Recent entries:
- You thought I was dead, but now I have returned to rule the world!
- Inspector Vampire
- And So Does Everyone Else
- My One Personality Liked it Very Much
- Religion Bad
- Blog in Book, So Meta!
- Words Fail Me
- Also excellent
- No, it's not a gay romance novel
- Prodigal Blogger Returns
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Browse books by:
Feeds:
The Book I Read
So one day it occurred to me that it would be cool to keep track of all the books I read. I read a lot of books, and I wanted to be able to see my reading history.
Making it a blog is natural so that I could comment on books as I read them. Maybe other people will find it interesting. Apparently you found it interesting to read at least this far.
The name of the blog comes from a song on the Talking Heads' album 77.
Your Humble Author
My name's Dave Rolsky. You can email me at autarch {at} urth {dot} org. I do a lot of geeky programming stuff (resume). I also do animal rights and veg-food activism/outreach.
What is Dear Ben?
It's the software I wrote to drive this weblog. I wanted something that would allow me to associate a book with each blog entry, and to browse entries both by date and by book or author. If you want to play with it you can check it out from my Subversion repository at https://svn.urth.org/svn/DearBen/trunk.
The name of the software comes from Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight, in which the narrator is writing a letter to his brother Ben explaining his adventures.
Geek Stuff
This site/app is my first experiment with 100% CSS layout. Yes, I know all the cool kids already did this ages ago, but I'm a programmer, not a designer. All of the pages are layed out using only CSS, except for the calendar, which does use a table.
I'm pretty happy with how this worked. It looks decent (I hope) and the HTML is much simpler and straightforward than the equivalent layout done with tables. There are still more nested <div> tags than I really like, though. For example, the drop shadow effect can only be achieved by nesting the two divs, one for the shadow and one for the content. If there was a "drop-shadow" border style, that would be wonderful.
The backend code is written in Perl, and the frontend uses Mason, of course. It uses MySQL for data storage. I probably would have preferred Postgres, but the server this runs on already had MySQL running.
The code uses the very slick Net::Amazon module to pull data and images about new books from Amazon.
Contractually Obligatory Link and Image
