Recently I finished a cataloging app that I've been developing in my spare time for most of this semester.  For a long time I've written notes about books I'm reading, as well as art, games, comics, movies and other things in notebooks, Google Docs, spreadsheets, all over the place.  Some of this is organized but most of it is not and even the organized stuff isn't easy to look at.

I always wanted a cataloging app where I could log all of these things and see the relationships between the stuff I'm reading and viewing, but only limited to my actual experience.  Some cataloging apps didn't allow you to make associations with other entries.  Others went overboard, pulling in links from the web and doing lots more than I actually wanted.  What I wanted was a closed system, something that only included things I've actually read or experienced, sort of an external map of my own mind or learning, a way to look at the whole of what I've read about, make associations between books I've read recently and things I read in 2008.  I think it will lead to a better organization of my thoughts on certain subjects I'm interested in, new media, fiction, theory.

When I finished building the app (which required learning enough node and mongo to make it work) I decided I might as well make it available for other people to use or develop, so I created a Github Repo and wrote instructions for a relatively non-techinical person to install and run it on their own heroku server, or a technical person to make an updated version.  I still have some features I want to add to the app, but I'm not sure when, if ever, I'll feel like diving back into a bunch of node and mongo.

Here's the project on GitHub.