digital bookshelf for al-folio

subhodeeps commented 1 year ago

Hi, I would like to request a new feature.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

This is feature request to add a digital bookshelf to al-folio. Many of us, particularly academics and students, read a lot of books and it would be nice if we could display what we are reading on our website and link them to reviews that we may write for them. Think of it as your own personal (stripped-down) Goodreads running on your own personal website.

Describe the solution you'd like

I have been recently toying with this idea and created jekyll-bookworm for the Minima theme. You can see what it looks like here. Since I am thinking of shifting my academic website to al-folio from the (the now abandoned) academicpages theme, I decided to see if I can implement it in al-folio. I have been modestly successful. You can take a look at my amatuer tinkering here.

I felt other users of al-folio might like this feature and I would be happy to send a pull request (you can, of course, take this idea ahead on your own).

There are however some issues that needs improvement:

the reviews are not displayed properly on phones and I can't seem to fix it, in general it can do with a lot aesthetic tweaks
it would be nice to have pagination in the bookshelf but I don't have the required expertise to do it quickly

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could not find an alternative or existing solution to what I was looking for: a digital bookshelf and a book review management system. I would be happy if you can point me to something that can implement this in a more polished fashion.

Additional context

I am not an expert in web development and I admit my attempts are probably amateurish but I would be happy to get your inputs and see if something like this can be incorporated into al-folio.

Best, Subhodeep

asboyer commented 3 months ago

@subhodeeps I took a look at your personal website and really liked what you've done with your bookshelf. I made an attempt to do what you were talking about on this al-folio template. I actually prefer the look of yours, as well the different statuses for each book you're reading.

george-gca commented 3 months ago

If you manage to implement this, would you mind sending a PR? Maybe you could also add the subscribe via email that I saw you have in your site to this template? It is a feature that have been requested a while ago (#2097).

asboyer commented 3 months ago

Yeah, I can do that. I'll make a PR when I've got those.

subhodeeps commented 3 months ago

Hi, in the original post I had included my edits to the al-folio theme as well https://github.com/subhodeeps/al-folio and the statuses of the books can be implemented by adding a separate layout for the books and the front-matter https://github.com/subhodeeps/al-folio/blob/master/_layouts/books.html.

eolesinski commented 1 week ago

@subhodeeps this is such an incredible idea! I really like how the bookshelf looks on your website. I've been thinking about pulling in your changes here (unless you were waiting to open a PR). The only thing I noticed is that on Safari it seems like the books on your website are very stretched (only showing one per line). Not sure if this is an issue with my computer or if you experienced the same?

george-gca commented 4 days ago

Can you submit a PR with this? I've seen a few users asking for it.

subhodeeps commented 4 days ago

Hi, thanks for the interest in this idea! I have no problem if someone else goes ahead and incorporates the code into al-folio. My attempts to incorporate this into al-folio can be found here https://subhodeeps.github.io/al-folio/_pages/books/

I am bit occupied at the moment to submit a PR request and it has been a while since I looked at al-folio's code, so it'd be difficult for me to submit a PR right now. I would be delighted if somebody took takes this idea forward!

asboyer commented 3 days ago

Can you submit a PR with this? I've seen a few users asking for it.

Yea, I'll try to work on it. Thanks for the help @subhodeeps

eolesinski commented 3 days ago

@asboyer The issue was related to stretching rather than only showing a single book per line:

Although it seems like this is only occurring on his current website, but not on the link he shared above: https://subhodeeps.github.io/al-folio/_pages/books/ everything here looks like it is working fine on Safari with multiple books per line (looks like a different branch).

I just took a look at your website as well and also really like what you have done! Specifically, adding the reviews, music/movie integration, specific tagging, and watch dates looks really great! I wonder if there is an easy way / if it would make sense to have it so that you could switch between showing one per line vs multiple on each line.

subhodeeps commented 2 days ago

Hi, the changes I made to al-folio is available in my fork of the al-folio repo https://github.com/subhodeeps/al-folio

The commits are available here (6th Oct 2022): https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio/compare/master...subhodeeps:al-folio:master

Since I have made several other changes to my copy of the site, I can't (shouldn't) create a pull request but I hope the commits will give you an idea of the changes that needs to be made.

alshedivat / al-folio

digital bookshelf for al-folio #923