Personal Library

We all have a pile of books at home we won't be opening for the next few months at least, years at most. An unopen book collecting dust is a book in stasis, in hiatus, when it should be opened, folded, read, flicked, bookmarked. I am working on a list of all of my books on a CSV file, to make them available to be lended to a restricted circle.

Knowledge is a tool for liberation. As such, this should become a tool for collective, dis/organized and autonomous liberation. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, but the books may teach us what's inside the walls.

Technical aspect

This software is a PHP file interacting with a spreadsheet in the CSV format.

This is arguably the simplest form of Content Management Software. Since we're looking at public simple UTF-encoded text, there is no need for database security. The best database in this case is a CSV file, the predecessor of advanced spreadsheet formats. It can be opened and edited in LibreOffice Calc or MS Excel, or in the simplest text editor.

Once loaded, the PHP file looks at all the .csv files, their names and their content, and creates a webpage out of them dynamically. If one wishes to host static content instead, one can open the page once in their browser and copy the rendered HTML by viewing the source. This makes it one of the simplest forms of a Static Site Generator too.

See the result at delyo.be/biblio.