Friday, 2 October 2026

I hate reading the Introduction chapter of a book, and will often skip them. They’re usually dull.#

So I love it when a book simply doesn’t use the word “introduction” in its introduction. It tricks me, quite happily, into actually reading it.#

The book I’ve just started has done it – "The Pen: A Human History" by Simon Garfield.#

And you know what? I enjoyed the intro chapter.#

I've written before on one of my old blogs about tagging and the importance of not keeping it too organised. I had a habit of not wanting to create a new tag uness I was certain I'd use it again for other things.#

I also had a bit of a habit of of nesting them, creating monstrosities like travel:england:resource:walking.#

I'm now more relax. I have 2,871 tags for my 21,229 bookmarks on Pinboard.#

Because they're created by my brain, I often suprise myself when I see a tag has already been created for something I'm bookmarking.#

Today I was bookmarking a page about a graphic for a blueprint of Sherlock Holmes' flat. The website was old looking – lots of plain HTML. So I tagged it old.web. And to my suprise, I'd already used that tag for a page about Charles Darwin and a Usenet archive.#

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I often reference the book I'm reading in posts. It's good to have a central place to see all my posts about a book, so I was adding a unique ID. For example, B204. An ID is a lot shorter than having to write out the book title and author. However, it also doesn't tell the user anything about the book, and my tags list was getting clogged up by these IDs.#

So, I got Claude Fable 5.1 to build a separate metadata system for books! They're like tags, but just separated out for books. And it means I can show the title, author, year published, and also cover art!#

It needs a bit of tweaking, but it will do for now.#

Note: please ignore the books attached to this post. I'm just testing out the ability to hopefully add multiple books to a post.#

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