The start of year two of The Alberta Dynamo blog.

The first year had 303 posts. Several dozen posts never got written.

Back in mid-August, William M. Briggs had a post called “Advice To Blog Writers”

There is no deep understanding required.

If you don’t do the work, the work won’t get done.

And so the answer is to sound like my father: self-discipline!

If you want to be a blogger who everyday writes a column, you must everyday write a column.

I had several goals when I started this blog….

1. Stay in control of the blog as opposed to the blog taking over my life.

2. Avoid becoming a rageaholic. I don’t want to be someone who only writes about the latest who or what I hate. Write about things I like.

3. Don’t toss away my self filter and be aware of how much of myself I pour into the writing. I’m very passionate about what I believe in and what I like…or don’t like. Passion can be very good thing for a blog, or a very dangerous one.

William Briggs continues in his advice….

There are only two kinds of blogs, lists and columns. I have no advice for list writers. But if you write columns, stick to standard length, which is about 750 words. Columns much shorter than this turn into lists. If you must say more than space allows, break it up across days. People don’t have the patience to read longer works on a computer screen.

The last sentence about reading on a computer screen, for me this highlights that books, good “old fashioned” books that you can hold in your hands or curl up with in your lap are still fantastic!

Books aren’t going anywhere, except perhaps onto redesigned Ikea bookshelves.

To some heavyweight pundits, the resizing of the iconic Ikea Billy bookshelf signals the death of the print book and the demise of reading.

To Ikea, it just means you can finally shelve your coffee-table books.

Billy shelves deeper than the standard 28 centimetres (11 inches) just allow people to store bigger books, Ikea Canada spokeswoman Madeleine Löwenborg-Frick told the Star on Tuesday.

“This design update is quite simply to accommodate a wider selection of books.”

Nearly 50 million Billy bookshelves have been sold worldwide and there has been no drop in sales, said Löwenborg-Frick.