This site, as comprehensive as it is, can leave visitors in the dust. Hopefully this page will clarify any questions you have.
- Personal
- WTF?
- Who are you?
- Are you obsessive-compulsive?
- I like your site. Will you _____? How do I contact you about that?
- Website
- Why is your reading list so short?
- Your website makes my brain and eyes hurt simultaneously. Why is it both ugly and unaccomodating?
- Why do so many books have no info about them?
- Where's the book review section?
- What's the difference between Active Reading Rates and Daily Reading Rates?
- What are Jane Chords?
- What do I do if I find a bug?
- Technical
WTF? seemed more appropriate than other, longer questions that had the same meaning.
This site is an attempt to bring my way of reading books into the 21st century. For about ten years I have maintained a long waiting list of books I intended to read as soon as its predecessors had been finished. Somewhere along the line I made this modest list into an outright hobby. Not only did I spend time reading the world's best books, but also turning them into statistical oddities. I maintained records of how long and how fast I read a book, daily records of what I read, and other interesting bits. Since numbers on notebook paper don't speak loudly, I gave them a new voice on the Internet.
My name is Will Oram, and I've spent most of my life in Austin, TX. I have been working on this project at various levels of intensity since 7th grade, December 1997. These days, I'm fresh out of graduating from Case Western Reserve University with a BA in Computer Science. I work for the University of Texas System.
Surprisingly, no. I have never been diagnosed with any personality disorder. What you see here is a slurry of healthy levels of eccentricity, bibliophilia, and technical skill!
I like your site. Will you _____? How do I contact you about that?
The phrase that fills in that blank makes all the difference!
- make a website for me: For money, possibly. For free, you'd have to sweep me off my feet with a grand idea.
- have sex with me: Sorry, I needed to include this. After all, it was probably the first thing you filled the blank in with, right? :) The answer (like I need to tell you) is no.
- give me book recommendations/summaries: I like spreading the word about good books, so I might send you an idea or two. As for summaries, do your own friggin' English paper.
- give me the PHP source code: I thought about offering the source as public domain since Day 1 of the site's open existence. For security and infallibility concerns, I decided against it. Nevertheless, I am willing to distribute the source to individuals who ask politely and seem innocuous.
- be my friend: I'll gladly chat you up through e-mail or other media. Meeting new people is fun, no? If you're so inclined, you can even facebook me.
All correspondence can be directed to spamguy *at* spamguy *dot* org. However you choose to contact me, be sure to indicate how you found me, else you might freak me out a bit.
Why is your reading list so short?
The site went live with no books in the list. I manually add each one from there using a hidden admin interface.
Even when complete, the list will be about 120 books long. That's pretty short for ten years of reading. The main reason is that this list is not comprehensive! Only books I add to my master reading list years ahead of time are counted. Books I read in school and on a whim are ignored, so that's 30 to 40 books on top of what's listed.
Despite that, the sad fact remains that I'm a slow reader. I take my sweet time.
Your website makes my brain and eyes hurt simultaneously. Why is it both ugly and unaccomodating?
I find the interface pretty, and I hope you do too. (I made the above question up. No one's told me that it's ugly...yet.) It's 100% derived from CSS because my Photoshop skills are pretty weak.
You're far more likely to complain that you don't understand the stuff I document, though. That's because before this website, I and only I saw this information. I did my best to make it presentable to the general public, but unfortunately it's still unintuitive enough that a cheat sheet is almost mandatory.
Why do so many books have no info about them?
From fiction book #2 (Crime and Punishment) to fiction book #29 (Lucky Jim) I kept no records at all. In many cases I went back to original copies of the books I read to find Jane Chords and page counts, but facts like start and stop dates are lost to history forever. Book #1 (War and Peace) is special because I planned from the start to read it over the course of a year.
Certain facts I didn't record until late in the process. The use of deadlines didn't start until about August 2002. Jotting down when I acquired a book didn't happen until July 2005.
Where's the book review section?
I don't keep that sort of information. The information here is strictly objective. I could fish out and link to an Amazon listing for every book I read, but I would feel obligated to link only to editions I used, which makes the effort that much less practical.
What's the difference between Active Reading Rates and Daily Reading Rates?
This question is probably the biggest reason this FAQ exists. Distinguishing the two pieces of data in a book's profile just isn't possible given the space.
The Daily Reading Rate is simply the book's length (in pages) divided by how long it takes/took to read it.
The Active Reading Rate is more complicated: it's the book's length (in pages) divided by the number of days I spent reading it. Suppose I read X pages on Day 1, spend all of Day 2 in a coma, and read Y pages on Day 3. Three days have passed, but only two were spent reading, so the ARR (...matey?) is (X + Y)/2.
There are plenty of ways to distinguish the two, especially if you appreciate mathematics. First, the DRR ≤ ARR, always. The greater the difference between them, the less time I spent bothering to read a book. Secondly, suppose for a second that I die halfway through a book and am unable to maintain data input. The ARR would never change while the DRR would asymptotically approach 0 pages per day. (For calculus dweebs, given pages P and time T, lim T→∞ P/T = 0.) Finally, the DRR's denominator is a constantly changing real number whilst the ARR's denominator is an integer that changes only when I tell it to.
Too much information, right? Sorry.
This question is probably the second biggest reason this FAQ exists. A Jane Chord is the two-word phrase created by merging the first and last words in a book. These phrases often summarise the books they came from, contain pithy social commentary, or are just plain nonsense. The most-cited example is Joyce's Ulysses, which is Stately yes.
Jane Chords are not my invention; they were taught to me by a librarian friend of mine. According to folklore, the concept was developed by an editor's wife, named Jane.
I would be overjoyed to learn about it. Send your analysis of the problem to me at spamguy *at* spamguy *dot* org.
What did you use to construct the site?
- Most development took place on my MacBook Pro laptop, which had custom installs of PHP 5, MySQL 5, and the indispensable PHPMyAdmin 2.11.
- All PHP, HTML, and CSS work was done with the excellent Smultron text editor. Maintenance using FTP required Cyberduck.
- The Firebug Firefox extension proved invaluable in bugfixing.
- All charts and graphs are Flash-based (!) and rely upon the PHP/SWF Charts engine.
- The live search feature (which only I, the admin, get to use for now) is the impossibly awesome AJAX Auto Suggest v2.1.3 from Brand Spanking New.
- To summarise, I employed HTML, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, AJAX (OK, not a language), CSS, and Adobe Flash.
- Not a tool per se, but I took much inspiration from What I Have Read Since 1974, another site that...well, you can guess. I discovered it in Yahoo!'s Useless Pages Directory, back when Yahoo! was worth visiting. Both this and my site have numerous overlapping features and data analyses. Heck, I didn't exist in 1974.
Where did you learn to write code?
I learned HTML v1 or v2 way back in 1993, but I had to haul ass this year to bring my knowledge up to v4. Except where tables are useful, this site is table-free and relies entirely on div/span constructs! My professional background is majority C++, which doesn't apply well to the Internet. By comparison, though, it made learning PHP fun and easy! SQL was the worst, requiring a whole college course at Case Western Reserve. I probably couldn't have managed to learn it alone. However, YMMV.