… or at least a good, easy to use one for WordPress templates that is as flexible as we would like. The Book Puzzler searched and scrounged, and cam up short.
Sure, there are some plug-ins and code snippets, along with quite a few very nice templates, that are free and readily available. Some references will be given below to sites that can actually help. For our purposes, though, we could find nothing that was adaptable and met our needs. (I would love to be proved wrong, however, so let me know if I missed a gem somewhere.)
The plug-ins and solutions that the Book Puzzler returned with were nice, but would not give the kind of menu we wanted. That is, the fields were not fluid enough to keep up with what we actually wanted on the header menu as opposed to the defaults that were there.
Suckerfish Drop-Down Menu is a great plug-in, but it did not do exacly what we wanted. I have a feeling that the coding must be fairly complex, and the work involved in genrating the exact features we or others might want would be something you would need to pay for. That said, you can see links to sites using this plug-in HERE. It is very fuctional and will work for a lot of situations. THe developers of this plugin have released som efree themes with the feature already enabeld:
Another theme, Jillij, is a very nice starting point and is fairly easy to tweak to change the appearance to suit your needs. It is a one column theme, so if you are into sidebars it may not be whaere you want to start. The Book Puzzler has installed it and played around with it, but we have chosen not to use it on any current site. It is on our active list of very good choices, though.
The Book Puzzler’s assignments include finding good WordPress templates and making these templates work for various sites. We will put up a post with our favorite templates at some point. One of our favorites for certain content is MassivePress, by WP Elements. This is one of the so called magazine format themes, and will not work for a lot of content or blogs. For the right content it is perfect, though, and it is very amenable to tweaking. We use it on our review site Adirondack Book Review.
One of my complaints was that returning to the home page was not as intuitive and easy and I would have liked. There is a small home link in the header menu, but not as clear as desired. The Book Puzzler was sent off to find out how to remedy this. Finally, someone shared this, I think through links found right on the MassivePress site. This is what he did in the header php file, which seems to have worked to make a clickable banner for a quick return home. Beware that the code below may be formatted in a way that needs editing to be readable. Instead of copying and pasting sometimes you need to type it our by hand.
The Book Puzzler does not know why it works, exactly, or even if it will work for everyone. It is a small victory that it does even this, so let’s leave it at that. Use at your own risk, and back up all your original files before messing with code.
On another site he also moved the header menu down below the banner instead of having way up in the top right, but that is a different story.
I do wonder how many bloggers, online store owners and the like really intended to end up learning so much about designing their site. The hours, days, put into researching and design balloon into a job description all their own. Only the lucky ones, I think, come to grips with the reality that their own skills will likely never keep up with the things they must know and the swiftness of change. These are the ones who quit while they are ahead, or at least while they are not behind.
The Book Puzzler was initially charged with opening up a few blogger sites to promote the bookstore (the store itself was, is and will continue to be hosted by a third party, Chrislands, which is one of the best low cost merchant platforms out there - and no I do not get any referrals or benefits from that plug).
For blogger, of course, the Book Puzzler needed to learn basic html. Not a real stretch. We all seem to learn snippets here and there without ever grasping, truly knowing, how it all really works. Sure, it’s easy to paste code to throw up images and links. If we market our stuff and use affiliates at all we even learn to build cutstome eBay links using photo software and hex codes to match the layout of our sites.
Where does it end, though. We have, accidentally or otherwise, wandered into the role of itinerant webmaster. We stumble from task to task, never gaining the skill or freedom to fully develop a niche, but being called to perform the tasks that others have never quite gotten to even beginning to learn. At its best, it allows one to don the role of some sort of peripatetic webmaster, wandering from site to site offering limited but hard earned insight into how to fix things up and get them clunking along, even if they don’t gleam with all that php freshness and sleek coding we have heard talk of. We fix things up and make them work for those who need help but can’t learn it on their own. It is sort of bargain basement webmastering for those that cannot afford a tailor. For those who can’t even afford a new Lands End Webmaster Blazer during the end of season clearance sale.
This is what happened to The Book Puzzler. There he was, happily eating his popcorn over in the corner and counting it an achievement if he remembered to wash the butter off his hands before touching the vellum. All of a sudden, he was assigned jobs that no one else wanted to bother with. Who, after all, better could waste half a day learning how to edit and post that new banner for the website than that fool? Soon, though, he was the one with the skills. It was now easier and faster to have him do anything. Miraculously he retained a fair percentage of what he learned (in his case “fair” means anything over 15%). He became indispensable in a weird sort of way, a word (”indispensable”, not “weird”) that no one had ever applied to him before. Or his father before him. Or his father’s father before him. Or his father’s father’s father…oh, you know how it goes.
So he may not know what “peripatetic” means, and although he may have heard the word it would never occur to him to actually use the word “itinerant” in a sentence. He knows he is a “webmaster” though, and he even knows what it means. We all refrain from telling him that he isn’t a very good one. That would confuse him, for doesn’t master mean the best of them all, top of the heap? Well, not in his case, but he is useful, occasionally productive, and is, after all, able to do things with the websites that the rest of us cannot.
