One thing I've liked about Billmon's website is that he has a little sidebar item on "Current Reading." I've been wanting to hack something together like that, and finally did. The cover images have been scraped from the usual places, but don't link to the usual stores. Don't have any accounts set up, and don't feel like linking for the hell of it. This could change in the future. In fact, I have a book review section on the website which I've never done much with, but that might be the right place to link if I choose to develop it further.

I also made a slight cleanup of the Links section. Again, the website has long had a Links section, which has almost as long been obsolete: another project desperately seeking time. But the real significance of these two changes is that they break out of the prison formed by the Serendipity blog software. Previously I used the "HTML Nugget" plugin for the links. Now I've created a brand new plugin which evals an arbitrary piece of PHP code. That code sucks in an external PHP file, which I can then program without having to hack through the Serendipity Admin interface. While this may not be a good idea in general, it will be a huge convenience for me. It means I can do development locally, then just blast the changed up.

Feels good to actually do a little programming for once.