It’s still coming.

However, one part has arrived. I’ve moved the Seattle Book Events page that I’ve hosted on Rat’s Reading for just under two years. Links to the old page should redirect to the new dedicated site. I’ll leave the redirect up for a while. Please update links and bookmarks though.

So, ta-da! If you want to know who’s talking and signing books in Seattle, check out the new site: Seattle Author Readings and Lectures.

Hosting it on a dedicated site means I’ll be able to introduce some new features for it eventually. Right now it’s basically the same thing as was here, with different formatting. Eventually, it’ll have it’s own associated Twitter account, blog, and maybe more.

Unlike previous years, I’m not going to write a reflection on the past year. Thank you to all the people who’ve read the blog. I enjoy writing it.

In an effort to get my ass in gear on a project I put aside because real life intervened, I’m also announcing this blog’s demise. Yup, Rat’s Reading is going away. I’m not sure exactly when it will happen, but within a few months I’m going to shut the blog down.

At that point, a new blog will be born. I’m changing domain names and going with a very different look and feel. It will have actual graphics on it, as opposed to Rat’s Reading’s minimalist design. There may be a new feature or two. My cranky self will be embodied on every page. That won’t change.

There you have it.

Image Five Years by Michael Ruiz is licensed and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Marie from The Boston Bibliophile also entered with her charity AIDS Action Committee, and writer Caren Gussoff entered with Pasado’s Safe Haven. All three charities are worth checking out.

And my obligatory reminder: the A.L.S.A. Walk to Defeat A.L.S. is still in need of your support. If you can’t donate yourself, please consider spreading the word. The A.L.S.A. made my mom’s last year so much better than it could have been. You can find information about the Walk to Defeat A.L.S. on my donation page.

I’ve been pushing the Walk to Defeat A.L.S. for just under a month now, and folks who read this blog have contributed nearly $500 so far. I think that’s awesome! A.L.S. sufferers like my mom need all the help they can get. If you haven’t donated money and have a little bit to spare, take a look at at my donation page for more information on A.L.S., the A.L.S.A., why i care, and how you can get a free book as a thank you gift for donating.

But there are also lots of other worthy charities out there. Concord Free Press is trying to spur charitable giving by giving away free books. In return for a free book, readers agree to a) donate money in the amount of their choosing to a charity of their choice and b) pass the book on to someone else with the same agreement. I accepted their second book Push Comes to Shove (see review here) with those terms, so now I need to donate. I’ve already given money to the Walk to Defeat A.L.S. and would have without this book to spur me, so I need a new charity. Rather than pick one of my other favorite charities, I’m going to open this up with a contest.

Comment on this post with your favorite charity. Include a URL if you know it, so other folks who are entering this contest can learn more about your charity. Next Saturday, I will pick a comment at random. I’ll send this numbered limited edition of Push Comes to Shove to the winning commenter and donate $20 to their charity as well.

The fine print: comment must have name of charity and its contact information like a URL to be a valid entry, bona fide charities only (I’m not sending money to you, your family, or your political party no matter how worthy they are), entries close August 14 at midnight, one entry per person (if you want to increase your charity’s chances, get a friend to comment), winner notified by email so make sure it works or I’ll pick another comment.

So today I added my own list of author readings and other events for Seattle to Rat’s Reading. With the addition of the Events Manager plugin for WordPress, I have a good base of code to manage these, so I’m hoping the maintenance won’t be too much. At this point, the site merely features a list of upcoming events, which I hope to keep up to date about a month in advance.

If that were all, it wouldn’t be worth it. But there’s a few features I plan to add as soon as I code them up: weekly posts of events added, weekly posts of events upcoming (i.e., Fridays, if that be the day, sees an auto-generated post with the following weeks events), an RSS subscriptions, and an iCal subscription (so events can be imported to Google Calendar or other time management app).

In any case, check out the listing and tell me what you think.

The upgrade appears to be successful. If you see any problems, please note them in the comments.

Hopefully Scott Wallick will update Sandbox to use the new threaded comments feature of WordPress 2.7. I took a quick gander at what I’d have to do to enable them myself. It didn’t look like something I want to tackle right now. Then again, I rarely get more than two or three comments, so perhaps having threaded comments isn’t all that important.

If there are problems, please leave a comment here.

I never set a closing date for the contest. However, I’ve gotten no further guesses for two months, so I’m going to close it without a winner. Mostly I’d forgotten about it, but today I looked at my stats and I’ve now had a visitor from the formerly correct answer. On 30 October, someone from Ethiopia read two pages of my drivel. Since the answer is now wrong, I figure it’s okay to give up on the contest.

On a related note, does any reader have suggestions as to interesting literature-related Twitter pursuits? I don’t mean new ideas to implement. (If you have a great Twitter idea, do it yourself. I might be happy to run with it, but it’ll be my gig once I go.) I mean interesting stuff people have already done with Twitter. TwitterLit is a great idea, for instance. Or bkkeepr. I may re-start my bkkeepr thing. Haven’t decided yet.

Any other interesting Twitter book projects out there?