Off Site Reviews

Start of the Best of the Year Lists

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I love reading through best of the year Book lists to see what I missed. I tend to read a lot of books that are a few years old and not that many that are brand new. So rarely have I read more than a handful of any of the best of the year lists. Instead I use them to add to my wish lists and pick them up in the future.

So far I have noticed four “˜Best of 2014′ lists. Let me know in the comments if you have come across others.

  • Goodreads Best Books of 2014 – this is a reader choice award list with over 3 million votes cast. It tends to be a bit of a popularity contest but still interesting. It also has a lot of different categories and includes the nominations not just the top books.
  • Huffington Post Books Best of 2014 – this is from the editors of the Huffington Post Books section. It includes Lila, which is my book of the year
  • Bookriot.com’s Best of 2014 – Bookriot is a very good Book oriented website. The contributors have a best of list and are asking readers to contribute their best books of the year.
  • Amazon’s Editor’s 100 Best of 2014 – Amazon will have a best selling of 2014 later, but this is the editor’s choice list.  The book of the year is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I picked it up and am half way through it.  I understand the choice but I am having a hard time making it through. It is a very sad and tragic book.

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Digital Parenting With Pressgram

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aPressgram was released yesterday for iphone (android coming later).  I have been using the alpha and beta test versions since they were released and I am very pleased with the final product. Below is the post that I wrote about Pressgram during the Kickstarter campaign in April.  

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Now that we have publicly announced that my wife and I are going to have a child in the fall, I have been thinking more about digital parenting.  I have thought about this more than a lot of first time fathers because I have also been a full time nanny for five years.  In that time I have seen an enormous change in the way we share our children’s lives.

When my oldest niece was first born I created a static Web site for her.  A few months later I changed to a Blogger blog.  Once my second niece was born I primarily turned the blogs over to their mother and I started sharing pictures and happenings through twitter, Facebook, and eventually Instagram.

My nieces (sisterly love)

But over the past 18 months my love of social media sites is waning.  Not because I don’t love the communities there, but because I am increasingly concerned with how Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are using my information (picture, stories, timeline) to make money and how I am losing control of my own data. And more importantly how I may be losing control of my nieces data.

My friend John Saddington announced a solution that I have been looking forward to since before we publicly announced our upcoming child.  Pressgr.am is a way to use the filters and photo tools of Instagram and other photo apps while keeping your photos on your own site or choosing when and where to share them.

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