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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.

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20 reactions on “Federated Bookshelves Update”

  3. @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?

  7. @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.

  12. This week the schools were closed as a pandemic measure. It meant that both E’s and my work time was cut in half, so we could take care of Y for the other half of the day. This made for a unexpectedly busy week. I had planned to use the week to finish some stuff, and had planned few meetings accordingly. Now those meetings were all I had time for. We’re of course not the only ones in this situation, it hit other families just as much, so there was plenty of understanding. The hours that would otherwise have been billable to clients are of course a hidden cost, but it’s been a good year economically already.
    So this week I

    Had a meeting with a financial advisor on how to start providing a pension savings scheme to our team
    Played some more with federated bookshelves
    Went for a walk with a client team, as our last weekly team meeting of the year
    Had the other usual client meetings
    Received the contract for what will be my core assingment next year (about 1000 hours in 2022). This amount of time makes it possible to create more rhythm in my work for them, and weekly practices to increase effectiveness
    Had a conversation about bringing together re-users of meteo radar data
    Did most of the December invoicing, only a few remain to be send out next week
    Did the food shopping for Christmas
    Celebrated Christmas Day with the three of us, with a vegetarian dinner (the 5yo had her own animal protein side dishes, as she definitely isn’t into vegetarian meals )
    Celebrated 2nd Christmas Day with E’s parents who are staying over
    Received some bad news about a dear friend which makes me worried

    Y’s been building a lot, in Lego, Playmobil and Duplo, the past week she was home unexpectedly from school. This is her latest apartment tower for various cuddly toy animals. The unicorn has the penthouse with a large balcony.

  13. @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.

  15. Starting in 2010 I have posted an annual ‘Tadaa’ list, a list of things that made me feel I had accomplished something.
    This is the first time in 11 years I did not feel like making this list. This second pandemic year was again a year where our lives had a small and local scope mostly, where most days just carried over into the next. Additionally as I’ve been keeping day logs since April 2020, and have been posting week notes for three years now, maybe there’s less of an internal need of looking back annually, as unlike a decade ago I’ve been doing it weekly and daily for myself as well. Mostly I think it’s the pandemic, where nothing much happens during a year of staying home almost exclusively. As E mentioned this week, you miss out on so much coincidental inspiration, ideas and associative thoughts that you’d normally get from just being out in the world.
    Yet, maybe that means I really should be making the effort of writing the annual list. So here goes, in no particular order.

    Made sure that Y got to fully enjoy playing in the snow, and skating on the ice, for the few days in February that both were possible. Important memories to make with her.
    E and I made it work well at home, despite irregular school closures, a quarantine, and having Covid breach our household. I appreciated our house a lot, allowing us space as it does to both have our own home office, being able to sit in the garden under the apple tree or at the water’s edge watching the swans, ducks and coots. We complemented each other well, and E even completed a half year training program on data and AI on top of all of it.
    Went away when we could, e.g. to Zeeland over the easter weekend, enjoyed some lunches in town, visited a few museums.
    We spent two weeks in Copenhagen in the summer in a beautiful house we rented. Cycling through the city, just hanging out, meeting up with friends and having a nice place to return to or stay at and relax for a day was a great break. I am very glad that I booked the rental early in the spring, when it wasn’t at all clear that it would be even possible to travel across inner-EU borders. Just the act of having booked it was valuable as it put something on the horizon a few months out.
    A week in Versailles and Paris at the end of summer was an unplanned but huge pleasure. We enjoyed camping out in a forest area on the edge of Versailles, while having Paris within 30 mins by train and the railway station a 10 minute walk away. We got to be outside a lot, played around with Y in the camp ground’s swimming pool, while also exploring Paris (which Y loved), taking in (a small section of) the Louvre, and having lunch and coffee any place we liked. Paris wasn’t very busy, but not empty either, the perfect setting to roam as we pleased in a city that was lively enough to feel its pulse. It was a very energising week, and the best spur of the moment decision we made this year.
    Volunteered to speak at the FOSS4G Netherlands conference this fall, that fell in the brief period where such events could take place face to face.
    My company had a good year, again well above the pre-pandemic 2019. Our team I think grew tighter, and we managed to have a lot of fun despite the pandemic measures taking a mental toll on all of us at times. That financially things went well helped as stabilising factor, reducing uncertainty in uncertain times. Renting cabins in a holiday park in June, so we could work together for a week while each having our own cabin, is something to do during regular years as well. Last month it was a decade ago that we started our company, and in fact I feel these past years, despite the pandemic, were the best ones as a group and for me personally had most meaning.
    I got to work this year on a topic that I really enjoy, learning to work with and within the coming EU digital and data legal framework. The work evolved from a study I did last year, advising the European Commission on the planned open data obligations for EU countries. This important wave of 6 pieces of legislation is the biggest influence on data governance in Europe since the original PSI Directive and INSPIRE Directive 10-15 years ago. It goes much deeper and is much wider in scope than what came before though. There’s a renewed elan, and I feel the type of energy that my work 10 years ago generated around European open data efforts. This new wave will be key to any data work for at least five years, if not for the rest of the decade.
    For next year, I’ve already signed a contract with a client to keep track of those European developments, help Dutch dataholders and users to leverage their potential, and build bridges to initiatives elsewhere in Europe. It provides me with even more time to do that, which allows me to organise it more as a program of continuous work, not like one project out of several. I hope and intend to use this opportunity to help drive the momentum from this new batch of data legislation in 2022.
    I’ve been writing my blog here for 19 years now. Again this year it was an important instrument in having and generating conversations with a wide variety of people. In these stay at home times having a way of connecting to people all over the world is very valuable, and doing it all from my own domain is a source of agency. Thank you to all I had the opportunity to interact with this year, to all who dropped by in my inbox.
    Last year I started making a notes system (in Obsidian) having revamped my personal KM system. Last year I made some 800 conceptual notes mostly gleaned form existing blogposts and presentations I wrote the past 20 years. That number hasn’t grown very fast this year, to a 1050 plus about 200 more factual notes. Together with an ideas collection, and book notes they make some 1650 notes, or about a third of the total number of 5000 notes in my PKM system. Other notes are work related notes, day logs and an annotated library of things that caught my eye this year. I am happy it felt effortless to keep the note making going this year, even if I feel I had too little time to actually sit down and think and write, growing the conceptual part of it all. I’ve also done little non-fiction reading, an annual complaint I have though it was more than in previous years. Such reading provides input that could let my notes grow. Having dusted off my PKM system last year has really helped me this year in keeping track of my work, and being able to keep building on little things I started earlier and then had to leave alone for a while. What pleases me no end, in terms of reducing friction and the sense of ‘magic’ that I got it to work, I now run two client websites, where I publish information for them directly from my notes collection. It allows me to work in my own notes on my own laptop, and in the background GitHub ensures that those notes get published as a website.
    I’m what is called the ‘programming equivalent of a home cook. Making small adaptations to my laptop’s working environment, and little pieces of code to help me do some tasks is gratifying (if sometimes frustrating during the process of creation), and let’s me incrementally reduce friction in my workflows. This year I enjoyed rummaging around the back-end of my feed reader, and experimenting with what I call federated bookshelves, and a few other small things. The federated bookshelves stuff will be a topic of discussion and, I hope, making during a tentatively planned online IndieWeb meet-up in February on distributed libraries.

