Making A Better Book List
Goodreads is yuck. Too many options, functions, and animations. Yuck, yuck, yuck.
I like lists. Simple lists that I can bring with me wherever I go. Not held preciously in a app, but dumb and free.
That’s why I’ve used Google Keep for the past 6 years now. A single note containing most of the books I’ve read (starting at 2023). Personally, it works great. Publicly though, it’s a little rough.
My wife is annoyed because she can't see what I've read. When giving recommendation it's off putting off to receive a long list and waiting for me to find the book I was thinking about is slightly awkward.
But I don’t want to use Goodreads or any other app. I want to own it. It’s my list, buzz off.
Enter, Claude Code.
Sure, I could just make a quick post or web page that has my list publicly. I could even dust off the ‘ole coding skills and make something better-ish. But I wanted a little more pizzazz than that. After all, we have a tool that has feasted upon thousands of other tools and came out the bloody winner. So, get to work Claude.
First things first, it had to be simple. List-like, but slightly better. No fancy backend, HTML was preferred. I want to own it all and I’m not going to fix it if it's broken. Next, as few of parameters as possible.
Title, obviously.
Author, is helpful.
Page count, so I can brag.
Lastly? A simple favorite button.
Easy to find the books I love recommending.
I fed my wants and wishes to Claude, with every possible misspelling and grammatical issue. I pointed it at my reading list and had it dig up all the relevant information. It drafted out a couple of options, skewing for more complication than I wanted, but we got to where its’ at now. A digital bookshelf!
I wish I could say I came up with that idea, but I can’t, the artificial intelligence did. I love it though. No book covers or artwork, just a simple color scheme with a pop of pink for favorite books. The spines grow in width per page count of book and scrolling is smooth horizontally. There’s slight animations that make it friendly, but nothing absurd or complicated.
Will I some day give up on this and never use it again? Certainly.
But right now it’s fun to think I “made” it. Check it out above!