Man, let me tell you about this little project I got into a while back. I was sitting around, looking at my messy bookshelf, and honestly, it was driving me nuts. I’ve got all these books, right? Some I’ve read, some I haven’t, some I even bought twice because I forgot I already had them. It was a proper mess. Every time someone asked me if I had a certain book, I’d have to go digging through stacks, sometimes for nothing. I needed a better way to just keep track of my books.
So, I started thinking, how hard could it be to just list them all out? I mean, I wasn’t looking for anything fancy, no crazy database or anything, just a simple list. My first thought was just a spreadsheet, but then I figured, nah, that’s too boring. I wanted something I could just open on my computer, quick and easy. That’s where the idea to just build a super simple HTML file came from. Just a single page that lived on my desktop, you know? Something I could open with a browser, but it wouldn’t need the internet or anything.
I decided to just dive straight in. I cracked open a plain text editor – nothing fancy, just a simple one. I started with the most basic stuff you learn about HTML, just trying to get a page up. I remembered hearing about headings and paragraphs, so I threw those in. My first attempt was literally just a title that said “My Book Collection” and then I typed out a book title. It looked awful, obviously, just plain black text on a white background. But hey, it was a start! I saved it as “*” and opened it. Seeing that title in my browser, even if it was tiny and ugly, felt like a small win.
Getting Things Organized
Then came the real work. How do I actually list all these books without it just being one long, unreadable block of text? I remembered seeing lists on websites, those bullet points or numbered lists. So, I figured, an unordered list, that’s the ticket. I started manually typing out tags for each book: `<ul>`, then `<li>Book Title by Author</li>`, over and over again. It was pretty tedious, not gonna lie. I must have spent a couple of evenings just going through my shelves, picking up each book, typing in its title and author. My fingers were tired, and my eyes were getting blurry from staring at the screen, but I kept pushing through.
I hit a wall when I realized just listing them wasn’t quite enough. What about if I wanted to know if I’d read it? Or what genre it was? I quickly realized I needed a bit more structure than just plain list items. I messed around with trying to put like, a little note in brackets after each title, but it looked terrible. I needed some way to make it clearer. That’s when I remembered tables. Oh man, tables!
I had a vague idea of how tables worked, you know, rows and columns. So, I scrapped the list idea for a bit and started learning how to set up a basic table. This was a bit trickier because you had `<table>`, `<tr>` for rows, and `<td>` for the actual data. I decided on four columns: Title, Author, Genre, and “Read Status” (just a simple Yes/No). Typing all those `<td>` tags for every single book was even more painful than the list, but it immediately looked way cleaner once I got a few entries in there. It actually started looking like something useful.
Making it Look Less Like a Spreadsheet from the 90s
After getting all the data in – which took ages, trust me – I looked at it and thought, “This is functional, but it’s still ugly.” Like, really ugly. All black and white, no spacing, just crammed together. That’s when I dipped my toes into CSS. Just a tiny bit, nothing major. I didn’t even bother with a separate stylesheet; I just threw some inline styles right into the HTML. I know, I know, not the best practice, but for a single local file, who cares?
I played around with changing the background color of the table rows, just to make it alternate, you know, so it was easier to read. I also tried to make the text a bit bigger and gave it some padding so it wasn’t hugging the borders of the cells so tight. I learned just by trying stuff out. If it looked bad, I’d delete it and try something else. There were moments I wanted to just give up, thinking, “Why am I even doing this? A spreadsheet would have been faster!” But then I’d make a tiny change that actually looked good, and that kept me going.
The final “record” of this whole practice was this single HTML file. It’s got all my books, nicely laid out in a table, with columns for the title, author, genre, and whether I’ve read it or not. It’s not fancy; there’s no search bar, no way to sort it automatically, nothing interactive. If I want to add a new book, I just open the HTML file in my text editor, add a new table row, save it, and boom, it’s there. Same for marking one as read. It’s totally manual, but it’s mine, and it works for what I needed.
Looking back, it was a silly little project, but I learned a bunch just by messing around. It really showed me that even simple stuff can be useful, and you don’t need to be a coding wizard to build something that solves a small personal problem. Now, when someone asks me about a book, I just open “*” and find it in seconds. Much better than digging through dusty shelves!
