Rick Brant Website Section and Related Thoughts

I was not planning to add a Rick Brant section to my website.  However, I decided to do it for two reasons.  First, I decided that I could do it with considerably less effort than it took to add the Three Investigators section this summer.  Rick Brant is a shorter series with fewer formats.  Second, I did it because many secondary series like Rick Brant are neglected on the internet.  There used to be an excellent Rick Brant site, but that site is now defunct.  The only way to view it is through the Internet Wayback Machine.  If you don't know how to find it, then you'll never see it. 

Rick Brant Science-Adventure Series

I do have a link to the defunct Rick Brant site down at the bottom of the page.  The section is complete as of right now except for some possible editing of my comments about the series on the main page of the section.  Additionally, I will be rewriting the summary of #24 from what was provided by the publisher.  I am currently reading #23, so I will get to the #24 summary sometime this week.

I created this section rather fast.  I already had the scans of the books, and I just needed to create the section.  I copied another section and changed the text for Rick Brant.  I created the entire section probably the fastest I have ever done, in just a couple of days.  The summaries were the hardest part, since I had to write them so that they were the length I needed to match the images. 

I do proofread by reading the text myself several times over.  Often, website owners get criticized by readers when typos slip through, and sometimes readers assume that everyone relies on a spell checker.  Not so.  While the HTML editor does underline possible typos in red, it won't let me know when I have typed a wrong word that is correctly spelled.  Those errors can only be spotted by reading the text over and over.  Many of them can slip by through repeated readings since the mind automatically reads the word as what was intended.

For instance, I finally noticed that I had typed "certainly" when I meant to type "certainty."  At a glance, the word looked like what I meant, but I finally spotted the one incorrect letter.  Elsewhere, I had typed "fisherman" instead of "fishermen" and kept reading it as "fishermen."  Finally, I realized that I needed to change one letter.  If I hadn't made that change, someone might have thought that I didn't know the difference between singular and plural.

I proofread the same way for this blog.  The blog editor does mark misspelled words, but it doesn't know when I have typed the wrong word spelled correctly.  Most of these posts get read six or more times by me before they get published.

Don't get too excited expecting for me to add more sections to my website.  I might, since I have now added two this year, but then again, I might not.  I can't promise anything, but if I do add another section, it will be done impulsively and fast.  I do feel more inclined to do so than I did this summer.  I really had to force myself to create the Three Investigators section, and it was grueling.  I had motivational issues, especially because I hadn't added a section in five years.  Doing Rick Brant was a breeze by comparison, but I'll just have to see how I feel after I start reading my next new series.