Started Another Book Site

Well obviously I don’t really write here anymore. I mean the last update was June 2014 when I talked about Football Manager.

It’s funny actually as I don’t really play Football Manager anymore, however I come here to update WordPress and the plugins once per month(for security) and I end up looking at that post and it gets me right motivated to actually get a football manager game going.

Work wise I’ve been so busy I just don’t want to dedicate the time to Football Manager. I mean I’ve tried – holy crap have I tried – over the last little while, but I always lose interest.

Part of it is the commitment – you really need to commit yourself to FM and focus on it and I just don’t want to do that. I’ve just been too busy with my work projects.

One of them is another book site – https://www.BookSeries.org.

I’ve been running book websites since 2011. The first site I started was https://www.OrderOfBooks.com. It’s funny as I still remember the progression of that site and how things randomly work out.

I started the site purely for my own benefit – to track a list of authors I like and their series. Then I had some friends ask me to do it for authors they like so I kept it going and slowly worked at the site.

It really felt like a pet project and I didn’t focus on it much but then the author Brad Thor appeared on CNN.

He can be a rather controversial fella and he said something that caused people to google him. Well who happened to rank #1 for him at the time? My site Order of Books of course!

So it brought in a lot of traffic and after the initial surge the numbers stayed strong. Invested more in the site immediately and it’s worked out.

This new project BookSeries.org is really cool though. I mean on the frontend it appears the same sort of site – a whole bunch of book series listed by character and author.

The backend is mental though. On the first site we have to update everything manually. On this site there’s a really sick backend that does everything automatically. It’s been like 3 years in the making.

So for example if Lee Child has a new book come out. I have to get notified about it via regular means – his Facebook page, Google news notice etc.

Then I have to go in and add that entry in to the Lee Child entry. Not once but multiple times – once for each country we target to. Then I have to do the same for Jack Reacher – the character in the Lee Child series.

It’s a right pain in the arse. That’s just one author however we have over 3000 authors on the site who write multiple series so it gets crazy.

Meanwhile for the new site it’s as simple as checking once a day and seeing all new books. It will say to us “Hey here’s a new book by Lee Child – you want us to add it to his Jack Reacher list?”. Simple little click of the button and boom good to go.

So that’s been fun – that has taken up a lot of my time as has just been going through existing sites.

Not sure what I’ll do with this blog – been thinking of starting some sort of ebook that covers all my Scotsmanality stuff and blog writings. Not that I’d sell it or anything but just something neat to keep and flick through all the time.

In saying that I have really enjoyed writing here. Usually I am writing for the search engines so it was nice to take a break from that.

Maybe I’ll start up writing again.