Pete Ashton's Weblog

When the idea for Stator first started taking shape I approached my old bookselling chum Andy about participating (in fact I blogged the moment back in October). Andy and I started working at the same bookshop in central Birmingham in 1998 and while I galavanted around the country he stayed and established himself as the fiction buyer. The company PR machine likes to push its knowledgeable booksellers giving space to staff recommends and giving the illusion that the choice of books in the store comes from the staff. Of course this is a farce as most of the stock is selected centrally with profit as the main criteria, but booksellers like Andy who do give a shit still exist.

Ghostwritten, Andy's Stator blog, was initially conceived as a way of bypassing the corporate stuff and connected his knowledge of fiction with potential readers. At the time I was thinking of Stator as having specific categories, one blog for books, another for music, another for photos, and so on. Things have turned out a lot looser than that and so far Andy has treated Ghostwritten as a more general weblog/journal that happens to be written by a bookseller, which is fine and, given the plethora of book review sites out there, probably more interesting.

The design of the site is a mashup of my blog and the default Typepad template. As with BugPowder I've used my design because I've spent years developing it and it works. From Typepad I've taken the centred column and large photo-as-header. The colours came from a Movable Type style sheet that Andy liked.

I'll be introducing the rest of the Stator blogs in the near future as I redesign them, and you'll be delighted to hear there are two new ones in gestation.

It's probably about time I officially launched Stator.org into the world. Last summer I had the idea for establishing a community of weblogs and sub-sites, in the autumn I came up with the name and in December I started inviting people to join. It's potentially the biggest and most long term project I've embarked upon and as such I'm taking it very very slowly indeed, allowing it to evolve and grow at its own pace.