I am proposing a session for IndieWebCamp West Coast: “Keeping Track of Books and Reading Progress.”
I would like to discuss the use-cases and experiences of using our websites to:
- track books we want to read
- categorize (or “shelve”) books
- track reading progress
Most of my personal experience has been around tracking books I want to read. It is probably more accurate to classify those as want posts instead of read posts. I’d like to discuss the differences between these three types of posts and what they look like on our sites. Regarding categorizing books, we should also discuss Library JSON.
This session is broader than indiebookclub but will likely have an impact on it. indiebookclub creates posts with a status of to-read, reading, or finished. The first is probably a want post and the others seem to be reading progress posts.
@sonicrocketman: I noticed I wasn’t seeing your feed in Monocle. It looks like your jsonfeed doesn’t validate: https://validator.jsonfeed.org/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpine.blog%2Fu%2Fsonicrocketman%2Ffeed.json
I subscribed to your microformats feed and that’s working smoothly!
I’m attending .
Todd Grotenhuis on blog.grotenhuis.info:Remember all those apps/sites where you could create a daily/weekly newspaper from links and posts in your social feeds? Do any of those still exist?
https://paper.li/ still exists. If you use it, please don't have it auto-tweet them though. XD
Want to read: How to Be an Antiracist by (ISBN 9780525509288)
via Episode 229 - White Homework with Tori Williams Douglass
Want to read: The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It by (ISBN 9781583335086)
via Episode 229 - White Homework with Tori Williams Douglass
Felt cute, might quarantine later
Remembering my trip to Austin in the Before Times (February).
Want to watch Give Me Sex Jesus
What happens when a generation of Christian youth pledge sexual abstinence until marriage? Since the 1990s, the Purity Movement has been at the center of the national sexual conversation extending past the pew and all the way into the Oval Office. Including some of the leading experts on Evangelicalism today, Give Me Sex Jesus invites you into the guilt, pleasure, shame, and humor of sorting out faith and sex in America.
Michael Gungor on twitter.com:The reason I don’t just PR this and say that I agree with these advocates to save myself from the mob of cancel culture is because I believe this sort of thinking that is prominent in progressive circles is a type of fundamentalism that actually hurts people more than it helps.
“save myself from the mob of cancel culture” does not read as a good faith interpretation of the reactions you received.
Currently reading: You're a Miracle (And a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You by (ISBN 9781984823243)
Represent the #indieweb on your Animal Crossing island! To get your own, access the kiosk in the Able Sisters store and search for Design ID MO-5MDH-M0LJ-3MX1.
Also, if you want to visit my island, add me as a Switch friend.
I’m attending .
Really looking forward to reading Mike McHargue’s new book! I also highly recommend his podcast, Ask Science Mike, and his first book, Finding God in the Waves.
Jeremy Keith on adactio.com:At the beginning of the year, Remy wrote about extracting Goodreads metadata so he could create his end-of-year reading list. More recently, Mark Llobrera wrote about how he created a visualisation of his reading history. In his case, he’s using JSON to store the information.
This kind of JSON storage is exactly what Tom Critchlow proposes in his post, Library JSON - A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads:
Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.
His proposal looks kind of similar to what Mark came up with. There’s a title, an author, an image, and some kind of date for when you started and/or finished reading the book.
Matt then points out that RSS gets close to the data format being suggested and asks how about using RSS?:
Rather than inventing a new format, my suggestion is that this is RSS plus an extension to deal with books. This is analogous to how the podcast feeds are specified: they are RSS plus custom tags.
Like Matt, I’m in favour of re-using existing wheels rather than inventing new ones, mostly to avoid a 927 situation.
But all of these proposals—whether JSON or RSS—involve the creation of a separate file, and yet the information is originally published in HTML. Along the lines of Matt’s idea, I could imagine extending the h-entry collection of class names to allow for books (or films, or other media). It already handles images (with u-photo). I think the missing fields are the date-related ones: when you start and finish reading. Those fields are present in a different microformat, h-event in the form of dt-start and dt-end. Maybe they could be combined:
<article class="h-entry h-event h-review">
<h1 class="p-name p-item">Book title</h1>
<img class="u-photo" src="image.jpg" alt="Book cover.">
<p class="p-summary h-card">Book author</p>
<time class="dt-start" datetime="YYYY-MM-DD">Start date</time>
<time class="dt-end" datetime="YYYY-MM-DD">End date</time>
<div class="e-content">Remarks</div>
<data class="p-rating" value="5">★★★★★</data>
<time class="dt-published" datetime="YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm">Date of this post</time>
</article>
That markup is simultaneously a post (h-entry) and an event (h-event) and you can even throw in h-card for the book author (as well as h-review if you like to rate the books you read). It can be converted to RSS and also converted to .ics for calendars—those parsers are already out there. It’s ready for aggregation and it’s ready for visualisation.
I publish very minimal reading posts here on adactio.com. What little data is there isn’t very structured—I don’t even separate the book title from the author. But maybe I’ll have a little play around with turning these h-entries into combined h-entry/event posts.
Have you tried the indiebookclub Micropub client? Based on my usage of that, I wrote up some brief thoughts about using separate citation and review posts. That doesn't capture reading progress yet, but it's on the list of things I'm thinking about for indiebookclub.
sonicrocketman on pine.blog:Can you do me a favor and reply to this? I think I've implemented the spec and I'm testing it.
Testing, testing
Want to read: It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self by (ISBN 9780399588143)
Recommended by Hillary McBride
sonicrocketman on pine.blog:I may have to tweak things then. I’m using the microformats Python library and it doesn’t catch your author info apparently.
It gets my homepage URL as the author property, but I don't expect it will handle fetching that and following the authorship specification. That's more indieweb-land than microformats2.
BTW, I'm gonna have a quick IndieWeb lunch Zoom at noon today. Link will be in chat.