    In terms of work hours, I mostly worked about 3 days per week in the first six months, using the rest to balance the logistics of a household in times of pandemic and find some space for myself. The rest of the year I worked more or less fulltime.
    As we’ve been home mostly I had ample time to read, just over 70 books, of which a handful non-fiction. Fiction reading is something I worked into my day well in the past years (at least 30 mins before sleeping, an easy to arrange habit). The non-fiction reading is still something I want to find a working flow and rhythm for (and have been for years). It requires making time in a way that is less easy (reading, noting, thinking) than it is for fiction. On the plus side, the non-fiction I did read I also much more actively made notes on.
    We will spend some days around New Year in Switzerland, visiting dear friends. A tradition we couldn’t adhere to last year, but can do this year (if we test negative before leaving).
    Ever onwards! (After having the first week of January off that is)
    2021 wasn’t a piece of cake, but like the one pictured despite its imperfections and cracks still held beauty. I enjoyed this raspberry and chocolate confection towards the end of a joyful day with E and Y in Tivolo Gardens in Copenhagen last August.

  20. I want to make it easy to publish lists of books I am reading and have read, or any other list. And do so without using centralised platforms like e.g. Goodreads (Amazon). A book list is a small library.
    The route I am currently on, is publishing a machine readable list others can easily incorporate. These lists are in OPML, an exchange format for outlines. It’s the same format generally used to share lists of RSS feed subscriptions.
    Current situation and usage: automated lists
    Currently I am able to directly automatically create the lists in OPML from my individual book notes in Obsidian.md (which I use for PKM).
    In Q1 2022 I experienced that creating lists and posting them works nicely and smoothly, with no friction. I do currently only create a few lists (fiction and non-fiction in the running year, antilibrary). I’m also working through the books I’ve read in the last decade or so, and gradually creating those lists. I’m not generating those as OPML however, they currently are just a list in my own notes.
    Next steps: consuming other lists
    Next steps will look at how to do the federating itself: how can I ‘consume’, or even include in my own lists, the OPML, ActivityPub or JSON lists of others in a meaningful way? I think a first step is consuming one list published by someone else, treating it as a recommendation list perhaps or some other form of input, much like I’m reading feeds. It might be useful to be able to pick out mentions about books I’ve already read, are in my anti-library, match an author I like, or match my interests while being unknown to me. I suspect a slightly tweaked parser for every new list might be needed, as using a list depends both on format and on content fields.
    Ealier steps: proof of concept and data model
    In 2020 I came across a posting by Tom Critchlow on this topic, and a year later I started looking into using OPML to create the lists.
    I created a proof of concept, with a data format.
    Using that I created a webform to update a book list by hand with a new entry.
    Then I automated generating the lists (code on GitHub).
    All as proofs of concept.

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