long time, no post

Well, here I am. I am still alive even though I haven't posted in my blog in a very long time. Not even a quote of the week! Which doesn't mean I've been neglecting my site. No, I've been working on revamping the structure.

I've removed the "entertainment" main page that I used to have, in favour of having direct links to the old “movies,” “music,” and “books” section on the main page of my website. In addition, I’ve changed the "movies" section to a "watch" section, which will encompass reviews regarding anything you can watch - movies, television, shorts, commercials, online shorts, live theatre, live comedy, etc. I’ve changed the “books” section to a “read” section which will include reviews and articles regarding anything you can read – mainly books and magazines, although I won’t count out website reviews for sites that are information based. Finally, I’ve changed the “music” section to a “listen” section, for you guessed it, anything you can listen to – so primarily CDs (or Audio-DVDs / Enhanced CDs) will be reviewed in this section and anything to do with the music industry.

This still leaves me the question of what to do about other types of reviews that I have posted on Epinions.com - such as computer hardware and software reviews. I may have to create another new section, but I’m not sure yet. Some hardware reviews could probably be included in the watch or listen sections. I’ve never known what to do with those reviews – so I may just have to find a way of fitting them into the current structure, cause I don’t want to have to redo the top of my pages again anytime soon. I guess a DVD player review could go under “watch” and “listen,” a speaker review or soundcard review would fall under “listen.” Software reviews for say a word processor could go under “read” because I use word processors mainly to write stuff that I want people to read. But then, where would I put say, my Windows XP review from a few years back? I’d probably put that review under “Watch” because I use my computer mainly to watch and make movies.

So the sections that have been updated are as follows:

I’ve put some new reviews in the READ section, one on James Frey’s a million little pieces; one on Sol Stein’s On Writing and finally, one on William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. For each of my book reviews, I’ve placed direct links to the product as listed on Amazon.ca.

I’ve ditched my old links to Chapters.ca, because the site they hosted their affiliates program has changed and Chapters is no longer a partner with that site. I might reapply to be a part of their program, to give people who visit my site a choice, but for now I’m fine with using links to just Amazon. One thing that kinda shocked me was the poor quality of some of my old book reviews. They definitely need to be reworked at sometime in the future.

I’ve also posted What Lies Within: A Memoir that I wrote last year.

I also want this blog to be more important than it is, so I may dabble in writing more thoughts on politics, stuff at Kwantlen and on entertainment. Try and make it more topical, so that it's more than just updates about what I've done to my site.

Anyway, gotta do some reading,

- Steve