As a form of WAB* I’ve made it easier for myself to update my OPML book lists. I created those lists earlier this year as a proof of concept of publishing federated bookshelves. Updating OPML files residing on my hosted webserver is not a fun manual task. Ultimately I want to automate pushing lists from my personal working environment (notes in Obsidian) to my site. Given my limited coding skills I made a first easier step and created a webform in a php script that allows me to add a book to an opml list. It has a drop-down menu for the various OPML lists I keep (e.g. fiction2021, non-fiction2021, currently reading, anti-library), provides the right fields to add the right OPML data attributes, and then writes them to the correct list (each list is a separate file).
That now works well. Having a way to post to my book lists by submitting a form now, I can take the next step of generating such form submissions to replace manually filling out the form.
* Work Avoiding Behaviour, a continuation of the SAB, Study Avoiding Behaviour that I excelled in at university. WAB seems to fit very well with the current locked down last days until the end of year. The Dutch terms ‘studie/werk ontwijkend gedrag’ SOG/WOG lend themselves to the verb to ‘sog’ and to ‘wog’. Yesterday when Y asked E what she had been doing today, E said ‘I’ve been wogging’, and I realised I had been too.
@ton I believe someone suggested a book-related session at the next IndieWebCamp Online… Maybe we can get a few folks interested in this together to discuss? Micro.blog’s bookshelves have JSON Feed and I’m open to adapting to OPML and/or @tomcritchlow‘s Library format. Or maybe Library JSON can even be tweaked to be JSON Feed compatible?
@manton I’m definitely on-board with a bookshelves-focused IndieWebCamp session. I also love that @ton has an anti-library shelf. That’s the next shelf I’m planning to add.
@kimberlyhirsh Great! In chat today, sounds like there’s interest in making books a standalone pop-up session in February.
@manton sounds good! I’ve added myself to indieweb.org/2021/Pop-… W.r.t. JSON / OPML I’m starting from OPML but it’s not either/or to me. Dave Winer released github.com/scripting… which can help me transform between the two.
@manton That’s great news! I don’t always check indieweb-meta so I sometimes miss these kinds of things. Added myself to the list of interested parties and my availability. I’m hoping to deliberately make 2022 the Year of the Book for me.
@manton @kimberlyhirsh I’ll be signing up with my interest for this as soon as I figure out how to create my wiki profile.
@kimberlyhirsh Thank you. Cool. Looking forward to seeing more antilibraries. Your comment made me pay attention again to it.
@pimoore You should be able to sign into the IndieWeb wiki with your Micro.blog domain name. There’s also this wiki page with some other steps, although I think most are optional for just basic wiki editing.
@manton Thanks Manton, the login already worked so I just need to set up my account page so I can link to it and add my name to the list.
@ton thanks for mentioning this, I have signed up. I will work on having a demo of my application for the event, would be interested in seeing the PHP form you recently posted about.
@AndySylvester mailed it to you Andy
@ton got it – thanks! I will take a look.
@AndySylvester also see http://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022... (that description contains a link to github for the code of this next step in my experiments)
@ton thanks for mentioning this blog post, I am looking it over now
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