So I had this idea. One of those little things which stuck in the back of my mind. It wasn’t anything earth shattering, but I was struggling with the realization that I was about to finish In the Plex, and I couldn’t decide which book to pick up next. I’ve got about 25 unread books on my Nook, so what should I read?
Well, I should ask my friends, clearly. They’re smart people and they’ve got good ideas.
But how? Do I put up a list of books I haven’t read yet? And then it came to me, I’d setup a simple polling system ala Reddit or Digg or Hacker News. But way simpler. Your upvote is worth 2 points, a downvote is worth 1 point. When I finish a book, I take the current top book and reset the balance as well as adding any new books to the pool of eligible choices.
Brilliant!
I sat down this afternoon and in the course of watching some mindless tv special, I hammered out the very first 0.1 alpha version. Put it up and began the fast iteration system which has proven so successful for startups.
The first point of feedback came from my friend Davin via Facebook and his comments boiled down to “Uhhh, wtf is this?” Quite right. Better explanation needed, check. Then rather than using some rather unclear up and down arrows, I changed to “Read” and “Skip” as the voting options.
Total time invested: 3 hours.
Then I was off for an evening with my wife, went to see a show at the Orlando Fringe festival. After we laughed and had a grand ole’ time, we came home and turned on the boob tube and cuddled on the couch. As she went to bed I pulled out the laptop and began improving upon the day’s earlier work, I still had a few hours of energy left in me.
I set about to improve the system to allow tracking of what I am currently reading, and displaying it as you’ll see in the sidebar to the right. Also, I added the ability to collect fun facts like how long it took to finish etc. And lastly I added some admin tools to improve the management, make it easier to add new books, remove books, etc.
Additional time invested: 1.5 hours.
And for now I call the project complete as a solid beta. Leave it out and let it breathe, we’ll see.
So I introduce you to, “Trick’s Reading List” – Have a look and cast some votes. Any profit made from the Amazon referrals will be used to purchase books for the local library or donated to some other book related charity.
First suggestion, when I click “Refresh for 9 More” only about half of what it shows is new.
How about just showing the whole list with easy “Read/Skip” buttons instead of all that Amazon buy crap? I’m just trying to tell you what to do with your free time, not coming here to buy books.