+++ title = "Reading Lists" author = ["Colin Powell"] date = 2018-08-20T22:06:00-04:00 lastmod = 2019-05-29T12:42:15-04:00 tags = ["spacemacs", "tools"] categories = ["emacs"] draft = false +++ Oh Goodreads. Your website is a cluttered mess. Your UX hasn't been improved in years. The only value I derive from keeping my reading list on you is that my friends can see what I'm reading. Which is a neat trick, but since I've mostly given up on Facebook too, it not really enough to keep me. I was an early adopter of Goodreads, but my life has taken a turn towards the personal and the text-based. I use Emacs (via [spacemacs](spacemacs.org)) as much as I can. Org-mode might be the single most impressive IDEA rendered into software I've ever seen. It simply makes the things I use on a regular basis more powerful and expressive, which is not something I can say for Word, Twitter, or Chrome. Those are merely tools. They don't amplify my ability to document and create. Really the post _[Leaving Goodreads]()_ is what convinced me to go, one more time, back to my reading list in org mode. But the killer feature this time around was [ox-hugo](), which allows me to easily dump Org-mode subtrees into a hugo-powered blog directory. A simple `rsync` later and I can publish random subtrees, including book reviews! The whole thing is so elegant, I couldn't have dreamed up the process if I had tried. The whole thing was truly an evolution of tools, and one that was only possible because each tool, Emacs, spacemacs, org-mode, hugo, ox-hugo, does it's job so elegantly.