Now Reading

Rather than write about writing, or how my WIP is going, or actually work on my WIP, I spent pretty much an entire day listing the books that I’m currently reading in the sidebar (do have a look over there). Had I coded it by hand in a simple widget, it would have taken about 30 minutes. But why do that when I can spend a whole day on it?

I started looking for WordPress plugins that would take an ISBN number and then magically produce a list for me. I downloaded and installed several, only to remove them (some just didn’t work, some didn’t use thumbnails, some only showed one book). Although it didn’t quite do what I wanted, I finally settled on the Now Reading Reloaded plugin and started customizing it. I already had the Amazon AWS key (the thumbnails are pulled from there), so it was just a matter of changing the php templates. Of course, because the plugin is nice enough to produce several different kinds of pages (a list of all books, past and present, books by a particular author, books in the sidebar, books with certain tags that you can search for) I had to fiddle with the templates for all of these pages, because I’m so picky.

Of course, I also had to revisit the whole PHP4 versus PHP5 issue as well, for my ISP which runs an Apache server. Ugh.

By the end of the day, I had basically got most everything functioning, and then I had to start populating the new database. As of now, I’ve only listed a few books, but will work on listing more, particularly as they relate to writing. It just seemed to me that because reading and writing are so connected, it seemed weird not to show books that I’m reading if I’m talking about writing. It’s also an opportunity for a shout out on the books that have really made a positive impact.