Risen from the Ashes

I spent most of today reviving this blog. First, I copied in all the posts about books and reading that I had made to my LiveJournal site. Fortunately, this Blogger software allows me to specify the posting date and therefore back-date posts to get them in to the correct order in the archives. Then, I created a page to hold the books I've read in 2008 and updated the home page as well. This involved making small changes to my cascading style sheets and the imbed code that gets pulled into each page.

But now the place looks all spruced up and happily lived in instead of dusty and abandoned.

While there was quite a bit of tedium in coding all the HTML to bring the blog up to date, I really enjoyed reading old postings. For example, in January 2005, I posted about the Baen Free Library. At that time, I commented "It's too difficult to read in bed with an electronic book" since the only way that I had to read an electronic book at that time was to use my laptop computer. Happily, three years later, I am now the proud owner of a Kindle from Amazon.com and a Sony PRS 505, and both are quite comfortable to use when reading in bed. Not only that, but I've read nine books from Baen—some free and others purchased through their WebScription web site.

And, when looking at the top 100 lists—The Big Read Top 100 and BookCrossing's Top 100—I saw that there were some books that I have now read and some that I definitely have on my TBR stack. I think that maybe I'll update my status in these lists at the end of the year.