About the Library
It started when some people I work with asked why I never read any fun books. I went home that night, looked at all my books, my inventory spreadsheets, and fed some stuff to ChatGPT to come up with a general fun[yes/no]. That wasn’t good enough, so I did that to my entire library.
By that point, I was curious and I wanted more data. I wasn’t pleased with the yes/no/maybe fun measure. I thought about it, and came up with a questionnaire and a scoring mechanism, which you can read on the ‘Fun?’ tab. Then I saw ChartJS and wanted some cool charts. I also thought it’d be nice to have all of my reviews centralized on my own platform.
I use Obsidian for all of my writing, and originally planned to use Obsidian Publish. However, that wouldn’t have supported the charts. So I used Hugo (which I also use for my personal site) and used some python scripts to convert en-masse all of my Obsidian book notes. I also used python scripts to refine my inventory spreadsheet down into a books.csv that Hugo and ChartJS can interact with. I had ChatGPT do a lot of the scripting work, often being annoyed because I knew it was doing things wrong and I’d have to clean up after it. But, it all worked out.
I plan to add some more charts and stuff, and the funScore hasn’t been calculated but for a subset of my books.csv, so that measure is incomplete at this time. I may also add a Films section with similar ideas, someday.
About TB
I read books and write reviews. You can find me on Goodreads, and see my other projects here.