Nate Finch

All the things, keeping it clever…🤓

Building a plugin to help me read more

Nate

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A picture of my reads bookshelf

Everyone wants to read more, right?

Reading hasn’t been a normal part of my life for almost ten years. I went to grad school for a few years, read a ton, and maybe burned out on reading books.

Also, I’ve never been much of a fiction reader. I’d mostly only read non-fiction, research, and “self-help” type books.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but I knew I wanted to read more.

How it started…

So, in 2023, I started reading again and kept a markdown file of books I was reading:

A screenshot of my book list from 2023... Very boring looking.
Wow… such a boring way to keep track of this!

While this was very practical and very easy to update in Obsidian, this is not very fun.

Other people buy books and keep bookshelves full of their reading journey. I’d gotten most of these books through our local public library. This is great, and I recommend libraries to everyone, but I wanted to be able to “show off” a little.

While starting up my reading journey again, I was listening to the ShopTalkShow podcast, and the mentioned Dave Rupert’s Bookshelf. I checked it out and immediately fell in love with it.

As a WordPress developer, I knew this would be pretty straightforward to implement.

How it’s going…

I started hacking away at what became the MyReads plugin in March, 2025. I’ve done plenty of custom plugins with custom post types, so the initial build came pretty easily.

I’d written for the WP Developer Blog about creating a multiblock plugin with post meta, so I had a good start on creating a rating block and adding post meta via blocks to a post.

The end result is something I’m very happy with:

A picture of my reads bookshelf

Dave’s bookshelf is definitely more polished, but I’m pretty happy with this.

Using the plugin to read more…

After this plugin was built, not only did I start iterating on it, but I wanted to actually use it.

Being able to see my reading progress visually with book covers and see that “X reads for the year” number tick up was very rewarding and motivating to continue reading.

You can see the difference it made pretty quickly, I read:

  • 27 books in 2023 (my first year back reading)
  • 53 books in 2024
  • 120 books in 2025 (the year I started building MyReads)

It’s definitely addicting to put up numbers on reading, hahaha…

I’m sure I’ll continue to do read and use this plugin to motivate me and enjoy the look back on what I’ve read.