Saturday, July 30, 2011

A Reading Log

(Check out my  new Reading Log!)

I have been wanting to have a reading log for a long time now, for it'd be nice if I could keep track of all the books that I have read. However, I have always been reluctant to actually start one because of the enormous energy that I would need to spend to come up with the list of books that I have already read.

Yesterday, however, I finally made up my mind and spent 4-6 hours working on my reading log, which  I made a page for accessibility reasons. So how come it took me so long? Well, the hardest part was definitely the part where I had to come up with all the books I have read. I had to search for their titles, and try to remember the approximate time when I have finished reading them. Also, besides coming up with all the books that I have read, making the actual table was also a difficult task. At first I coded the table manually using HTML. However, at the end it didn't look very nice because the table looked very squished together. I then transferred the table to Google Docs, and magically the layout looked much nicer.

That wasn't the end of the problem, however. I then had to spend about one hour fixing the HTML code of the table from Google Docs. At first it was simply too long (300,000 characters), and it kept causing my browser to lag. Then after I turned it into CSS, it started changing the layout of my whole blog. I had to look through the code and debug it myself.

Fortunately, it's all done now. Not only does it look nice, it is also very easy for me to edit. So in the future, whenever I come up with a new item for the log, I will edit the page. I am sure it will be useful at some time in the future