Over the Christmas/New Year break, I launched my latest side project: Read My Book Notes. I took the markdown sources for all the book notes that I had been putting on this blog, and created a custom NodeJS script to fetch thumbnails and metadata from Amazon. The website itself is static and built using the wonderful Gatsby framework. I used one of the starter themes to get some basic css and image plugins configured. I updated the homepage to have a 3d bookshelf effect, which I cobbled together after going through some tutorials on codrops.

One question I get regularly is about my note taking process. I use a Livescribe Echo pen to take notes in a notebook as I am reading. I later run the notes through an OCR plugin. The output text has anywhere from 70-90% accuracy, which I then fix by hand. I used netlify to host the site, and it has been a wonderful experience so far.

Going forward, I’ll post my future notes on the new site. Happy book reading!