Katy’s Book Bloggin’ Setup

Dang! I love this automated book review and publish setup by Katy Decorah. She made a GitHub action called read-action to fetch the metadata of a book and add it to a yaml file on her website. After that, Katy then made an iOS Shortcut to review the book from her phone, grab the metadata from that pull request and then publish it to her site. This is so impossibly neat and it’s extremely tempting to steal this idea for my own site.

I’ve always been in two minds about adding book reviews to my site. The maintenance work behind adding the ISBN, adding the image, adding the author, etc. is far too much work and I still think that the blogging process should be as easy as possible to encourage more blogging. And yet for years I’ve been overwhelmingly jealous of Mandy Brown’s A Working Library, where she records everything she reads. It’s just remarkable.

Today I’m sharing what I’m read on Instagram because it’s easy and I like making bad jokes about the books I’m reading. But this process that Katy has built is so dang easy and powers this remarkable little archive. In the last week alone I’ve search for [my name] [book name] at least half a dozen times to find an old post about a book that I loved.

Hmmm...