{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2024/my-hub",
  "path": "/essays/2024/my-hub",
  "publishedAt": "2024-07-15T16:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "I read [quite][1] a [bit][2]. I like talking and taking notes about what I read, what I'd want to read and build lists\nof this so I can refer to it later. I mentioned in [a previous newsletter entry][3] about the admiration I had for both\n[Mandy Brown][4]'s and [Jessamyn West][5]'s approaches to showing what they're reading and their thoughts on it.\nLast year, I read [about twenty books][6], many of which I can't help but mention whenever they seem relevant. If\nbooks serve as a way to guide people to (or away from) an idea, then I have a yearn to see what more I could learn. With\nthe Internet, books are a bit easier to find &mdash; digital borrowing services like [Hoopla][7] and [Libro.fm][8] make\nit easier to get them and immerse yourself in an audio-visual experience I find more captivating than video. I read\n[Poverty, by America][9] in this fashion and the narration made the heavy points hit a lot harder than I was hoping for\n(and made the sweet points stick closer to my heart).\n\nI'm not _that_ choosy about the medium I find books in. I have a preference for digital books because it makes it easier\nfor me to cross-reference my notes and my handwriting is not improving. I also lean on my local library to get some\nphysical books when I find myself wanting books I can't get online or finding myself itching for a physical read without\nhaving to buy it. Again, I'm not choosy &mdash; I take it how I can; it's _a great age_ to be a reader. Being able\nto pick up my eReader, devour some pages, pop onto my laptop, sync those notes into Calibre and link that into my \"Book\nNotes\" folder in Obsidian is something I find that keeps me eager to go back and do it all over again.\n\nBut this is all locked up on my computer. I initially considered investing more in how I use [Bookwyrm][10] to update\nnotes as well as looking at fixing my integration to something like Goodreads. There's also the rising star,\nStoryGraph, that I don't use enough. What I don't want to do is have to manage three different profiles - in fact, I\nwant to get to a point where I don't even check them. One could lean into something like [POSSE][11] but that makes me\nstill beholden to these platforms for discovery and connectivity with my friends. That's something that's falling apart,\nespecially [with Goodreads][12]. StoryGraph also doesn't seem immediately interested in [building out a third-party ecosystem][13]\nas they've focused on building out the core product. The only option that seems to be completely open, has a database\nthat's freely accessible and has some social functionality is the offering from [OpenLibrary][16]. Lots of places but\nall lacking in some way, either in community, data or access. I ended catching the same book-tool-I-must-make bug that [Wendy\nLiu had with her own book tracking system][14] because I began outlining what I wanted for myself.\n\nAnother thing that I've realized is that I _want to write more_ about what I'm reading. It's not enough to just read as\nthat information remains with me. In this online space, I find it more necessary to drive folks towards longer form\ncontent. That kind of content inherently goes against the short-form formats that drive the semi-noxious loop we find\nwith social media. At this stage, there's some things that I clearly do want and things I don't. This is enough for\nme to begin experimenting with what I do want to have out there. Here's when I fire up Obsidian to begin planning.\n\nThe Book Thing .. App .. Site? \n\nThe thing about this is that I'm _not_ going to try to make this work for many people. It's optimized to my particular\nreading flow which entails:\n\n Reading digital books with KOReader, synchronized with Calibre\n Listening to books from [Libro.fm][8] or [Playbook][15]\n Physical books that I'm reading, either ones I borrow or own.\n\nI also need to be able to do the following:\n\n View all of the notes I've collected for a book (or link)\n See markers in the material that I've made (as highlights, simple bookmarks, etc)\n Full text search of the content I've produced (not of the material themselves)\n\nThis is enough for me to begin sketching out what the core bits of the application should look like. I've skipped\nwriting any actual logic and decided to mock out a lot of it. You can check out [the source code][17]; I haven't\nyet focused on making automated builds for it.\n\n<figure>\n    <img src=\"/images/my-hub-toni.png\" alt=\"\"/>\n    <figcaption>It's rough looking and needs some TLC but the gist is there.</figcaption>\n</figure>\n\nThe core of this is pretty simple and it's evidence that I immediately got carried away with defining the guts.\nInitially, I started with focusing on how to represent a book and information associated to it. After a stroll outside,\nI came back to realize that I could effectively do the same for links on the Web (and beyond).\n\nThe interface is extremely rough for now as I'm focusing on making the guts correct but I'm open to ideas \non how to make it look _right_. I'm extremely tempted to make it such that people can make their own interfaces \nbut this isn't Hypercard. What I'm focusing on is making the storage of this as flat as possible so that applications\nthat use its core library can work seamlessly. I'm yo-yoing on doing something to how Neovim handles plugins or \nbringing in a Lua and JavaScript interpreter to allow for extensibility that way.\n\nFeel free to shoot thoughts over to me via e-mail or social; this is what I'll be working on this week!\n\n[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/11273359-jacky\n[2]: https://bookwyrm.social/user/jacky\n[3]: https://buttondown.email/jackyalcine/archive/good-news-and-musings-around-a-rapidly-changing/\n[4]: https://aworkinglibrary.com/about/\n[5]: https://jessamyn.info/\n[6]: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/43447563\n[7]: https://www.hoopladigital.com/\n[8]: https://libro.fm/\n[9]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/poverty-by-america-matthew-desmond/21003293?ean=9780593678541\n[10]: https://bookwyrm.social/\n[11]: https://indieweb.org/posse\n[12]: https://indieweb.org/Goodreads#API_for_Goodreads\n[13]: https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/features/posts/an-api\n[14]: https://github.com/dellsystem/bookmarker\n[15]: https://github.com/Goodwy/playbook\n[16]: https://openlibrary.org/people/jackyalcine\n[17]: https://git.sr.ht/~jacky/livtet\n[18]: https://jacky.wtf/projects/livtet\n[19]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986\n[20]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3987",
  "title": "Making A Place for My Reading and Research"
}