murder.booklocker.com

The newest book in the Senior Center Murder series has just been released through BookLocker. You can purchase a copy at Barnes & Noble online or from BookLocker directly.

For those of you who have been asking, yes, the romance between suburban cowboy detective Stan Nevins and the curvaceous, feisty Park Ridge Senior Center director Teresa Cusentino heats up! It’s summer after all.

The novel is set at the Six County Senior Olympics, a very real event for senior citizens northwest of Chicago.

It should come as no surprise that I’m thinking of abandoning this blog. After a year of trying to make it work, I’m simply giving up … for now.

Maybe I’ll reinvent myself and it. Maybe not.

There’s lots of good stuff hidden in the archives - take a look around. Thanks to CWA members who helped me mount the last hurrah.

and read a story in the LA Times. In my blogroll I have a site called the Reluctant Blogger which is written by Henry Kisor.

Today I saw in his post a link to a story that will (or should) break your heart. It’s about a columnist who, well. let Henry tell you.

UPS planted my prize from Seattle Gourmet Coffee on the doorstep yesterday as the dog barked hysterically. Once the truck had pulled away and the noise settled to a grrr, I opened the door and retrieved the package. [In case you forgot, I won the Red Envelope contest and have been waiting for my prize.] 

Aside from the large piece of burlap - which I assumed was part of a bag that used to hold coffee beans - I was tickled to find TWO pounds of coffee. One of whole bean Colombian Supremo and one of Seattle Gourmet’s Northwest Blend, both medium roast. Now if we can just find the coffee bean grinder ….

Luanne was really excited about the stainless steel travel coffee mug. Maybe I’ll get back my XENA: Warrior Princess mug since it appears the one from Seattle Gourmet Coffee is superior. With all due respect and gratitude for the prize, there’s something about reading “I just want to get through the day without having to kick somebody’s ass” that makes me prefer the XENA mug.

Oh yeah, and they also tucked in a white chocolate dipped biscotti. Thanks!

I was checking my site stats for Blooking Central and saw one “Recently Came From” entry was from Wikipedia. I backtracked and discovered that Blooking Central is one of two external links listed! Not bad for a site that’s less than 2 months old.

I’ve put a lot of hard work into the blooking site - 24 blooks examined the last month, 15 blooks or blooks-to-be so far this month and it’s only the sixth of July.

“Despite the light-hearted song and video, the idea for The Zimmers came from a hard-hitting BBC2 documentary called Power to the People, about elderly people standing up for themselves.”

Where it began:

“It all started with a project by BBC documentary maker Tim Samuels. ‘I set out to make a programme exploring how we treat old people in this country,’ he says. ‘So many are dumped in homes, stuck on their own, brushed under the carpet and marginalised. If you can judge a society by how well it looks after its old people, I always suspected we’d be in trouble.’

“He was right. He visited care homes that were often shabby, and occasionally grossly negligent. He found residents left to stagnate, slumped like zombies in front of blaring daytime telly, and denied crucial medical supervision.”

And now they’re celebs!

Pensioners talkin’ ’bout their generation
A Widley couple are part of the 40-strong group The Zimmers who have re-recorded My Generation, and the video has already taken cyberspace by storm, with an estimated 10m people logging on to see it on sites such as Myspace and YouTube.

Read The Daily Mail and see photo. To track the story through two of the members, John and Dorothy Tree, see The Portsmouth News.

On this Memorial Day, 2007, it’s important for Americans to do some remembering. While we may remember different things for different reasons, trust me, the exercise will do us good.

I want to pick up where I left off in my first post on blooks. I mentioned a novel, Hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet Bubble and rubble. Author Tom Evslin notes several things of interest in a post about his blook.

Presentation

It seems he’s thought of everything.

• * “The salesy description of the story which would be on the inside front flap of a physical book” but this is a blook so he gives you a link to the blurb.
• * There’s a faux website for the company that the protagonist leads.
• * Evslin even taunts the reader to, “Check the FAQs if you want to know more about the company and Careers to see if you would have applied there.”

Logistics

A different article covers the logistics of having the novel, Hackoff, online as a blog. Blogs are generally in reverse chronological order which means that you would read the newest first. Evslin solved this (so you didn’t read the end first!) by employing Blookmarks.

