Review News
Here’s the status on the books I’m currently reading:
- Writer’s Market 2007 Deluxe Edition: Mostly read; also need to evaluate the online service
- The Oldways Table (essays and recipes): About half-read; done making recipes
- College Cooking: Read; half-done making recipes
- Super Natural Cooking: Almost done reading; need to make recipes
I also have more that I haven’t started on yet.
Technorati Tags: book reviews, books, Amazon.com, reviewing, reviews
Amazon has a new feature, where they can take key phrases in a page’s content and turn them into product links, where you roll over the link and get a preview of a related product. I’m testing this out tentatively on just one review for now. Here’s how I see the pros and cons so far:
On the one hand, in general I detest rollover ads–it’s too easy to accidentally roll over them, and then you’re dealing with this expanding window, and waiting for it to collapse again before you can go on reading. On the other hand, these ads are tiny text-link ads, so they’re much easier to avoid rolling over, and the preview is much smaller and folds up much faster than most rollover ads.
I can limit these to a specific number of links per page, up to 10. I went for 5 on the test page; more than that and I think it would get annoying in the length of an average review.
I can change the appearance of these links so they’re obviously different than normal links, so you won’t have to worry about confusing them and accidentally clicking on one of these instead of a normal link. For instance, I used the option to put a dashed underline beneath them, and (tentatively) I’ve used a different link color as well (although I’m not as sure of that choice–it stands out a bit more that way, and I’m thinking it would be better to have it blend in).
I wouldn’t do this at all except that within the context of the review blog I can imagine this is something that would be valuable to people. I’m not contemplating using it for the rest of the site. However, when people come to the pages specifically looking for information on products, further links to related products on Amazon might be useful.
Most importantly–what do you folks think? Would this feature make the reviews annoying to read? Would it be helpful in finding books you want to read? Let me know. (Feel free to just leave a comment here with your thoughts.) If folks would find it annoying, I’ll end the experiment and not do it. If the majority of people would find it a useful feature, I’ll seriously consider integrating it into the review blog.
Thanks for your input!
Oh, I should also briefly explain why the lull in activity lately, for my regular readers. I swear there’s just something about Spring–it’s been this series of things. The furnace went out, my husband went out of town for a week, and (in what I think is a minor bout of hypomania) I haven’t really been sleeping. My doc put me on a new asthma med that gave me tremors (so much for that experiment) and a sleeping pill that didn’t keep me asleep at night but boy did it put me to sleep around the time I was supposed to get up in the morning (so much for that experiment). And of course the hypomania has made me restless as all hell. I’ve kind of been reading books in and around skipping from activity to activity. So it gets done, just not with any kind of predictable schedule.
In the meantime, though, I present you with a cool new T-shirt. This was the brainchild of our partner’s wife, to match with the fact that mother’s day is in the not-TOO-distant future:
Perfect for both Warcraft-playing moms and the tolerant moms of kids who play Warcraft. 
I think it came out just right–it’s in a font I don’t normally use for T-shirts, but it has the right whimsical touch for this one.
