So yesterday I insisted that my website was about more than my weblog–and then proceeded to talk about little but the blog.
Let’s move on today.
A major part of this site is my book blog and book pages.
This started as a way for me to keep track of books I’d read–especially after I’d sold them back to the used bookstore–and to remember what happened in a book–especially a continuing series.
It reached it’s current incarnation several years ago, although the amount of change it’s gone through seems to say that things may again change in the future.
But maybe not. It’s a lot of work to modify those pages.
First thing I’ll note is that when you go to the genre pages, you won’t get the full deal if you’re using IE. I’ll leave the rant for later, but suffice to say, IE doesn’t bother to follow the rules every other browser follows, so some of the really cool stuff I’ve done doesn’t work in IE. This doesn’t mean you can’t view the pages–everything works fine, and I have a style sheet JUST for freaking IE that ignores the really cool stuff I did. It just means you don’t get the drop down menus, which are really the heart of all the work I did.
So if you go to, say, the Fantasy page or the Mystery page, the menu at the top of the page contains various drop down menus listing every author I’ve read and reviewed. Yes, there are a lot names there. That menu stays with you as you browse the book pages, so you can quickly jump to another author.
There is little in the world that made me as happy as getting that menu system to work right, and making it easy to update.
So what if you’re using IE? You just jump down the page and can peruse the authors from there. Clicking on an author name will take you to the page. Everything works, but it’s just not as cool and useful.
Also, if you click on a book title or image, it will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get pennies for the purchase, that will eventually become a gift certificate which will eventually become a free book.
There is also a link to my on-line book database. This was my project for learning php and MySQL, and I was rather pleased with the way it turned out I must say. Unfortunately, my web host made some server changes in the past months, and my admin pages stopped working, and I haven’t had the time to try and fix them. So the database is about a year out of date. But still, it’s nice for trying to remember who wrote a book. And one day (HA!) I’d like to enter character names.
We’ll see how that goes.
So there’s another section of my site you may never have known existed.