nowreading.info is now being redevelped as a complete mishmash! Much along the same lines as – obviously with different content to - my other site nntk.net, but using WordPress rather than the image-based Gallery.
Originally the site was going to be about books I was reading as I read them – hence the title – but I had to rethink this because I wasn’t generating content quickly enough! You can still find some reference to this germ of an idea in the ‘Now reading/listening/gaming:’ pages.
Then, the idea was to build up a searchable archive of the notes contained in ‘The Note-Books of Samuel Butler’. This still exists here!
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
I am posting individual notes by Samuel Butler on this site (follow the link above or use the sidebar!) and in time hope to include the full published volume. On the The Note-Books page the notes are presented in a random order, tagged with the section of the published notebooks they originte from. I have chosen this initial random view to try and spark the interest of anyone unfamiliar with Butler’s work, and give ever varying initial page content! If you want a more ordered view, clicking on a tag will present you with the notes in the sequential order they appear in the published notebooks. The same result can be obtained by following the links from the Note-Books Sections page.
Best of all, the notes are searchable – use the search box in the sidebar to find notes Samuel Butler wrote on any topic – the spectrum is quite wide!
To get some impression of what the notes encompass, I can best refer you to Henry Festing Jones, who compiled and edited Butler’s notes into the book form which he published in 1912. The preface Festing Jones wrote to the note-books can be found here. It starts off with
Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making them:
“One’s thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails.”
So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way across the field of his vision.
and continues to expand in detail on Butler’s note-taking habits and the wide variety of subjects he comments on.
Now I have also added some content to the site relating to Abernant (Aberdare, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales) – including some useful links and photo galleries. The links page is also the new destination for my registered domain name abernant.net. This used to redirect to a very basic Google Sites page, but routing it here will give me a lot more flexibility in terms of content and style.
There is also a Blog section, which also picks up some of my Twitter updates – it should retrieve all of them, but the convoluted feeds never seem to function perfectly. 
In the same vein there is the more experimental SituationistTweet page where I’m playing about with searching Twitter for various phrases and converting them to WordPress posts. This is also not functioning perfectly yet and is really only for my own curiosity at the moment, just to see if I can get it to work!
Beyond this is a forum which can be used to contact me or discuss anything relating to the site.
Then, there are the adverts – sorry, just trying to offset some of the costs of running a few websites. Feel free to click on any of them to help support the continuation of nntk.net, hill107.net, this site or anything else web related I might dream up! In particular, if you are going to buy anything at all from Amazon I’d be very grateful if you visited their site via the various links I have scattered about on this site…
