sangsara.net

Tag: Web Design

  • Shelf Expression

    Shelf Expression

    Find it on GitHub

    Shelf Expression is the system I use for bookshelf.sangsara.net. It produces a responsive microsite displaying a shelf of up to twenty books, with cover art and synopses automatically pulled from online sources. It supports linking out to Goodreads for more information. It offers a choice of two themes: Minimal, with a simple grid and subtle animations; and Vitsoe, with a skeuomorphic shelf and playful “pick up” animations.

    You can use it to add a curated page to your personal site — recommendations for visitors (like I’ve done), a personal bibliography, or maybe a book club’s seasonal reading list. It is ready to fork from GitHub; if you use an agentic coding tool, point it at the repo and have it adapt the header and navigation for your own site. There is also a built-in tool (Shift-Ctrl-U) for updating the book selection without having to write any code.

    You may optionally supply Google Books and Gemini API keys to prevent rate limiting and summarize retrieved synopses.

    Shelf Expression is free for non-commercial use. Credit is appreciated but not necessary, though I’d love to hear from anyone who uses it.

    Two themes: Minimal and a Vitsoe-inspired shelving system
    You can navigate books with buttons, arrow keys, and swipes.
    The hidden editor screen lets you easily update the shelf.

  • A UX design walkthrough of Feedly’s new Explore experience

    Eduardo Santos: Introducing feedly’s New Explore Experience

    I’m a pretty light user of Feedly these days, perhaps because RSS is just a chronologically ordered dump of too much information and I’ve grown to prefer a little machine intervention, but this detailed breakdown of a feature redesign is quite the pleasure to read.

    Feedly probably does have a bigger role to play in aiding content discovery (no one can get enough of it), but what’s interesting is that an RSS reader approaches it in a different way from others like Flipboard. It’s less about piecemeal articles, topics, or user-curated magazines. It’s sites! Boosting little known sites and blogs exhibiting consistent quality serves a much more important cause: feeding the cycle of good content creation and letting authors grow their follower base, not enjoying random hits of virality at the whim of algorithms and chance.