I've spent the last several years tracking the books I've read on the blog. I started doing it more or less become Sharon Lee does it and it seems cool. I also may have some latent quantified selfer tendencies.
It's been fun to do, to some extent and it's something I can do to feel creative without really having to think (and knitting projects are also kinda nice). It also makes me revisit what I've read and keep the keeping track I'm doing on Goodreads organized. I'm not sure whether or not it helped me to read more, but it certainly didn't hurt.
On the other hand, there are some problems. Some of them are technical and then a few are more organization (and now one is ethical).
The first problem I have is that blogger limits the number of tags you have on a post. Actually that's not true. Blogger limits the number of characters you have in tags to 200. I have no idea why, but it means that if I have more than about 3 books in a post I have to leave things out and I really like having the authors and books and series show up in the cloud tag at the bottom of the blog. I suppose I could put one book per post, but that's always felt like too many extra posts.
The next is that it's hard to keep a numbered list in a table in HTML. It's not impossible (and I do actually intend to write up how I automated it) but it means that when I look at my blog on the web on a nice big computer screen it looks good, nice list of numbered lines with enough space for things like the title and the author. However if I look at it on my phone, or at the RSS feed it's messed up. The counting relies on javascript which isn't implemented the same everywhere and often it's a mess.
I used to manually number the table to keep that from happening, but manually numbering 120 rows of an HTML table is an invitation to duplication and mess. It also doesn't' help the inevitable problem that no matter how careful I am, the list I have on the blog never matches the list of have on good reads and I'm at a loss to fix it. I think it was pretty good in 2021, but more or less it's always been wrong.
Keeping the list on Goodreads and on my blog is also redundant, and aside the benefits I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure there's a lot of reason to keep two lists. I think putting the books on the blog also provided me with a good excuse for not writing on things. Oh, I should writing about automatically numbering rows in an HTML table, but I'll just update the books first. Blogging about books has certainly swamped the number of posts I've made about anything else for the last while.
Finally I'm tempted to quit Goodreads. My partner and I have been trying to move a lot of our business away from Amazon, and since the business with Comixology, I've been pretty unhappy to let them be the automatic choice in our life. I've discovered Bookwyrm, which has the benefit of being part of the fediverse along with Mastodon, but on the other hand I really like seeing the handful of friends I'm friends with on Goodreads and I'd be sad to leave there right now.
So I'm not all that sure what I want to do. For the time being, I'm not blogging the books I've read this year. If you're interested then you're totally welcome to keep track of what I've been reading over on Goodreads. I think some kind of periodic data project might be the way to go, since there's a lot of fun visualization things that I could be doing and that would also keep me in touch with the books I've read the way blogging them did.
There are other more general thoughts I've been having about blogging, none of which I'm all that ready to write about. For now, I think this is where I'm at, less book blogging and I'm going to have to find something else to do when I need a slightly brainless project. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.
March 2023 Covers
February 2023 Covers
January 2023 Covers
