For some time now and almost without realising it, I’ve been building a digital scaffold for my memories.

Social media is one example, but I’ve barely been using this in recent years and prefer to add what little I do share to Micro.blog.

But there are more subtle aspects. My IMDb lists hold a record of all the films I’ve watched since 2004. My (more recent) Letterboxd account also includes the date and with whom I watched the film. Last.fm captures music I’ve listened to, and concerts I’ve attended are kept in Setlist.fm. All the books I’ve read are catalogued in LibraryThing, which I’ve written about before.

The more I think about it, the more scaffolding boards I discover. This is a topic I will be returning to…

In another attempt to improve the usefulness of the books catalogued in Micro.blog I’ve now spent some time reviewing my Favourites Collection on Librarything. I’ve always found it difficult to make shortlists like this and I’m sure I’ll continue to tweak it over time. But for now this is the list I have and I’ve now added a ⭐️ next to each of my favourite titles on my Books Read page

As the number of books I’ve read continues to grow I’ve been thinking about how best to make the page listing these more useful. Until now the only thing I’ve identified is books I’ve re-read using 🔄. But I recently re-read Walden and enjoyed it much less second time round. So I’m not sure this is worthwhile in itself.

On LibraryThing I have a collection called favourites but it’s a work in progress. I intend to spend time on this in the next few weeks. When it’s finished, I’ll go through my list on here and add ⭐️ against all my favourite titles.

In the meantime I’ve decided to rank the top 3 books I read each year using 🥇, 🥈 and 🥉. The usefulness of this is limited, since some years I read a handful of average books and other years I read many great books. However I think the combination of identifying the top 3 books each year, those I’ve read more than once and my overall favourites will give my list of books read more value.

On 25th November 2011 I paid the princely sum of $25 for lifetime membership of LibraryThing. At the time I think there was a free membership with a limit on the number of books logged. Although I hadn’t yet reached that limit I wanted to support the developers because I was making good use of the site.

When I first joined, a couple of years earlier, my need to catalogue things had been there for a while. I stumbled across LibraryThing when I was looking at options for cataloguing books. This was in a world before Goodreads. To begin with, I took some time to try to remember everything I’d read. Of course I must have missed some titles but I’m confident I remembered the most important. Aside from some guessed reading years I think My library is pretty accurate.

Collections are one way to organise your books. Currently I use collections to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction. I also use them to indicate ownership status and to highlight favourites. LibraryThing also offers tags which I use to record whether a book has been read and if so in what year. I also use tags to identify genre (or subject in the case of non-fiction), format, and what I want to do with a book after I’ve read it.

It’s always a work in progress though. I like to tinker with the structure and organisation. At the moment I’m cleaning it up (again), ensuring that media for each title is correct, book covers are accurate and publication dates are the original ones. I’m also updating the tags I use.

Since joining Micro.blog I’ve started to use Epilogue to track books I finish and, following the example of others on Micro.blog and elsewhere on the web, I now have a reading page and another which lists books I’ve finished by year. At some point I’d like to add some sort of rating system.

It’s over 11 years since I became a lifetime member. I’m very happy with the site and although I’ve been tempted to migrate over to Goodreads a few times I’m very glad I stuck with it - Amazon already owns enough of me and LibraryThing looks more indie web anyway!

How I catalogue my music has evolved since I first started doing it over 10 years ago. In this article I’ll share how I started and how things have changed.

My first compact disc player was a 21st birthday gift from my parents. The first album I listened to, also a gift, was I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got by Sinéad O’Connor.

Music was one of the first things I started cataloguing and there were several aspects to it.

First there was my collection of CDs. In 2009 I found a simple Windows application – Orange CD – which did the job well. The application made it easy to enter albums by barcode, by scanning the disc in the drive or manually. It also allowed the collection to be published online. At the time of writing my collection is still there.

Even before I finished cataloguing my CDs I’d begun to rip them to my PC’s hard disk. This was the 2nd aspect to cataloguing my music. Once all my CDs had been ripped, I had a digital version of the collection. I didn’t give much thought to how my digital collection was organised. By default albums are ripped to folders of the same name. Album folders sit inside artist folders. Doing something other than this default would simply have created more work.

