I’ve begun the fine-tuning of the bookstore. The bagpipe pages, for example, now feature music from my own list of favorites instead of a generic selection. Much of it is also bagpipe music that should appeal to the — gasp! — non-bagpipe enthusiasts among you, including some groups that really know how to rock. More bookstore updates will follow in the weeks ahead, so keep watching.

Also, I meant to mention yesterday, but didn’t, that SixDegrees.org is a partnership with the wonderful Network for Good. Please visit them and learn more about a very easy way to support some very worthy causes.

While I haven’t been posting, I haven’t been neglecting the site completely. For starters, I created a little Amazon bookstore. It’s not finished yet. The front page is fine; it contains some of my current recommendations. The interior pages are another matter. Right now, they’re just generic listings of books and music, sorted by category and keyword. Eventually, I’ll pair those listings down so that they’re a bit more personal, containing items I’ve hand-selected instead of every single item Amazon sells with the keyword “horror” or “bagpipes” or what have you.

If you’d like to check it out, you can find the link toward the bottom of the sidebar, right below the Amazon search box. Or, even easier, you can just click here:

My Amazon Store

The other, more important project is the “badge” I added to the sidebar to let visitors make donations to some very worthwhile charities related to literacy, the arts and education — for example, Chely Wright’s Reading, Writing and Rhythm Foundation. You don’t like country music? That’s okay, neither do I. But I love the things that Chely’s organization does to promote arts in the schools, and to help schools that might not have a music program without outside support.

The badge comes from Kevin Bacon’s amazing SixDegrees.org, a project that shows something good can come out of a silly game, and that social networking can be about something other than geeky buzzwords and self-obsessed Myspace pages full of bad grammar and spelling.

You can find the badge at the bottom of the sidebar. Take a look. Who knows? You might even feel moved to click one or two of the “donate” buttons.

Using tags will allow a deeper, more complete, more intuitive level of search and navigation than the simple categorization of posts. And they’re fun, since they can include keywords that are sensible and straightforward or lighthearted and odd.

I’ve not yet had time to go back and add tags to all the existing posts, but I’ve finished some of them, which should give you a good feel for how it will work. Eventually, at the end of every post you’ll find a list of tags. If you want to find other posts with the same keywords, just click, and off you’ll go.

Even better, you can use this entertaining tag cloud to find your way around the archives.

On another note, it looks as if the White Sox and Indians will play this afternoon, despite the bone-chilling temperatures (almost 40 degrees colder than yesterday) and some wind damage that occurred overnight at U.S. Cellular Field. We’re practicing our shivering and teeth-chattering now, so we should be all set.

Of course, you should still update/upgrade/change your browser for all the reasons mentioned below.