11 November 2025

Flesh wins the Booker

The Booker Prize winner was announced just before 9am Sydney time this morning. We were on our way to Penrith to give our dog, Lucy, (the dog in our website banner) a day out, when I saw on my phone (I wasn’t driving) that David Szalay had won for Flesh.

I’d bought three books from the Longlist a couple of months ago. I’d chosen to buy Endling by Maria Reva and Universality by Natasha Brown based on what I read about them on the Booker Prize website. While I was in the bookstore, I also bought Flesh on impulse.

My initial thought before the shortlist was announced was that Endling would definitely be shortlisted and had a good chance to win the prize. I was wrong. It didn’t make the cut while Flesh was ushered through for the final round. I thought it was a good book and I reviewed it positively, but it was not one of my favourite Booker novels.

But the news of its win was welcome this morning, nevertheless. We were actually going to go to Harry Hartog’s bookstore in Penrith to pick up the winner before starting our day with Lucy. Instead, we headed towards the river to start the day with a walk, and I had no new Booker winning novel to review. Which is quite welcome at the moment, since things are quite busy!

- bikerbuddy

1 November 2025

Groundhog Day

I run this website for books and sometimes I even get to read them!

But the problem is that since the beginning of last year I’ve been doing a lot of updates and some of them require quite a bit of retrofitting. Yesterday we posted our 720^th review and there is almost a thousand pages on this website. So, if there are things I didn’t do when I created those pages (because when we started this website I didn’t even know what alt image text was) then I have a problem. Most of the structural problems in the review pages have been addressed since last year, but there have been a few things I’ve wanted to add, and I still find my ignorance about web design is enormous.

This current batch of retrofitting started towards the end of August with me wanting to insert an advertisement for Michael Duffy’s new book at the end of all reviews (this is unpaid and unasked for. I did it because I wanted to) Given the number of reviews, this was something I wanted to do in a way that could be useful in the future. So instead of inserting the advertisement in each review I created it once and then inserted some code into each review that would load whatever file had the name I gave the advertisement. In future, I can do mass updates across the website by changing that one file. But to achieve this meant that I had to edit every review to make it work.

I had no sooner finished that when I realised I should have added another place on each review for the same purpose. I had nothing I wanted to put there yet, but it was for the future. So, I went through the same process with all the reviews again. After that I decided to use the new spot to put a list of the most recent reviews so I could see my new position working. While I was doing all this, I also changed the way embedded YouTube videos display so they could be larger on larger screens and be responsive for smaller screens. I also moved them and the ad I had just placed for Michael Duffy so they displayed in the correct position on phone screens.

Having just gotten through editing all the reviews again, I discovered there was something even more time consuming to do. I had received some junk mail from a company wanting to quote me big bucks to address the lack of many alt texts for images across the website, as well as my failure to understand what meta tags are when I started and why they should be on ALL my pages, not just reviews. (If you don’t know, they help search engines gather information about pages).

I decided I preferred to spend time rather than money (this is supposed to be a hobby, not a business), so I once again started the laborious task of beginning to edit review pages first. I started putting the meta tag information into the pages, and soon realised I really should address all the remaining issues with reviews (that I was one day going to get to) before I moved on to other pages in the website. I don’t want to have a Groundhog Day scenario where I do this forever. Some of the other issues on review pages? They are as follows:

For many reviews I have to add the alt text for images. I have to correct ' apostrophes to ’ apostrophes to achieve consistency. Other consistency issues include removing double spaces between sentences for many of Toriaz’s reviews (she does that), and standardising the way I display ellipses and quotations. Sometimes I find errors (I can’t believe how tenaciously typos cling to life), and I fix them when I see them. I’m also taking out ‘img’ from ‘img title’ to leave just ‘title’ because that works just as well, and the validating page for websites tends to pick up the ‘img’ part of it as a mistake.

If you began reading this blog and made it all the way to the end thinking that I was going to report something more interesting, I’m sorry. Sometimes, running a website when you didn’t really know what you were doing from the start really is just a lot of hard slog.

- bikerbuddy

PS: All that without mentioning the new random reviews button on the Reviews Search Page or having to restore all the comments across the site!