Nate Klaiber

Introducing the new Nate Klaiber Book Reviews

Stamp given to me as a gift from my wife on Christmas, 2007

I have decided to soft launch my new book reviews website, Nate Klaiber Book Reviews. This website has been tucked away for the past year, while I dedicated my working hours to Reflect CMS. A great big thank you to Aaron Boeving for helping me take this website from idea to reality. He was the designer of the interface. There are some things still rough around the edges, but I forced myself to get it out into the wild. Now that it's up, I will be taking feedback and making iterations.

While this past year kept me busy with work, I didn't stop reading books. I have a queue of reviews lined up and will be releasing them over the next few weeks. A lot of great books, authors and reviews will be making their way to the site. If you are an author and would like to update any bio information, feel free to contact me and I will get it updated. Thanks to those authors who have already given me some updated bios and pictures.

My Goals

My goal with this site was simple: To have an online storage of my personal library and reviews. It all started with blog posts, but they simply weren't contextual enough to let me create the proper data models for books, authors, publisher, and reviews. Also, behind the scenes is an administration panel that lets me do some fun things:

• A customizable sitemap. This is automatically generated in the application via observers, but I also have the flexibility to add other static pages or alter any information as I see fit. This generates the sitemap.xml file used by all major search engines. It's less work for me, but gives me the freedom and flexibility to adjust things such as title, description, and tags on the fly. Search engine friendly URL's are automatically generated to my liking in each section. I have a robots exclusions setup to eventually block potential duplicate content pages. SEO benefits baked in.
• Taxonomy baked in. There are categories and tags stored with every piece of content. These will eventually make their way into the interface, when I find out how I want to use them in a proper manner. In the meantime, they will help serve the search index that will arrive within the week.
• I can keep some fun stats for my personal knowledge. I know how many pages I have read, how many I have to read, and where I am within each book. This was something I was happy to see inside of Readernaut. I can also check out books to friends, and keep track of who has what book.
• Integration with other web services. Shortly around the bend, I will be integrating some of my Flickr photos to their attached reviews thanks to machine-tagging. I will also be adding calls to action to purchase from Amazon, and work closely with their API to help people purchase books when they want to. I will also be integrating with Twitter as a pseudo-RSS feed for those interested in following. Not only will I integrate with other services, but there will be a public API available for the site as it stands now. It was built with REST in mind.
• The ability to filter books based on their intended audiences. These come directly from the publishers, and can be found on most of the books. This allows you to find books based on your level of experience. More will come with this.
• There will be several RSS options. While many of you have said you enjoy the lengthy reviews, I will also have cliff notes versions available on all of the reviews and feeds. More to come on these options.

Stay tuned for some more updates on this progress. I will be keeping this site as a tumblelog of things going on in the industry, so if you want to subscribe to only book reviews, be sure to update your feeds with the new RSS feed at NK Book Reviews: http://www.nkbookreviews.com/reviews/rss. If you would prefer to follow me on twitter, you can follow @nkbookreviews and it will notify you of recent reviews!

Transitions

Launching this site is also part of another transition. In September I left my role as Marketing Director with Clear Function. I simply couldn't stand Aaron Boeving any longer. OK, that last part isn't true. The timing was right for me to do something I had been wanting to do for a while, which is start my own business. It also let Stephen and Aaron restructure some of their plans with Clear Function. It was a good thing for all parties involved, and I still consider them to be incredible friends and colleagues.

With that transition taking place, I received some guidance from some excellent friends and colleagues and started The Klaibers Web Engineering, LLC. I connected with a local agency, WRIS, and began taking on some different projects with them. My role with them as a Strategic Partner is great, and they have a talented team working behind the scenes there. Their new website is just around the corner. With this new venture, I have revived the old domain of www.theklaibers.com. This will be getting a new makeover after the first of the year.

A very special thank you to many different friends and family during this transition time: Stephen Rainey, Aaron Boeving, Scott Meier, Hector Cabarcas, Brad Colbow, Craig Minch, Brad Dielman, Bridget Stewart, Beth Dean, Josh Walsh, Joe Fiorini, Brendan Cullen, Matt Becker, John MacAdam, Patrick Gerber, Eric Wiley, Vince Frantz, and a handful of other people. This also includes my own family, especially my wife.