By @edent · blogging books meta WordPress · 150 words
One of the things I love about having a database-backed blog like WordPress is that's it opens up a delightful range of possibilities for displaying content. I've read and reviewed around 300 books over the last few years. So I wrote a scrap of code which goes through all my book reviews, grabs their cover […]
Continue reading →By @edent · books bugs google · 3 comments · 300 words · read ~113 times.
Google Books is one of many projects that Google has forgotten about. There's no support available and, of course, it's impossible to send them a bug report. The best anyone can do is write a ranty blog post and hope it gets noticed. When I search for my name in Google Books, it returns books […]
Continue reading →By @edent · art books linux · 1 comment · 1,050 words · read ~240 times.
Yesterday, I revealed my disappointment in being unable to print a bookcase. Today I revel in my cleverness at coming up with a solution! I decided to create a photo-mosaic of a nice photo of me and my wife - using all our book covers. The Result Close Up The image was printed on high-quality […]
Continue reading →By @edent · api books libraries · 3 comments · 500 words
This is a mixture of lament and how-to guide. Suppose you've reviewed lots of books. It's pretty easy to generate a link to let people buy the book at Amazon or any other online store. But how do you link to a user's local library? You can't. There is no "search every library in the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · art books · 1 comment · 150 words
I was inspired by this delightful bookshop clock: Bookshop clock... pic.twitter.com/1tvwJiI4kn — David Coates (@OziasMidwinter) May 16, 2021 I wondered - if it was possible to create a similar clock using books from a single author? So here's my first attempt - using Agatha Christie's novels. I've tried to use first edition covers, where possible. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · books meta NaBloPoMo · 8 comments · 450 words · read ~291 times.
Last year, I set myself a challenge to read a new book per week. I managed to read 50 books, which I was pretty happy with. This year*, I decided to only read books written by women. Here's what I learned. Obviously, COVID had a fairly negative effect on my reading rate. I went months […]
Continue reading →By @edent · books footnotes usability · 24 comments · 1,650 words · read ~3,675 times.
I've been reading lots more non-fiction books than normal. And I'm getting increasingly annoyed about footnotes1. Footnotes are a weird skeuomorph hangover from the days of printed text. I don't think they are really suited to eBooks - but they seem to have come along for the ride into the future. There are a few […]
Continue reading →By @edent · books holiday reading · 1 comment · 4,050 words · read ~102 times.
Last month, I took myself on holiday with one aim - read as many books as possible. My wife and I tend to alternate our holidays - one relaxing break then one adventure break. Our previous trip was a 3 week road-trip through Australia, so this time I opted for an all-inclusive break in the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · books meta NaBloPoMo · 3 comments · 350 words · read ~198 times.
I set myself an unofficial New Year's Resolution* - to read more books and write a review of each of them. I wanted to read about one new book per week. Well, I fell a little short of that target - what with getting a new job, moving house, road-tripping across Australia - but I'm […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review books gds WeekNotes work · 2 comments · 1,000 words · read ~128 times.
Covering 2 weeks of holiday and 1 week of work. This is how I've spent my time... Talks The lovely folk at JS Oxford invited me to talk about my recent experiments with SVG. Headlining the bill was the brilliant Nicky Thompson with her talk about CSS shapes. Work Mostly deleting emails, as is appropriate […]
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