jackp’s vox

I kept track of my books here for a while (using the feed to, um, "feed" my tumblelog) but when Vox made the feed contents much less useful, reducing the book cover image size and adding a bunch of cruft, I moved my book collection to goodreads.com.

Ironically, I ended up using Yahoo! Pipes to improve the feed output from goodreads.com, and no, it didn't occur to me until afterward that I could have just done that in the first place with the Vox feed.

Oh well.

I probably won't be posting here again anytime soon, but I'll use it as an OpenID home until I find something better.

Not to make too much of it, this is very much a "first post" kind of situation. 

I've played with Vox's collection capabilities (adding books, music, videos, and photos) and they're quite nice, though there are a few additions I think they could make.  For example, under audio, it'd be nice to be able to "add to collection" an existing, already-hosted MP3, the way you can with Odeo.

One nice feature of Vox is that your collections can be browsed by themselves, and you can *also* easily add things from your collections into a blog post if you like.  I enjoy the loose coupling.  Here's an example:

on the nature trail, part 2: nature's staircase

I added a similar pic to my regular blog just a minute ago.  Both are actually hosted on Flickr, but another nice Vox feature is that you can add Flickr images to your Vox collection selectively; you're not restricted to picking an entire stream to include.

I wonder if this might also be the best way to keep track of my books -- there are several "book collection"-type sites out there, but none of them work quite the way I want them to.  They need to stop assuming I own every book I want to add to a collection, for example.  I just want to keep track of which books I've read, as I go through them pretty quickly and can easily end up forgetting the name of an author or series that I'd like to revisit later.  Here's a recent one:

The Laughing Corpse (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter (Paperback))

Laurell K. Hamilton

Yeah, trashy, I know.

Anyway.

Vox collections: good stuff.  The fact that I'm using this from Flock seems kind of overkill, though.

More later, quite possibly.