@macgenie @manton I would like to have a photos like page on my blog that is a bookshelf of images of the books I've read. Is it possible to make a page like photos that shows the images in a grid?
Micro.blog
@macgenie @manton More options for the visual representation of data would be awesome! Although your bookshelf already looks great @michaelfransen! Btw: there is built in support for IndieBookClub, but I don’t see many people using it (or I just don’t understand it completely...)
@ArnoldHoogerwerf @michaelfransen @macgenie I love the idea of making it easier to show book covers. We could have a special template that collects all the posts that link to an ISBN.
@manton I know that Micro.blog can't (and shouldn't, really) be an all-in-one replacement for every silo, not least because of the inevitable bloat that would occur, but a nice simple option like this for books would be great. That way it would be even easier to avoid Goodreads, just like it is with avoiding Instagram thanks to the photo features of Micro.blog.
@simonwoods I'm excited about this idea. I've always known we should do more with books but for some reason it didn't occur to me to make a built-in Books page. I'd like to one day use this kind of thing to catalog our bookshelves, too.
@ArnoldHoogerwerf @michaelfransen @macgenie I like the idea of that. Until that, I made a bookshelf page on my micro.blog and just did manual html. It's gonna take a while to get all the books in there though. lol. www.michaelfransen.com/bookshelf...
@manton this would be a great use of Hugo’s data-posts features where you can have just a simple JSON doc process to a page. I don’t know of any services that do the ISBN -> image cover lookup. Maybe Amazon is the best way? It’d be cool.
I need to see what my read posts look like on micro.blog, I made the Known plug-in so by definition it is buggy, haven't figured out the micropub parts.
@bix @jsonbecker Good to know, thanks. Amazon used to allow it, but I remember there were limits that affected Delicious Library for Mac.
@bix ooh. I went to clean up my stuff in an attempt to use Delicious Library once and could have used this. Fascinating and awesome.
@simonwoods Yep, there are so many things that can be done on websites/blogs but require knowledge/plug-ins, whereas they just work in silos…
@manton I recently added read posts for my blog following current microformats recommendations. I ended up using calibre's CLI tools for cover retrieval rather than rolling my own (supports both Amazon and Google). Might be a good place to look for ideas for how to implement this.
@bix Your post and @jsonbecker 's early post gave me an idea. It is possible to build a "passable" shortcode using data retrieval to query the Google books API from to get a cover from ISBN. However, out of the handful of ISBNs I tried - a number didn't exist or did not have a good sized image. :( The linked example is hardcoded to use thumbnails, and doesn't fall back very well if an ISBN isn't found, shindakun.micro.blog/2019/12/3...
@smokey This can be a good thing. I don't think every silo is terrible; just that they shouldn't be the only option we choose.