Library Thing & Blogger Beta

Long, long ago there was a woman - who was maybe not such a wise woman as she thought she was - who wanted to create a web of words. She'd tried to be all-consuming but didn't like it. So she unwound the threads of her library and wove an intricate web of del.icio.us feeds. The woman - who maybe didn't see the future as clearly as she thought she did - hadn't allowed for this being hard work to maintain, and prone to breaking because it hung so delicately. Eventually, it gathered cobwebs.

Time passed, and the woman discovered there were new things for her to play with, all shiny like a magpie's hoardings. So she started to transfer all her tagged books into Library Thing which lets her tag them and feed them via script widgets, and she started to redesign the blog to make use of this shiny new things. Except some of the shiny new blog things were too newly forged and couldn't be touched yet.

So the woman - who is now rather wiser about how to spend her time - sits weaving herself a new labyrinth of words which will be easier for others to navigate.

Fiddling About

I've just finished - I think - fiddling with the CSS code for this blog. There was something strange happening with the way the columns lined up, and some paragraph indenting was bugging me. I surfed bravely away from my normal comfort sites of W3schools and glish's CSS templates. I'd love to play with the CSS Zen garden but I do have other things to do, so I ended up at Floatutorial. I still had to fiddle to get the blogger content to sit in the right place, but at last this blog no longer looks half-cocked. At least in Firefox.

I've also changed the further readings links to a del.icio.us feed. Sara at storytelling is looking for links to authors who blog, so I'm going to get around to putting more into the further reading list. Suggestions always welcome.

Finally, the atom feed is running.

I don't think it has been syndicated to LJ yet, but if someone does that, could they let me know the syn URL? Ta.
The LJ syn is up (thanks, Trina!).


Updated to add:
Thanks to a smart person at the CSS forum, the thing is now behaving under the most common browsers and OSs. The one failing one is if you have a screen resolution of 800 x 600 and are running IE6 on a Windows OS. I'll try to fix it, but in the meantime, if you are being caught by that, may I suggest the joys of Firefox?

unwinding the threads

My plans to make a neat little intergrated system for my books got a bit waylaid by the need to write a novel (see the main grouch blog) but now I have acres of free time staring at me I have got back on it.

So, this is what I've done:

1. Set up del.icio.us tags, as previously mentioned back in November


2. Used the lovely RSS Digest feed to create feeds from the del.icio.us tags to the left and right sidebars here, covering the tags for current reading, waiting to be read, recently read, etc.


3. Used and abused a nice layout from glish. My abuse of the code makes it look odd in Firefox, but nevermind...


4. Used a pretty font called New Kinder to make new banners and badges.

From now on the blog (i.e. this bit here) will be used for reviews of what I'm reading whilst the sidebars will reveal where I am in the never-ending pile of stuff.

I just bought Labyrinths by Borges, in case no-one guessed.

update: now tweaked again