Having created a working flow to generate OPML booklists directly from the individual book notes in my PKM system, I did the first actual run in production of those scripts today.
It took a few steps to get to using the scripts in production.
- I have over 300 book note files in my Obsidian vault.
- Of course most lacked the templated inline data fields that allow me to create lists. For the 67 fiction books I read in 2021 I already had a manual list with links to the individual files. Where needed I added the templated data fields.
- Having added those inline fields where they were missing I can easily build lists in Obsidian with the Dataview plugin. Using this code
results in
- The same inline data fields are used by my scripts to read the individual files and build the same list in OPML
- That gets automatically posted to my website where the file is both machine and human readable.
Doing this in production made me discover a small typo in the script that builds the OPML, now fixed (also in the GitHub repository). It also made me realise I want to add a way of ordering the OPML outline entries by month read.
Lists to take into production next are those for currently reading (done), non-fiction 2021, and the anti-library. That last one will be the most work, I have a very long list of books to potentially read. I will approach that not as a task of building the list, but as an ongoing effort of evaluating books I have and why they are potentially of interest to me. A way, in short, to extend my learning, with the list as a useful side effect. The one for currently reading is the least work, and from it the lists for fiction 2022 and non-fiction 2022 will automatically follow. The work is in the backlog, getting history to conform to the convention I came up with, not in moving forward from this point.
In parallel it is great to see that Tom Critchlow is also looking at creating such book lists, in JSON, and at digesting such lists from others. The latter would implement the ‘federated’ part of federated bookshelves. Right now I just point to other people’s list and rss feeds in my ‘list of lists‘. To me getting to federation doesn’t require a ‘standard’. Because JSON, OPML and e.g. schema.org have enough specificity and overlap between them to allow both publishers of lists and parsers or such lists enough freedom to use or discard data fields as they see fit. But there is definitely a discussion to be had on identifying that overlap and how to use it best. Chris Aldrich is planning an IndieWeb event on this and other personal libraries related topics next month. I look forward to participating in that, quite a number of interesting people have expressed interest, and I hope we’ll get to not just talk but also experiment with book lists.
Great! Love seeing all the details of this come together
The first full week of 2022. We started the week in Luzern, Switzerland, where we enjoyed strolling around the city. Tuesday we took our car two floors back up the car elevator, and drove home to the Netherlands.
The remainder of the week was given over to various chores at home. Removing the Christmas tree from the living room, and having it picked up for instance. It is now back with the grower and replanted. We’ll see the tree again next year.
I paid my income taxes for 2020. It was significantly higher than what I usually have to pay additionally, because of much lower deductable business costs during the first pandemic year. No travel costs for instance, no lunches during the week in other places than home.
I had some time to myself and used it to homecook some PHP scripts that let me create lists of books from the individual book notes in my personal knowledge management system. Solving this rather niche use case, where I publish a list of books I’ve read in the OPML format on my site, was much fun to do, and I marveled at my self-created ‘magic’ whenever I ran the script these past days. Having a computer do what you want it to do is as compelling to me now as it was when I wrote my first line of BASIC in 1982.
Having created the scripts, I now am spending some time on (re-)writing book notes.
Tomorrow regular activities will recommence. I’m happy the the schools are also opening up (they closed a week before the Christmas holidays as part of a more strict pandemic lockdown), which means that E and I have time to actually do things. As I wrote earlier, my schedule for 2022 is already full, focusing on the new incoming EU legislation w.r.t. digitisation and data. There is a lot going on, and I’m looking forward to diving in again after 2 weeks off.
A last look along the 14th century Kapellbrücke across the Reuss to the 1839 Theater and the 17th century baroque Jesuit church, before driving home.
Ton Ziljstra is doing some more work on federated bookshelves (additional post here and Github stuff here). Chris Aldrich is also organizing a IndieWeb pop-up session on this topic. I reviewed the my federated bookshelves Github repo today, I came up with requirements and use cases for an app called Booklist Browser. I think my next step is to work on class diagrams…
Ton Ziljstra is doing some more work on federated bookshelves (additional post here and Github stuff here). Chris Aldrich is also organizing a IndieWeb pop-up session on this topic. I reviewed my federated bookshelves Github repo today, I came up with requirements and use cases for an app called Booklist Browser. I think my next step is to work on class diagrams…
At over 700 pages another one of Stephenson‘s books asking for a significant amount of time. The last time I read a book by him was almost exactly a year ago*, Fall or Dodge in Hell. This one is all about near future climate urgency responses, where one Texas billionaire takes it upon himself to start doing geo-engineering by launching sulfur into the stratosphere to create a veil, cool the planet and prevent sea level rise. The creation of such facts, and the termination shock tied to abandoning it again before there are more such projects in place, makes it into a new geopolitical reality. That geopolitical reality doesn’t play out in the US but in the Sino-Indian relationship, and the countries making up ‘Netherworld’, all those places around the world that have sealevel rise as an immediate concern. No wonder then that a Dutch royal is one of the characters, making a crashing entrance in Waco, Texas. While the geo-engineering is along the lines of Eliot Peper’s Veil, the various layers of narrative are more along the lines of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. Nice appearance of the performativity of war. With the geo-engineering backdrop informing the geopolitical narrative lines, it remains a humane and human centered story. It grabbed me quickly, and I enjoyed it a lot.
* This is a first post in the Books section in a year as well, so that previous Stephenson book is almost the previous posting. In between I have been looking at publishing book lists as a way of federating bookshelves. I aim to post more frequently about the books I enjoyed in a few more words than I put in those book lists. Following the book lists will give you a more complete (and timely) overview though.
In reply to Challenges of fragmented writing by Lilia Efimova
I recognise what you say. The multilingualism, the ‘going where the intended readership is’ vs shouting into the void on my blog, the friction due to fragmentation.
I think over the past 2-3 years I’ve made a few steps that have helped me reduce that friction and fragmentation.
The first element is that my site has become much more of a central point. I use it to post to Twitter and Mastodon, and responses there get fetched and added to my blogposts. It doesn’t work for Facebook, they’ve locked up their silo, then again I no longer have an account there either. Cross-posting from my blog to such services allows me to reach out to those who ‘live’ there, while still have my own unified view of the things I posted and the responses it got. I can both share my posts on Twitter, as well as have a category I use to send messages to Twitter, that otherwise don’t show up on my website, except to me.
I’ve created a way to post in multiple languages here in my blog that doesn’t amount to having walled off sections. It’s just all there in the same place, but who wants can separate out selected streams to follow. The main RSS feed simply holds everything but I added things like machine translation links to non-English blogposts in my feed.
I haven’t yet come upon an idea to easily and reliably create different levels of access for certain types of posts, or certain types of information within posts, which like you I would enjoy to have here. I do post things that never appear on the front page (meaning, like you blogged a long time ago, you have to make an effort to discover more), and I also post things that only show up in RSS, and remain unlisted in the site itself. As RSS readers are a self-selected separate readership, I can treat that as ‘posting to my blogger network’, while it isn’t public on my site.
The second key element is that I rearranged my PKM system in such a way that all of my offline writing is now in a single place (basically text files for which I use Obsidian as viewer).
Everything that catches my eye flows into it, as well as my own processing, connecting, and writing takes place there.
The step that I’m building now is that what I write there can automagically flow to the channels where I share such things (eg my book reading, and soon postings themselves). My site again is/will be the conduit for it, as it can also post to other channels. I also run 2 other websites for clients straight from my notes (when I update my own local notes on EU data regulations, the client site updates).
Obviously there is still a lot to wish for too, mostly in the area of granular access and disclosure.