Blookmarks

“After you read an episode, click Set Blookmark at the bottom of the episode just as you would put a physical bookmark wherever you left off reading in a traditional book. When you come back to the blook site, just click go to blookmark and you’ll be positioned right before the next episode.”

Feed readers also order posts from newest to oldest by default. But Evslin says, “Fortunately, many feed readers do allow you to reorder individual feeds so that the oldest is first - that’s the order you want for hackoff.com.”

In my first post on blooks (blogs-into-books) I cited an article which referred to the coming of Slurper. Evidently the company (blurb.com) changed their mind about the name of the software. The only surviving hints are in the current heading on their site, “Blog Slurper converts your blog into a book … automatically” and the first paragraph, “Slurp your blog into Blurb’s BookSmart™ software to create a bookstore-quality book, and end up with a permanent and portable archive to share with others.” You can download the software and slurp tonight for free — you only pay when you publish your book.

Yep, I can hear some of you thinking about slurping and producing your own book sans Blurb.

From another company called LAB Aprise! comes something called BlogCollector® with allows you to backup your blog. As an inducement they say, “Guess what, many people do not feel comfortable to read blogs! They prefer classic elegant books. To reach these audience, you can publish your blog into a book with BlogCollector.” Are we amused, bemused, musing? Like BookSmart™, BlogCollector® is free.

Although a lot of the blooks that are in print have been self-published, “There is even a British publisher called The Friday Project, which focuses specifically on turning internet sites, including blogs, into books.”

“Founded in 2005, The Friday Project focuses on developing brilliant books from the most exciting and innovative web sites, properties and content.” “Sales and distribution is handled by Pan Macmillan, giving [TFP] huge national and international reach. [They]’ve formed creative partnerships across the globe, building relationships with overseas publishers, TV, film and radio production companies and merchandising groups.”

I think it worth noting that TFP won the UK Young Publisher of the Year award in 2007 from the British Book Industry.

More on Publishing Blooks

From Media Life Online comes a list of blooks, complete with the names of the publishers and the URLs of the blogs. For instance, Belle de Jour’s book, “The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl,” (Source blog/site) and a blook which is described as “the cholesterol-busting quest of a man who aims to find a café serving the ultimate full English breakfast,” Egg Bacon Chips and Beans by Russell Davies.

Tag: Blook

Down three games the Chicago Bulls took today’s game with Detroit 102-87!

About a month ago, maybe two, I spent an entire Sunday morning crafting work-arounds for this theme. This morning I tried yet one more tweak, lost everything that I’d done and was forced to restore the virgin rendition.

After spending hours (what is it about Sunday mornings?) to restore its appearance, I’m forced to admit that I didn’t give theme selection enough thought up front. I was taken by the rich coffee color of the Ginseng Coffee theme. I even liked the huge asterisk at the top. I didn’t stop to ask myself how many categories I might conceivably have at the end of six months. Today’s stats tell me that “There are currently 148 posts and 130 comments, contained within 13 categories.” Who know?

I had never used Wordpress before. As I became more comfortable with the idea of pages versus posts, categories and subcategories, etc., there was more that I wanted to change. I found myself commenting out things and replacing them — like the big brown box that holds the asterisk. You can’t get rid of the asterisk and I haven’t found a way to cover it up. That’s lost prime real estate for me at this point.

Categories were only meant to appear on the line between the brown boxes. But I wanted to display more — so what to do? I fiddled and twiddled to bump them down and fake another category link line.

Then I fiddled and twiddled again to put the featured books from the BookLocker Virtual Tour where I wanted them.

I still can’t set up a page (not a post!) to hold a listing of categories and subcategories with the associated posts (just the headings), sort of like an index (this isn’t a problem with the theme). According to what I’ve read, I should be able to do this.

But I have no way of entering PHP into a page using anything other than the WYSIWYG editor (which immediately converts it into bastard HTML). I’ve come to the decision that it’s because I do not have access to the root. Which is darned inconvenient — I even have to ask for images to be uploaded. I finally gave up and started posting images on another site and pulling them in because it was easier. Thank God for my website where I can store them!

But back to Ginseng Coffee. I’m still happy with the colors although beginning to tire of them. I really dislike the color of the links in text. Here’s one just so you can compare with the ones that I turn blue, like this one. But, oh well. I’ve done enough tweaking that I’m not sure I could easily convert to another theme anyway.