So, there will be postings here too, under this category, of his struggles and triumphs with running various websites. Fool he may be, but you can trust him to find a solution if there is one reasonably to be found.
Here is an interesting puzzler we came across a while back (it was about a year ago that this was posted on the Puzzler’s Blogger blog, but much of that content will be migrated here and the Blogger site will be left to wither). A colleague had come across an old children’s book, written in German, English and some other languages, but with no real information about its origin nor any real idea about its worth.
Based on the information available, it was difficult to track down using the usual book search engines.Simple variations on the title brought no good information, and the few books that seemed to be documented did not have pictures or enough description to help make a match.
A more extensive search, using variations of the title on Google, eventually brought better results.The key was the phrase Zauber Bilderbuch, as well as the image of the wizard.An approximate match was found in the archives of a the University of Oldenburger, on a site called Digitalisierte historische Kinderbücher.Not an exact match, but pretty close.Using a web based translator provided the usual literal translation that was only marginally more helpful than the original German.(If it has not been mentioned, The Book Puzzler only speaks and reads one and a quarter languages. One is his native English.The other quarter is a mix of Spanish and French.)
Anyway, the page of interest was the index to a digitized copy of Zauber-Bilderbuch: eine interessante Unterhaltung für Jedermann - [ca. 1850].Clicking on the button labeled “Buch offnen” led to the images which very closely matched the original book being examined.
So where did that leave us.Not much of anywhere in term of knowing what to do with the book or how much it is worth.As The Book Puzzler platitudinously says on another blog, a book is only worth what someone will pay for it.But it can be properly described now, placed for sale, properly cataloged so when a collector comes along looking for this he or she will be able to find it among the billions of books referenced on the internet.If you say you have a copy “as preserved and described by the University of Oldenburger” you make the book more noteworthy.
Maybe someone else knows more about this particular book.As Always, I love to hear more about this type of thing.
The Book Puzzler had no idea.It was an interesting question, so he was sent to puzzle it out.
The question was prompted by a recently sold book.Mole and His New Red Hat, published in 1974 by The Rochester Folk Art Guild.There is no information in the book about the author or illustrator, so perhaps it was a collective effort of some sort.
The Book Puzzler did not know a lot about this organization (OK, he didn’t know anything about it) until he was cataloging the book.It turns out they have published a number of books, from crafts, to cooking to children’s fiction such as Mole.Some of their books are available directly on their site.
The guild describes itself thusly:
“The Rochester Folk Art Guild is a community of people sharing the aim of working practically toward a deeper understanding of themselves and their purpose, based on the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff. Their crafts and community life provide ways to cultivate a special quality of attention amidst the activities of daily life.”
How this extended into children’s literature is not exactly clear, but the book in question is on one level about paying attention to the world around you.The guild was founded, beginning circa 1957, by Louise Goepfert March.March was a follower of G. I. Gurdjieff, and the guild was initially composed of people interested in his ideas, which were directly related to the guild’s “aim to explore man’s inner development…with practical emphasis on craftmaking and physical work activities.”
Mole and His New Red Hat remains available on Amazon in the $10 to $20 range (I do not myself carry any more copies).It also shows up periodically on eBay.
There's a little thing author Jeffrey Eugenides does when he can't write. When he's feeling sleepy, when his head is in a fog, he reaches across his desk, digs under the piles of unanswered mail, and unearths his copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow.
Author Kamila Shamsie owns two copies of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion so that no matter where she is, she can always slip into the novel's vital, heart-stopping world.
The main character in Halldor Laxness' novel Independent People is querulous, contrary, hard-hearted and stubborn — but author Christina Sunley can't get enough of him.
Author Melody Moezzi says Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir, An Unquiet Mind, is the most brilliant and brutally honest book she's ever read about bipolar disorder.
When a woman at a bookstore in Brattleboro, Vt., put Castle Freeman Jr.'s novel Go With Me into author Charles Bock's hand, he had no idea what a wry, primal, epic and impossible-to-put-down book he had just been given.
Author Anne Cherian was 24 when she first read — and was enthralled by — Beryl Markham's autobiography West With the Night, a beautifully written retelling of the aviator's childhood in Africa and her daring solo flight across the Atlantic.
Ron Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen tracks a familiar story — an ambitious kid's escape from the inner city. Author Susan Jane Gilman says Suskind treats his subject with such care that this nonfiction tale has the impact of an epic novel.
Author Eric Kraft describes Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York as a "sometimes outrageous retroactive manifesto" about architecture and city planning — in short, a book not to miss.
The title character of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge is a confused and vindictive wife and mother in a small town on the coast of Maine. She's not at all likable — but that doesn't mean Melissa Bank doesn't love her.
, published in 1974 by 
