You may have noticed that I’ve added my reading list to the sidebar of the Reviews and Currently sections of the site. Hopefully it will encourage me to finish more book reviews and spur you to contact me regarding books you’re interested in. Isn’t the web a great venue for evangelizing your favourite written works?

Simple Setup

By using Jacob Hersch’s brilliant BookQueue plugin in collaboration with MTAmazon, the list is fairly simple to maintain and involves very little effort on the backend. Only the MT templates required some time to finesse and that’s due more to my own fussiness rather than plugin architectures.

I had seriously thought about employing my All Consuming notes for the list. All Consuming is a great repository for book information and is useful for inviting an avid reading community to your own book-related postings. However, it was the ability to manage the entire reading list locally that led to my adoption of BookQueue. Thus I have complete control over the list as it exists on my server rather than as an offsite feed. Choosing BookQueue wasn’t a comrpomise either as I can still incorporate All Consuming into my site by means of trackback pings.

See, with a web populated by such benevolent programmers and servers, everbody can be happy :)