i like having a bookshelf. it's a curated expression of what i like to read, and i want to keep a page like that; if i only have about a minute of your time, this is what i recommend. there's a lot more writing out there though, pieces that wouldn't make my bookshelf but might interest you.

i want to express this long tail of work that makes up so much of my information diet, and i also want a place to hack on the ingestion, analysis, and synthesis of this information. thus, lectara was born.

as of july 2025, it's a super basic service that i run on my homelab, just enough for me to trust it to stay up and log my data. for now, i'm collecting data on unregretted reads. i'm hopeful that lectara will become a foundation for a few things: a frontend playground for frictionless logging, a page on my website linking to things i read (think something like Read Something Wonderful), a personal dataset to play with, and a service that supports all these explorations.

update mid-2026: i continued iterating on this app and use it almost every day. it turned into a bespoke app for me to log and annotate this dataset as i went through my day-to-day life, and i'm pretty happy with its utility to me.

however, at this point in my life, i'm less confident about publishing my information diet. i don't want to feel like preferring certain read pieces stay private is at odds with being honest to the system. obviously, i could just make some pieces private, but i'm really lazy; i'm not interested in deciding on this at log-time, and it turns out i'm less interested in doing retrospective annotation for everything i read than i originally thought.

maybe i'll reconsider publishing this information or some subset of it in the future.