Introducing Aaron Swartz: Books, a section of my website with books I’ve read and their reviews.
I’ve been looking for the right way to keep track of all the books I read for a long time. I started several years ago with a simple word processing document, but that quickly grew constraining as the book list stretched to several pages. Soon after I switched to an AppleWorks “database” but that became too unwieldy and had no way to publish to the Web. Today I think I’ve finally found the solution to my problem.
It lies in a program called Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein of Eastgate. I just got the program yesterday and it’s an incredibly intuitive and useful way to store things. I started in on this project this morning and within in hours learned how to store all my book reviews in Tinderbox and provide a wonderful export of them to HTML with next/previous links and everything. It was incredibly simple. If I would have tried to do this with a database-backed website, my previous tool for these jobs, it would have taken me days or weeks. Thanks to Tinderbox, I can spend the rest of the day working on something else.