ClubReading Facelift

Table of Contents

Well - it’s time for some changes at ClubReading. The current site has served us well for a long time, but it is feeling it’s age. As you can see, the new site start page is a blog. This will give us a chance to share and dialog with the community, while still having a place for a conversation.

The new books part of the site is written using the Zend Framework. I have to admit, the new books part of the site is not complete. There are still some very rough edges, but it will meet the basic needs:

Search Amazon and add books to the site
Display the books in a variety of formats
Maintain lists of books

A couple of new features:

Books can now be rated, and the ratings are searchable/browsable.
The comments section is being hosted by Disqus

Like I said, I know the new site still needs a lot of work, but it’s time to put it in place and start really exercising it. FYI - if we run into any security issues with the new books site, I’ll take it off-line and correct as necessary.

What should you expect here? Any number of things, including:

Posts about books, authors, reviews
Interesting technology that may or may not relate to reading/writing
Rants about anything…and nothing in particular

Enjoy!

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Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down"

The first chapter of Nick Hornby’s novel, “A Long Way Down” introduces the 4 main characters, Martin, Maureen, Jess and JJ. Each main character tells the story in a rotating first person, and each section clearly identifies who is speaking. The story starts with Martin explaining why he is on top of a fifteen-story building, on New Years Eve, “Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block?”

Countryside Scarf for Birthday

Now that I’m back into knitting, I made a nice textured scarf for my sister on her birthday this year.

The pattern is the Countryside scarf by La boutique de Jeanne

I’m really happy with how it turned out, but also not inclined to do more scarves. Just never ending rectangle of the same stitch pattern over and over….

I do want to do a shawl soon though. I’ve been collecting nice fingering weight yarns to give the amazing Vertices Unite by Stephen West a try.

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.
Albert Einstein