Comment by xavdid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xavdid | Hacker News Reader

I'm proud of a lot of things about my site, but maybe the domain most of all: https://xavd.id

It's written with Gatsby and hosted on Netlify (which handles the build step without configuration). I picked Gatsby because I wanted to use react/preprocessors, but also wanted to be able to "just write" (and MDX lets me do both of those). It also has a vibrant plugin ecosystem and is JS based (vs Ruby, which my previous site used; I don't write Ruby any longer).

I blog a few times a year, a mix of technical topics and media reviews. The blog is meant to be mostly text, but it being in React means I can drop in rich things, like support for hide-able spoilers and nice code blocks. I've optimized the layout for reading text (good font size, max-width, line-height), so hopefully it works!

Some favorite posts are:

- Python Dataclasses from Scratch: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/

- My yearly media review. Here's 2021; 2022 should be up in the next few days: https://xavd.id/blog/post/favorite-media-2021/

Thanks for looking!

Interesting that you also track reading speed. My speed differential between different types of of books always surprises me a bit. Usually it's something like, "Wait, I'm only 20% through this book and I've been reading it for two months?"

Hey David! It's Taylor from https://taylor.town

For those who don't know, @schmudde runs a blog called Beyond the Frame: https://schmud.de

He also has an excellent Strange Loop talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU6NvkkF4Xk

Neat! Thanks for that context.

That reading speed (in words / day) is mostly a byproduct of wanting to track start/end dates and a word count, so I get speed "for free". I don't actually look at it much, but it's an interesting proxy for "rough interest level".

It is funny how much variation there is between books/genres though! The sentence complexity and variety definitely comes into play here.

also curious how you track your reading speed? any tools or process that works for you?

Hey I love your reading tracking, care to share your tracking / reading process? Any reason you use airtable over, say, Goodreads?

Thank you for the kind words!

I find the Goodreads UI _incredibly_ busy. Here's what I saw when I logged in just now: https://cdn.zappy.app/76d7cba6b409f0aa9310214401d11db9.png

It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.

I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.

Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.

Great site. Would be cool to pull your Airtable data into Gatsby and render it on your site!

Thank you!

I've thought about it. Honestly the most likely thing is that I'll make a standalone site for media reviews and consolidate everything. That's what I did for this (https://github.com/xavdid/kerfuffle; currently offline) and I was very pleased with the result. ".review" is a TLD, so I spin it up under something there. :)

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