More Kalalau Trip Reports

I didn’t have much time to write today, so I did what every good blogger does: link to somebody else’s writing.

I updated my page of Kalalau trip reports with 3 new ones that are worth checking out. It’s like 3 blog posts for the price of none.

The Bookstore Is Open

I’ve been thinking of ways of earning some money doing what I love: exploring Kauai and writing about it. Hiking and taking pictures is fun, writing about it is what I do here, the tricky part is getting paid for it.

Before I put advertizing on this blog, I thought I’d try some other options first. The most straightforward is to be “affiliated” with an online bookstore and provide links for people to buy the books I recommend on my blog. So I now have a bookstore page on the blog now where you can click through to Amazon.com to buy all the books I have recommended, all 3 of them (one map and two books). If you go to that page right now, you’ll see a few more books that I’m reading and will review soon.

Many of the big online merchants have these programs, which pay the website owner anywhere from 4% to 8% commission of the sales price. I hope I’m not breaching my contract when I say this, but I really wanted to be affiliated with an “independent” bookseller such as Powell’s Books. I tend to support the underdog, and I thought that a store focused only on books would serve my needs better. However, Amazon has a big network of associate booksellers, a larger group of smaller bookstores, and they were the only store that could list the relatively obscure titles about Kaua’i. On the positive side, lots of people know and trust Amazon, and I am myself a satisfied customer.

Anyways, if you’re thinking of buying the books you see on this blog, it helps me out if you buy them through my links. Hopefully, having a potential income from books will motivate me to review more of them. Don’t worry, I promise I will still recommend only the books I honestly like.

An Eclectic Sunrise

It’s been a while since I posted a sunrise picture, but I’m looking for a short and easy post today.

We’ve been having a bit of nice Kona weather again. Yesterday was sunny but not hot, and the mountains were spectacularly clear most of the day. With no clouds, the night was almost chilly under a waning moon . And this morning, a few cirrus high clouds were spectacularly lit by the morning sun:

The reason I called this an “eclectic sunrise” is because a relatively new blog called Kaua’i Eclectic describes the same sunrise much more beautifully than I:

I’ve been wanting to mention this blog, but I didn’t get around to adding it to the blogroll until now. It’s written by Joan Conrow, whom I do not know personally, but the story of her blog is well known. She was a Kaua’i correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper, including recent ferry news, until she was fired for voicing her personal anti-ferry opinions on her blog. So if you’re a ferry supporter, her writing will surely rub you the wrong way.

However, if you look beyond the politics, she is a keen observer of both mother nature and human nature. She usually writes about her morning walks and the people she meets, which lead her to expose some facet of Kaua’i or lesson she has learned from living here. But she does write a political blog, and so she keenly applies the lesson to the political target du jour.

If you shun the political reading, she has also written many articles for other Hawaiian publications such as the Honolulu Weekly (a free newspaper on Oahu) and the local airline magazines. From her descriptions of places and people, you can tell she is a spiritual person. Fortunately, her writing remains poetic, lyrical maybe, but rarely preachy. For example, she has an article about the mist in Koke’e and the Hindu temple on the Wailua river. On the right-hand side of her blog, she lists her own favorite pieces, including some about the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

And by the way, as I write this in the evening, it is pouring down rain. Update: it rained over 5 inches last night, more in one night than any previous whole month since the March 2006 deluge. And it’s raining hard again this morning.

New to This Technorati Thing

Hey, I’m claiming my blog on Technorati. Check out this blog’s profile.

As near as I can tell, it says that I’m a rank amateur. I’m trying to make this blog a bit more professional, and also a bit more appealing. Look for some changes and hopefully more frequent posts in the coming weeks. My goal is to break into Technorati’s top 1,000,000.

Blog Carnival Participant

Up until recently, I wasn’t too sure what a blog carnival was either. I still don’t know all the details, but it boils down to a bunch of “link love,” as they sometimes call it when blogs link to each other. The host blog defines a geographical area, Hawai’i in this case, and asks bloggers in the area to submit an existing post of their own to a sort of blog roundup. The host then creates a new post that summarizes all the submissions, allowing people to discover their blog neighbors.

So last month, Evelyn of homespunhonolulu.com emailed me to ask if I’d like to participate. She hosts a monthly blog carnival for Hawai’i entitled Carnival of Aloha. The rest of the time, she blogs about events for local people on Oahu and also about the small details about life in Hawaii, such as her recent in-depth post about honey from the Big Island.

Anyways, I liked the idea of gathering a random bunch of blog articles showing the many facets of blogging in Hawai’i, and so I submitted my recent Kalalau article for consideration. Oahu blogs dominate the published blog carnival for October, but there I am in the middle, along with a couple of other Kauaian bloggers and a big slice of life from across the islands.

If you write a blog in Hawai’i or about Hawai’i and would like to join the carnival, see Evelyn’s instructions and submission form. And if you just want to find some new blogs or articles about Hawai’i, here’s the link to her monthly Carnival of Aloha posts.