I have replaced the Photos link in the navigation to the new Books. Photos can still be viewed from the Archive page, just by clicking on the photoblogging category link on the top of that page.

This is not a photo blog, though I often post pictures, and I’ve decided that having a whole separate navigation item just to link to an Archive page with only photo posts wasn’t that important.

Instead, reflecting my long hobby of reading (and tracking my reading on various websites that are not my own), I’ve added a Books section. A few bits of note:

  1. I generally only track fiction reading of books I read with my eyes. I’ve already started to change this slightly in 2021, having tracked some non-fiction, but I would not take this as an exhaustive list of all long form things I have read and/or listened to.
  2. I am using a combination of Micro.blog’s bookshelves features and images with Bookshop.org affiliate links. In some cases, this has caused me to use ISBN listings that do not have great images from Micro.blog to try and ensure that all the links take you to a valid place to buy some books.
  3. Because of some limitations in the Micro.blog bookshelves feature, for now, things are not sorted quite how I’d like (with the most recently read books on top). I expect that the sort order will eventually change.

Lastly, for other folks who are using Micro.blog and might want to do something similar, I am considering releasing a plug-in, but won’t do so without considerable interest. I write my blog modifications mostly for myself and am not super interested in making them highly configurable to other theme environments. In this case, I think it’s actually quite simple to extract the functionality as I currently have it. However, if you want a far more flexible book page experience, I recommend Moondeer’s bookshelves plug-in. It’s highly configurable and Moondeer seems motivated to maintain a solid, general purpose book architecture. That said, even if I don’t release this as a plug-in, I’d be happy to share any template code or CSS that might be helpful to others.

Of course, this whole project wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t procrastinating from doing work or reading my current book, which I admit may have to go into the “did not finish” pile, at least for now.