When you have enough of them even compressed MP3 files take up too much space. I moved them over to the cloud after taking out my first Dropbox subscription in 2016. More recently I’ve moved all my files and folders to iCloud.

The 3rd aspect to my music cataloguing was certainly the easiest. Around the same time I started cataloguing my physical music collection, I also started to track my listening. The iPod Touch was already 2 years old and listening via apps was common. To begin with I “scrobbled” music using a custom app. In time Last FM was able to link to streaming services and track the music I listened to on those services.

It’s interesting to look at my listening trends over 12 years as a Last FM member. At the moment I don’t listen to much of anything. But there have been times when I’ve been a heavy user of streaming services. Anyone taking a close look will see a strangely eclectic library.

These days I still have physical CDs. But really I hold on to them as mementos. Before getting rid of more than half my collection I made playlists on Spotify of all the albums I owned. Whenever I want to enjoy the album in full I can now do so from my Spotify library.

Of course Spotify doesn’t have everything. So for those albums I owned that weren’t available I used an app called Cloudbeats. It’s a simple media player for cloud music files. Although it links to most of the main services when I moved to iCloud recently I discovered it wasn’t supported. I’ll need to find another solution to this in time but for now it’s not a big issue.

How I catalogue my music may have changed significantly since I started. But I continue to enjoy it and I remain on the lookout for improvements I can make.

I started using IMDb as soon as I discovered it in 1998, shortly before its acquisition by Amazon. It seemed exactly the type or resource for which the internet was designed. A huge database of movies with everything you might want to know about each one. Although the site has slowly become a promotional platform for Amazon, I remain an active user. One of my favourite features is the ability to create lists. In this article I’ll outline how and why I do this.

In early 2008 I discovered that with a free IMDb user account I could save lists of movies on the site. It’s a versatile way of grouping movies in almost any way you want. At the time I was still a member of Lovefilm, an online DVD rental service also purchased by Amazon. All the DVDs I’d rented were saved in a list I’d exported from the Lovefilm site. So I thought it would be good to create a list for each year and add the films I’d seen. This habit has continued and at the time of writing I have 17 years of movie watching captured on IMDB.

Adding films to a list is simple. In iOS navigate to the movie’s page in the IMDb app, select the ellipsis at the top right then choose “Add to List”. If you have created lists before you will be presented with these and you can choose the one to which you want to add this movie. Alternatively you can also “create a list” from here.

As well as lists of years containing the movies I’ve watched, I have a few other lists. My all time top 10 movies has its own list. I also track films I see at the cinema using my Odeon Limitless ticket. This helps me ensure I’m getting value from this monthly subscription. From time to time I might track films in the IMDb top 250 currently available on specific streaming service, or films we have recorded on our TiVo box. There are many other ways I could use lists but like most things the time consumed has to be evaluated against the value of doing it. For me the list of years is the single most useful feature.

IMDb also has a default list – the watchlist. You can see my watchlist here. Similar to streaming services this is a place where you can save films you’d like to see. The movie pages for films on your watchlist are visible in several locations. The watchlist appears within your lists page, accessible from the “You” button on the bottom right of the iOS app. You can also see a black tick on a yellow bookmark icon in the top left of the thumbnail for movies in search returns. On the movie’s page in the app, you’ll see a yellow “Add to Watchlist” button beneath the movie’s description. Adding the movie turns the button black and updates the text to “Added to Watchlist”.

Like most movie websites IMDb has the option to rate and review films. I first started using the rating feature in 2018 when I went through all of the films in each of my lists and added a rating retrospectively. It’s obviously much better to rate a film just after you’ve seen it but it was still a worthwhile exercise.

At the time of writing I’ve rated 1033 movies. Now whenever I watch a film I rate it and add it to the list for that year (and any others that are relevant). As with all cataloguing the value of the habit grows through time. It’s interesting to be able to check when I watched any particular film, or to watch something again and re-evaluate its rating.