Using WordPress to track my reading

A while back I put together a small plugin for tracking the books I read. Today I put the code up on Github in case it’s useful to others. You can see a live demo of it on my reading page.

The plugin uses a custom post type for books which lets you track each book as a new post. There’s also a custom taxonomy to keep track of the authors you’re reading as well.

I also wanted to create a repository for the notes I take when reading. I went with the easy way to do that. 🙂 Within the custom post type any content will show as notes. The main reading page has a little “View notes” link that is added automatically once you add content. It means I’ll slowly build up a public, searchable set of notes from my reading.

For displaying books I put together a few templates as a child theme. It’s what I use on this site and the child theme is up on Github. I need to clean up the author archive templates a bit but it at least gets a basic layout done.

In the future I’d love to add a graph at the top of the page which plots monthly stats of my reading. Having a visual representation of my reading velocity would be neat to see over time.

Comments

graham says:

Hi, I’ve tried to install your reading-list plugin but WordPress says its not valid. All I’ve done is zip the index.php file. Should I be doing something else?

Cheers

How are you trying to upload it? Through the Dashboard admin or through an FTP connection?

Mike Stumpf says:

Awesome!

This was just what I was looking for. Thank you!

Comments closed