I’ve broken out of my lockdown-era reading slump (a topic for another blog post) and wanted to return to tracking and sharing my reading online (tracking and sharing my reading is one of the reasons I went back to library school in the first place). I have accounts on both LibraryThing and Goodreads and used to find good recommendations on both sites, but Amazon bought Goodreads and LibraryThing, while still independent and nerd-friendly, is after all another silo where I am not in full control of the data I submit.
I went looking for an IndieWeb/fediverse-friendly solution and, as usual, I started getting into the weeds and trying to over-engineer the issue. Should I find a friendly neighbourhood BookWyrm instance or even run my own?1 In terms of social interaction, I’m pulling back from the oversharing encouraged by data-hungry corporations – I want to share the books I’m reading and see what other people are reading, but I don’t need to publicly track how many pages I read every day or comment on other people’s highlights or marginalia.
I realised that all I wanted for now was a single Reading page here to track the books I’ve read since the start of the year. Still in that over-engineering mindset, I thought I’d need to use something like Hugo data files and templates to represent structured book data, but really all I needed was a custom shortcode2 to mark up author, title, and date of publication. I use the book shortcode on my Reading page to enforce a consistent formatting style on each listed book. If I want to change the format or add more metadata later, I only need to change the shortcode to apply the new style to all content using the shortcode. You can see how this works in the source code for the shortcode and the Reading page.