The Path of the Bookseller

Well, here I am again. It’s been a while. In addition to the usual delays and procrastinations, I finally found that the blog software that I had been running had grown unusable. The comment spammers had discovered it, and were slamming the site with junk. The developer of the software had run out of time and patience to battle the software, and suggested that those of us who found it to be a problem might move on.

After a conversation with several other bloggers about available software, we each settled on using WordPress for our posts. Some moved their blogs to WordPress.com to use its hosting service. I wanted to keep my blog as part of my site. When my provider announced that they were hosting WordPress blogs, I tried to set things up through their built-in setup, but it proved insufficiently flexible. They suggested that I install WordPress myself, and pointed me to a good FAQ on how to do it.

I’ve had a day of relative immobility, having caught the cold that’s going around the store. (As a co-worker pointed out, considering that we all handle the same CDs, books, DVDs, money, keyboards, etc, as thousands of other people, many of whom are notably unsanitary, and many of others of whom are visiting us from the farthest reaches of the planet, it’s a wonder that we’re all still alive.) So I’ve been sitting here trying to learn and configure the software. Eventually, I want to be able to integrate it into the general site design, but there’ll be a learning curve there. Expect the site to mutate wildly for a while.

While I’m leaving the old blog up, I’m turning off comments, so the spammers stop there. I’ve enabled comments here, but put on spam-blocking software that I hope won’t be too vicious to non-spam posts. I’ll be keeping a close eye on that, and tuning things as we go along. (I hadn’t intended that the existing comments would disappear, but it looks like they have. They’re saved, and I’ll have to figure out a good way to preserve the non-spam ones online.)
Otherwise. life has been pretty quiet. Work has been challenging these past few months, but in good ways: without warning, we suddenly expanded our classical CD holdings by about 50%, while our staffing hours were trimmed to a near bare-bones level and we had several fairly abrupt shifts in in-store management. So I had to thrash through the chaos, with the excellent help of several others, to figure out how and where we were going to fit in the new CDs. (Unfortunately, my suggestions to hang them from the ceilings or put them out on the fire escapes weren’t approved.)

They’re doing the right things with the expanded base. I had feared that we were just going to get even more copies of The 100 Classical Works That Everyone Already Has. Instead, they’re going deep, with a good selection of lesser known composers and lesser known works by the big names. And people are buying them — when people are looking for the odd stuff, there’s a better chance that we have it, and I can recommend a wider array of CDs to them. We have a few regulars who are devouring our 20th century stuff, focusing on the most angular stuff we carry, mostly on Naxos but branching out to other labels. I wish we had more opera and more contemporary work, but I hope to improve that as we go along.

At home, I’ve moved into a new room in the Priory. My old room was off at a far end of a hall, and I felt quite isolated. I’m now in a new room, smaller but quite workable, right off of the kitchen and the common room, so I’m getting to see my housemates somewhat more. I’ve moved most of my CDs out into the common room, and am working on cataloging them, using the ReaderwareAW software and a modified CueCat. (More in another post about the frustrations of cataloguing classical CDs.) I’m also planning to catalog my DVDs with the CueCat and the online Gurulib service.

The Ocean of Ghosts project crawls forward, limited by the availability of time, people, and resources. I hope to record two of the songs soon. More as it happens… I also have some other musical ideas, including a new piece for the Cornelius Cardew Choir that is completed in my head but I still have to write down.

Hmm, I was going to spend today as a couch potato, watching the DVDs of the second season of Lost. I did manage to unwrap the box, extract the Special Features disc, and put it on my desk next to the DVD drive. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually take a look.