{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2025/back-to-livtet",
  "description": "Finding myself in need of a way to manage my book collection and my reference material, I've decided to revisit my ambitions with Livtet.\n",
  "path": "/essays/2025/back-to-livtet",
  "publishedAt": "2025-03-14T09:15:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "In order to pull myself away from the more time consuming parts of the\nInternet, I've decided to return my attention to [Livtet][]. For those who\ndon't know what it is, it's a local-first book management application that\nborne out of my need to organize my home collection. This time, I decided to\nget less galaxy-brained about supporting a bunch of stuff that took more time\nfor me to implement and get to the guts of what I _really_ needed for myself: a\nway to manage and annotate books that I have in my possession. I wrote\nabout the initial ambitions with it [last year][1] and got too focused on the\ninfrastructure of something that didn't live yet. Anyway, to progress.\n\nResetting Objectives\n\nOne thing that immediately plagued me was the interface. I fell back into my common \"dev as a\nstartup\" stance, which also involved [pulling out a book][2] to skim chapters on design. With some\nrefreshed guidance and a target, I had a better sense of what to run along with. The design aspect\nof a home library system isn't too novel (and frankly homogeneous), which made me a bit comfortable\nto keep things more simpler than I expected. I spent more time reworking the\npage for showing the book itself to allow myself to work backwards from what I\n_want_ this thing to do for me:\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/livtet-book-view.png\"\n        alt=\"A screenshot of the mostly mocked view of a book, Lurking, being presented in Livtet\" />\n</figure>\n\nIt's still a work in progress; I'm wrestling on how I want to present the audit\nlog of changes below. I still have a strong want to make this part of a set of\napplications:\n\n- one that runs on my laptop or PC that I can use for longer sessions of cataloguing and general backups,\n- one on my phone that I can use for updating this information when I'm on the go, not on my laptop or the like\n- via an extension for [KOReader][] so I can get my notes, progress and the like all backed up and easy to search elsewhere\n\nFor now, I'm focusing on getting the desktop application to a place where I can\ncome to it weekly and have it do what I expect. I'm eager to write more about\nit and open to ideas on how to present information. There _is_ a goal to make a\nWeb server that one could self-host to serve some bits of information from the\ndatabase; something like Calibre-Web but more ... sociably inclined.\n\n[livtet]: /projects/livtet/\n[koreader]: https://koreader.rocks/\n[1]: /essays/2024/making-livtet/\n[2]: https://www.hello-startup.net/",
  "title": "Focusing on Livtet Yet Again"
}