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Show HN: 50books, a bare-bones reading list tracker

9 points by david_shaw ↗ HN
Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a project that I've been working on the last few days that I finally finished last night: https://50books.org

This is a simple site designed to track your reading list into 2015. My personal goal is to read 50 books this year, and I wanted to hold myself accountable. Major sites like Goodreads are great, but were too much of a social network for my personal taste; on the other hand, using a text file (which was my 2014 solution) was too difficult to track and share.

I built https://50books.org using Sinatra, sqlite3 (via datamapper), and the Skeleton UI framework. I'm not a designer, but I'm pretty happy with how everything turned out.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any feedback you all might have!

5 comments

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david_shaw
Whoops -- I forgot to share my own reading list for 2015: it's located at https://50books.org/list/dshaw

I'm certainly up for any feedback on my to-read list, itself, too!

fcanela
You have some great but lengthy books (Don Quixote, The Lord of the Rings triology).

If you spend a lot of time reading, it's ok. If you doesn't and you want to read all the 50, be careful: you can run out of time.

david_shaw
Yeah -- there are definitely some behemoths in there. My hope is that knowing how intense they are, that I'll be able to actually figure out a plan of attack to get them done in time.

Part of the motivation aspect is finishing the list, which means that during certain books, I'll be reading a lot.

nicholasreed
Useable, definitely minimal. Goodreads is overkill for my needs and this is a nice start.

A few random pieces of feedback:

- Needs some sort of book registry API when adding books. Especially helpful if I'm adding just a few recent books to see how it actually works.

- I don't like that my read books are crossed off. Instead, I'd rather a second list, or a different color scheme.

Perhaps a nitpick, but it's offputting to see banner ads on a minimalist site. If this is a side project you've only worked a few days on and want feedback for, why try and monetize it right away?

david_shaw
Those are all great pieces of feedback; thank you :)

I think you're right about the crossing-off list. I'll try two columns that work side by side. I'll also consider removing the banner ads; I sort of include those as a default, mostly to see how they'd end up looking. This is a side-project in its infancy, so I'm clearly not expecting to make much (or any) money from it at this point.

I'll see what I can do with the registry API... it's definitely something I've thought about, but haven't yet had time to implement.

Thanks for using it and for leaving some feedback! It's very much appreciated :)