A Working Library

Mandy Brown's /reading pages are beautiful; something I'd like to emanate

location Raleigh,  NC,  US

I always enjoy a good /reading or /library page. Especially the ones with notes, and thorough linkages, etc. I read one of the reading notes for this book—Unjustified Texts, Perspectives on Typography by Robin Kinross—on Mandy Brown's page.

She has:

Then, further down, there are reading notes separated into three columns with:

  • the date the reading note was taken,
  • a title of the reading note
  • a citation with the author's surname, text tile, and page the quote was found.

Each of the Reading Notes are grouped under /writing and citing back to the book it was talking about.

It's really wonderful.

And it's built using Jekyll!

A /collection is a group of books from /reading. Navigate first to /reading. After selecting a collection, the url goes to /collections/$collection-name.

This is similar to /writing. The top level navigation /writing has a sidebar of Categories, where they then whittle down into /category/essays and /category/reading-notes.

This kind of matches how I've been thinking about organizing my plethora of pages, at the moment. I have /articles, /essays, /journal, /books, and such. For better wayfinding, I've been thinking of creating a landing page for /writing that has the sorting and navigation in a similar way. However, I like my url design of /$content-type as the primary bit, rather than /category or /collection as it allows easier remembering, and easier linking for very different sorts of content-types, as each of them grow over time.

Since I'm going down the url design analysis:

  • She also has /thinking, /about, and /subscribe pages at the top level navigation
  • /thinking seems to be a stream of links and quotes, similar to how I'm using my /links page.
  • /about is a simple about page that's wondefully written:

    I am a reader, writer, and work coach focused on helping people do their best work. In all my work, I read stories—whether written or spoken aloud—and seek to understand how they work, what holds them together, what they reveal about the world we live in, and where they point the way to new and better worlds.

    In past lives, I grew and led multi-disciplinary teams, including as CEO of Editorially and as VP of Product at Vox Media. As co-founder and former editor-in-chief of A Book Apart, I changed the way designers, developers, researchers and others work together with the publication of groundbreaking books about responsive web design, content strategy, and more.

    Begun in 2008, A Working Library is a project to explore the intersections of reading, technology, and the nature of work. The phrase “working library” usually refers to a collection of texts on a given subject; here, the collection is open-ended and the subjects are many and varied. As a generalist, I delight in making connections across disciplines, and in bringing together different ways of seeing and thinking. With adrienne maree brown, I read visionary science fiction and fantasy as a way of practicing the future. With Le Guin and Borges, I read all prose as fiction. And with Ursula Franklin, I believe technology is a practice—and that it is through practice that we learn and change.

  • /subscribe is a simple form for subscribing to her newsletter, with simple quotes of "what people say".