Yesterday evening I finally made it to my very first IndieWeb event: Personal Libraries Pop Up Session. I’ve had my reading list on my website for quite some time and had used GoodReads and similar services for more than decade now in order to keep track of those books I had already read while also looking into others’ lists to get some inspiration. Over the course of the last couple of weeks and especially with the API change at GoodReads I’ve used them less and less and started looking at alternatives but mostly at moving the tracking of my reading habits completely off there, which made yesterday’s event even more interesting to me.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to contribute anything mostly due to being rather shy at my first such event and everyone else knowing far more about that subject but I got some great ideas out of it! Even during the event I already started implementing a little OPML exporter for my “currently reading” list for others to consume and decided I wanted to at least add an OpenLibrary identifier to all the entries in my collection so that I could eventually correlate my entries with, for instance, Ton’s list.
Maggie Appleton also managed to spark my interest in book clubs again. I had been part of, let’s call them, lightweight variants there but never really engaged with others in “proper” book discussions. No idea if I can find the time for something like that but the problems organisers are facing there are definitely interesting!
Another takeaway for me was that ISBNs and other identifier are even more messy than I had expected! I also noticed that today when I wanted to add some metadata to my library and failed to find ISBNs for some books there.
As the OPML exporter and other ideas I have for my site, perhaps I can get some more done on the March 9 during the IndieWeb Create Day 😉 In the meantime, though, I want to thank Chris Aldrich for organising yesterday’s event and all attendees!
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