Hi everyone, I am just getting started and am at the practice stage. (I am part of cogdog’s Domain Camp.) I am exploring what I can do with my own domain and am thinking of creating a place where I document the books I read. (I read a lot.) Do you have a suggestion as to which type of package would work best for this? A wordpress site, maybe an Omeka? Thank for reading my post, Irene
Before picking software you might want to detail more about the features, functionality you want in such a site. How does it need to be structured? Will you be adding a lot of organizational terms to catalog/search your books or is more about writing about them?
Then it’s worth looking at a few existing sites to identify ones that have features, functions, designs that appeal.
Omeka is certainly built for libraries and collections where organizing the metadata is important; but you find plenty of book reviews published in Wordpress sites too. The answer is either might work well.
A lot of folks also do this in other services like http://goodreads.com, which does have some data services you could connect to a Wordpress site.
Design the functionality first!
If it’s just a log of the books you read, anything can handle that. If you’re looking to add notes/reflections and document key ideas from each book, something like Wordpress would work. I use a Wordpress site to document reading I do as a grad student - APA citation for the article/book, keywords for topics, categories for themes. I add notes and key quotes, and enable the “related posts” feature so I can easily follow connections between articles. It’s all searchable, so it’s easy to find anything I’ve read. The site isn’t public, but you can see it at https://phdnotes.darcynorman.net - password “cmd”
Thank you for sharing access. Your work has given me some new ideas!
There’s also LibraryThing - it has a much better privacy policy than Goodreads, and it has a widget you can use to embed in your site. There is a lifetime subscription cost of $25 if you list more than 200 books. I would have a hard time remembering what I’ve read without it.
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Thanks, it’s great to know LibraryThing is still around. I really liked their approach and use of RSS feeds way back in the early days,
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Depending on what you’ve got already, it’s sometimes useful to look at other examples of how these things are done. Looking at GoodReads and LibraryThing are certainly great. There are also some examples other independents have done on their own websites at https://indieweb.org/read#Other_Examples.
I’ve been considering doing something similar for a while and know there are also some related plugins within WordPress that do this sort of functionality. There are also one or two projects one can find on GitHub that might suit one’s needs in this area too.