Stalk my reading even more intensely!

On Tuesday I launched reading portal for my site. Basically, this is a one-stop place to learn about what I am reading, what I was reading (and what I thought about it), the best and worst books I've read each year, etc. Although I've got both my current reading and recent reading on the homepage, the reading portal is much more detailed. You can actually read the fifteen most recent reviews I've written, and there are links to my detailed yearly reading stats.

The coolest feature of the reading section is the one that has been finished and live for a while now: book lists. I can create a list of books, with their associated reviews, based on any criterion I desire. This was motivated by my annual best/worst books of the year list, which in previous years I posted directly to my blog. I am also slowly going through my Goodreads account and creating lists corresponding to series I have read or am reading. This is a nice way to see, in general, what kind of books I like to read (and a nice way for me to track what series I've read).

I've been using Symphony CMS for almost a year now, and I can't say enough good things about it. Once you wrap your head around using XSLT for the templating, Symphony reveals itself as the insane powerhouse it is. Development is fast, flexible, and most importantly, fun. I plan to do a lot more with Symphony CMS, both for this site and in general; I'm hoping to contribute to the community itself. To that end, I've started learning how to use Git for version control. So far it's pretty cool.

I have plenty of subjects for blog posts in mind, but I've been remiss in actually writing them. Work, reading, baseball, and of course website updates all seem to get in the way! I want to write about the Hugo-nominated works I've read, as well as how much I'm enjoying Ubuntu 11.04. So expect to see those soon.