February 22, 2005

unwinding the threads

My plans to make a neat little intergrated system for my books got a bit waylaid by the need to write a novel (see the main grouch blog) but now I have acres of free time staring at me I have got back on it.

So, this is what I've done:
  1. Set up del.icio.us tags, as previously mentioned back in November

  2. Used the lovely RSS Digest feed to create feeds from the del.icio.us tags to the left and right sidebars here, covering the tags for current reading, waiting to be read, recently read, etc.

  3. Used and abused a nice layout from glish. My abuse of the code makes it look odd in Firefox, but nevermind...

  4. Used a pretty font called New Kinder to make new banners and badges.

From now on the blog (i.e. this bit here) will be used for reviews of what I'm reading whilst the sidebars will reveal where I am in the never-ending pile of stuff.

I just bought Labyrinths by Borges, in case no-one guessed.

update: now tweaked again

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

How nice to see other people afflicted by a huge 'to read' bookpile.

And how nice to note that I've read six of those in your 'to read' list.

I tried allconsuming.net to track my reading, but I keep forgetting to update it.

Jon @ Rogue Semiotics

Mags said...

Yes, I found that with all-consuming: a good idea in principle but this lets me just google a book, tag it with delicious and the whole updating thing is done. Much easier, and not reliant on a book being on amazon's lists.

My to be read pile is, officially, 37 books. The feed is set to show 30, I think...

Anonymous said...

I'm well impressed.

Of course, I've tried to find time to do something like this for about 2 years, and I don't even have the excuse of a novel (although and OU PHD is kind of getting in the way).

I too tried all-consuming and but was just too slow to set up the book to be read.

I've very impressed by the way you have this organised. tagged via del.icio.us and it is in, very good

Mags said...

Thanks. It took about five hours but most of that was the CSS, the design, and getting that huge pile tagged. Now it's done though, it should be very easy to maintain.

Anonymous said...

One thing: is the 'Recently Read' list in order? With no dates or anything attached, you're losing that all important sense of the flow of your interest jiggering about between topics (or author).

Jon @ Rogue Semiotics

Mags said...

the recently read list shows books as they are added to the reading.read tag within del.icio.us with the most recent at the top, I think. Unfortunately, I suspect that retains the date it was added to del.icio.us, not the date last edited. I could get around that by deleting and then re-adding a book when it goes from 'reading' to 'to be read'.

It does still lose the sense of "how long has this book been stuck on the pile?" though...