Way back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I had an idea for a personal website. I had been sending out a personal newsletter full of humour and quotes, sometimes movie reviews, and I was also running a trivia game by email. It was just a small distribution group for the humour and stuff, larger for the trivia games, and I even got a few movie reviews posted on a local movie times site. I found that I really enjoyed it. But I wondered if I could move it from email to a website.

Over the years, I tried multiple layouts, formats, even types of back-end software to display it, but most of the core content elements remained the same. Somewhere in there I thought, “What if I posted book reviews too?” After all, I was reading a lot. But I tended to finish the book, throw it on a shelf, and move on. I wasn’t looking to become a reviewer for a newspaper, just some personal thoughts shared, well, somewhere other than a journal.

Last year, I finally said, “Okay, let’s figure this out right this time.” I figured out a layout, I figured out a workflow for myself, and I figured out where I wanted to post them. Plus, just for fun, I started updating my approach to book reviews (i.e. a personal “review” philosophy, if you will). Again, I don’t want to be a professional reviewer, but I also don’t want to be an online equivalent of grunting “Book good”.

I managed to figure all that out, but I didn’t get many posted with the full workflow. My goal for this year was to clear the initial backlog…thirty-six reviews that were written, posted somewhere originally, and relatively ready to go. Just not in the new format. I have been steadily munching away at them, a day here and a day there, a book review here and a book review there, and plowed through a whack of them today to finish it off.

I finally have all 36 up on the site, fully linked to the various review sites out there. I even have an index designed for all the book reviews, just need to populate these 36 in the list. It’s a bit tedious, but it was easier to wait until all 36 were done before trying to populate them all into the multiple indices.

I have a few more sitting in the wings, waiting to be finished, polished, or reorganized from notes into an actual review, but the bulk of the work? I’m calling it done like dinner. Woohoo me! 🙂