add a library/texts section

[equivalentideas]

This is to replace the wonderful Readmill. I'm a big fan of the 'books' collections on the personal websites of Mandy Brown, Frank Chimero and others, and I'd like to make my own similar section.

I’m imagining a broad family of texts: books, articles, audio, images, references.

I think there are a few stages to this:

1. add a texts collection
2. add highlights that are related to texts
3. explore how highlights and collections can be further linked through things like Web Mentions

I'll try and do this very iteratively and make fresh issues for sections of this mini project as I go along.

[equivalentideas]

I was thinking of calling the highlights section Scraps. I think Texts is good for the initial collection.

[equivalentideas]

What are the basic components of a text?

The components/chunks that texts at A Working Library break down into seem to be:

• title
• sub title
• author/authors
• author/authors urls
• publisher
• publisher link
• link to buy the book from amazon (affiliation link)
• year of copyright
• cover image
• short description [roughly 10 - 80 words]
• description [roughly 40 - 200 words]

Frank Chimero skips the description and gets straight into the highlights:

• title
• author
• cover image
• publisher
• year of copyright
• links to purchase, amazon and other
• a matched colour, used in the page design

I'd like to have descriptions at some point, but I think I'll start out with:

• title
• sub title
• author
• pub date
• link to access/purchase the text
• related links, could be interviews, other criticism etc.
• month read (e.g. 2013-11)

I feel like a matched colour could be interesting, and a fun way to add some colour to my site. Matched music could be a nice idea.

I'd like to add an image at some point, but I wont let that hold back the first iteration.

[equivalentideas]

A quick note on where this idea comes from.

I take a lot of notes from books and make a lot of highlights. I have a problem with all these little sparks of ideas fading away into a pile. I rarely go through and review them. How can I surface these scraps for myself, so that they come to me?

Imagine if you set your browser homepage to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. You could gift yourself a few minutes every day to learn something new. A lot of it would probably be quite useless; I just ended up on 1979 Australian Sports Car Championship.

Once I've built my digital pile of texts and scraps at equivalentideas.com I'll be able to make my homepage a random scrap. That way all the little treads I've picked up can come back and, like the Oblique Strategies cards, I can draw a random selection to prompt me when I'm looking for ideas.

[equivalentideas]

Adding texts:

• add the collection folder
• add the index page
• add some texts
• make sure all the links work
• design a text
• design the index