How I am trying to use linkding as a private Good Reads alternative

How I am trying to use linkding as a private Good Reads alternative

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across this article from cri.dev where he lists the tools that he is currently self-hosting.

One of them caught my attention: linkding. I had never heard of it before and when I read it I had to google what it was about. The description in its GitHub repo says: linkding is a simple bookmark service that you can host yourself. It's designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

This intrigued me because it was indeed something I was missing. I used to store bookmarks, links, collections and books (read and to be read) in a table in my nocodb self-hosted instance. It worked well but it was a bit too nerdy and cumbersome so I gave linkding a try.

I installed it with a couple of clicks in my CapRover server (if you want to know more about my self-hosted setup read My self-hosted setup) and I was immediately convinced that it’s exactly the tool that I was missing.

With some manual work, I migrated all the content from nocodb to linkding.

The part that I currently like the most is the catalog, mainly for books but it works well also for videos, and movies…: for each book, I add a new bookmark where:

• the URL is any page that describes it (Wikipedia page, Good Reads one…);
• the title is the book’s name;
• the description contains my review/notes that I keep for every book.

I then use the tags to organize them:

• each bookmark has the libri tag (it means books in Italian)
• the bookmark can have one of these: da-iniziare (to-start), in-corso (in-progress), finito (done).

With this categorization, I can quickly filter the books and find notes of old ones (#libri finito) or the list of the ones I am planning to buy/read (#libri #da-iniziare).