haven’t even managed to continue the stories I started). Plus this thing called work that keeps getting in the way but which pays the bills. To say that I have a full schedule is putting it mildly.