About Us

The Tampa Bay Book Group is a private group of book-lovers who meet the second Tuesday of every month to discuss a book. The discussion is moderated by an HCC professor who generously volunteers her time to the group. Sorry, we are not currently looking for new members.

Thanks for visiting!

This Site - 2003 - 2016

I used to maintain a site in static HTML with links to books created from the Associates Central linkbuilding page. You can still see the old site.

This Site 2016 - June 2019

In 2016, I switched to using Jekyll and the Jekyll::Amazon gem.

The source code for this site is available on Github. You may use it as a template for building your book group website.

Update June 2019 Sadly, Amazon has changed their policies for access to the Advertising API, to the detriment of hobbyists like me. So the method above will only work if you have an affiliate account that is making a significant amount of money. You can read my tale of woe about Amazon crushing hobbyist access to their API.

This Site June 2019 - Present

Well, it was fun working with Jekyll, but now that Amazon has changed its policies, I'm back to doing a static site by hand. But it's really not bad - make liberal use of server side includes and you can DRY your code up significantly. On the pages for 2020 and beyond, only the main content block is maintained by hand; the rest is SSI.