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In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading a lot. I also like to record my experiences, for example, by tracking the books I read on The Storygraph, and tracking the movies I watch on Letterboxd.

There’s an app called Readwise which is great for readers like myself. In the app, you can point your phone’s camera at the text on a page, and it will use OCR to save it as a quote. The app also allows you to review the quotes that you’ve saved in the past. It’s fun to revisit the favourite bits from books that I’ve read. The Readwise app implemented well, and I found it useful enough to pay for a subscription.

Having said that, I’m a firm believer in owning one’s data, so I decided to try to create my own solution. Introducing… “Quoteshelf”! This new section of the website contains all of the quotes that I’ve exported from Readwise. On the main page, I can swipe through a random selection of quotes, and I can browse the author index to find specific books.

To accompany my recent post reviewing the book One Day, I attempted to use DALL-E to generate an image of a calendar. The book is about events that occurred on a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and so I “engineered” the simplest prompt I could think of:

a drawing of a calendar with the date December 28, 1986 circled