Blog Archive

1 October 2025

A new reviewer and my son returns bearing gifts!

I was out over the weekend when a promised review from a new reviewer turned up in my email. A.R. Tivadar had contacted me a few weeks earlier asking if she could contribute to the Reading Project. Naturally, I was happy to hear from her. A.R. Tivadar is from a most exotic location: Romania. At least, it is exotic to me because 1) I have never been there; 2) it is historically linked with the Dracula legend, and; 3) many Dracula films depict it as a land of mountains, wolves and crumbling castles. In fact, these images are so strongly set in my imagination that I made sure to look up Bucharest, Romania’s capital, to remind myself that the country is inhabited by more than 19^th century peasants carrying straw sheafs and giving dire warnings, and is, in fact, a modern country like anywhere else!

Sorry to A.R. Tivadar for this digression!

A.R. Tivadar wrote a review for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. She reads and writes both Romanian and English, but she read her copy of the novel in a Romanian translation. I assume that was easiest for her to acquire. It would be interesting to understand how well it translated. You can read her review by clicking here. You can see her reviewer page which includes a brief biography written by her by clicking here.

I haven’t had a chance to write about A.R. Tivadar’s contribution until now because life has been busy. I managed to get her review up quickly on Monday afternoon after returning from my youngest son’s place. We had spent the day with him and his girfriend at IKEA. We took our trailer to help get new furniture for their house they have just bought, as well as using the trailer to get rid of a lot of cardboard from new appliances and packing boxes, which we took to a recycling centre. We filled the whole trailer with that alone!

And then yesterday I was up a 3:45am to get to Sydney airport in time to meet my other son who was returning from Minnesota. He’d been staying there with an American friend for the last 5 weeks to attend a medieval fair, among other things. By the time we got home, I slept for part of the afternoon.

I also received two presents from him: two books. One was a nice edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems. The second was a leatherbound edition of The Constitution of the United States of America, which also includes the complete Federalist Papers (which I have read and made the subject of a special project for this website) as well as other writings by some of the Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and George Washington. I have several books on the subject of America’s founding and its democracy, some of which I have read, others which I have been putting aside to wait for a chance to read thoroughly. The sense that this is topical, relevant and important seems ever stronger as the days go by.

- bikerbuddy

14 October 2025

Website Updates

I recently added an ‘advertising space’ to the bottom of our reviews. This isn’t because I will be taking paid advertisements in the future. It started with me wanting to help promote a local author and contributor to this website, Michael Duffy, who recently published the fourth book in his Bella Greaves Series, Death in the Gardens. What it means is that if I want to do something similar in the future – another advertisement, or maybe even a message – I will only have to modify one file for it to be displayed across all the website reviews.

I then decided to do the same for the space beneath the book cover in the reviews. I placed the space a little further below the cover so the page didn’t look too cramped. But I decided to leave the space out of certain reviews, like double reviews, as well as Charles Dickens and George Eliot reviews, for aesthetic reasons. This space was meant to be for future applications I haven’t yet anticipated. But with the space implemented, I wanted to see it work. I then had the idea to place a list of our most recent reviews in that space with links to the reviews. So, most reviews (except the ones I indicated) now have this list at the moment. Check out a review. If the list doesn’t appear, refresh your browser, or make sure it’s not one of the few reviews that don’t have this feature. Also, I have set it to not appear on screens that are too narrow, like phones and some tablets. Whether I keep the reviews list in this space for now will depend on if I still like it in a few weeks’ time. If you have an opinion about this or what follows in the next paragraph, you can always leave a comment.

Finally, I decided to upgrade the Search Page with a new button. Since last year it has been possible to do a General Search on that page, as well as an Advanced Search using several criteria. There are some reviews on the website that get a lot of traffic, and some reviews that are almost never read. I thought it would be nice if people could click a button to randomly discover reviews that they might not otherwise have looked at. I decided a third option, a button that opened reviews randomly, would be a nice addition to the page. I had the idea from Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button. I’m still in the process of implementing it, so not all reviews are included in this feature yet, but there is enough that you can see it working. You can check out the Search Page by clicking here, but if you want to try out the button, here it is. Have a go!

- bikerbuddy

22 October 2025

On Disappearing (and reappearing) Comments

My last blog post was about updates I’ve been doing to the site. I’ve gone further and have been working over the last few days on updating all reviews across the website. I started by wanting to reposition the updatable space at the bottom of reviews to sit centre on narrower screens that feature only two columns, rather than directly beneath the review. As I started, I realised I also wanted to update reviews with embedded YouTube videos to do the same thing. That lead to me making the YouTube videos adaptable for various screen sizes so they could appear larger on larger screens. One thing leads to another . . .

At the point in time I am writing this, I am still working through that.

However, because I needed to look at a lot of reviews, I began to notice there were no comments at the bottom of reviews that I knew had received comments. So, I went in to HTML Comment Box to investigate. (I wrote a blog post about this service on 18 October 2024). I noticed newer comments were there. It was older comments that had disappeared.

Then I realised what the problem was.

On 2 June this year we bought our current domain name, readingproject.au, which replaced the default URL http://readingproject.neocities.org. I should have realised, but had not thought about it, that this would break the link between HTML Comment Box and our website. It happened some time ago when Neocities dropped the .html from Neocities URLs, which did the same thing. At that time, I went back and transferred all the comments to the new URL

That’s what I have had to do this morning, too.

So, if you are one of those people who, in the past, have commented on our website only to see your comment disappear, that is the reason. I didn’t delete it. The link was broken. The link is now fixed. Your comment should be back, unless it was on a blog post for July 2023, June 2023, or February 2023. For some reason I have had trouble transferring those comments. I will try to find a workaround.

- bikerbuddy