The views and opinions expressed in this blog by Kyle Brady are solely his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of Intuitive Industries LLC, their clients, the sponsors or advertisers of this blog, or other employers Kyle may have.
You might be interested to know that there's two different kind of posts on this blog: "Thought of the Day" and "Normal". The "Thought of the Day" category is a once-a-day random tidbit, usually a funny video or picture, and the "Normal" is just what you'd expect from a blog like this:
Unicorn-Butterfly Soup.
--Kyle
p.s. the subscription options to the left (psst! <---- that way) reflect the same content options
Now, if you know me at all, you know I love reading. Especially SciFi and Fantasy books. And I actually sent out info to a few publishers (like Tor and Ace), offering to help proofread or review early versions of upcoming books… but I never heard anything.
So I created a group on Goodreads called “Pre-release Reader Volunteer Group”. Not the sexiest name around, but it gets the point across. The basic idea is to allow authors (or wannabe-authors) an easy method to get their books looked at and reviewed, free of hassle, free of charge. And the upside is that the people reading them get to be part of an “exclusive group” of people who had a “first look” at these books.
We’ll see how it goes, and if it ends up working well, I may extend this into the non-Goodreads world, and create an online community to facilitate this… but I wanted to start small first.
Happy Reading!
posted on August 24th, 2008 at 6:46 pm by Kyle - Comments
You might remember me telling you I was working on a collaboration with a guy named Roy Wallen, awhile back. It was going well, but not really in the direction I had in mind, so I began writing my own book to encapsulate exactly what I’m wanting. Whether or not my work with Roy will continue, I don’t know, since I haven’t heard from him yet, but we’ll see.
Tentatively titled “Whispers Into Shadow”, it’s a SciFi/Fantasy book based in modern times. Here’s what’s defined as the concept:
A girl begins to discover she has magical powers, and becomes friends with two others (a boy, and a closet elf). Evil begins to grow from a whisper to a shadow, as the three friends start to understand the part they have to play in the upcoming struggle.
I’ve already “completed” (aka written for the first time) the Introduction and the first 3 Chapters, and I’m posting them over on Goodreads as I go (you’ll have to signup for an account if you don’t have one), at least up to a certain point.
This will obviously be a long process, and this is only the first version of what I’m sure will be rewritten and reworked many times, but I’d like some feedback nonetheless…
posted on December 12th, 2007 at 10:56 pm by Kyle - Comments
As I mentioned, I’m in the process of creating a Goodreads widget that auto-replaces certain tags with the appropriate links to authors or books…
I’m actually almost done, after about an hour of work so far. There’s a problem with the AJAX Request for some reason, but everything else is more or less complete.
The only change I’ve had to make (in comparison to my original claims) from a user standpoint is that the tags will look like:
[[author:Terry Goodkind]]
[[book:Children of Dune]]
Instead of:
[author:terry-goodkind]
[book:children-of-dune]
The reason is that it makes parsing the page easier with two brackets, and with the correct spelling and capitalization, I don’t have to do any funky string reformatting.
I’ll be back later tonight or tomorrow, hopefully, with the final update…
posted on October 25th, 2007 at 6:50 pm by Kyle - Comments
Something I found would be interesting, and asked Otis of Goodreads if it would be possible…
A widget for blogs (and other sites), using Javascript and the Prototype Library, that searches for authors and books, and attempts to reference them… instead of forcing you to link them yourself. This would have been useful here.
Otis has created an API method for me to send queries to (will be available later tonight), and I’ll be using Javascript to look for “tags” in the text. Two examples:
[author:terry goodkind]
[book:sword of truth]
Which would turn into direct links (or the closest match), spat out by Goodreads, to Goodreads.
I’ll be starting (and hopefully finishing) it this weekend.
posted on October 24th, 2007 at 4:02 pm by Kyle - Comments
