First Book Review Posted

Hello there,

did you ever learn how to learn? I think it’s quite ironic that all the schools I went to didn’t cover this topic, although you’re supposed to learn there. Since this blog will be a lot about learning as well, I figured that it would be a sensible idea to start with some information about learning. That’s why I’ve reviewed and organized the contents from “The Only Skill That Matters“. I hope that you’ll be able to use those methods for all of your further learning. For me personally, it’s been a real game-changer. My learning and my reading have shifted significantly.

Some Blog Updates

Guides

I’ve done some more work on this blog as well. You might spot the “Guides” section in the header of this page. It’s still empty now, but that’s where I’ll start putting most of my narrative, walking you through the information that’ll gradually accumulate on here in a reasonable order. My goal is that you’ll use the guides if you want to get into a topic but don’t know how, and the “Knowledge” section only if you already know what you’re looking for.

Support sediment

Finally, I’ve created a “Support” page, where I present how you can support this website and what I plan on using any funds for. It’s important to me to make clear that this isn’t for profit. I believe that doing things for profit usually comes at a cost to the product and thus the consumers. When designing something for profit, or even with profit in mind, I’d make different decisions than when I’m only thinking about who might use this and how to provide the most value.

About, Home Page & Book Ratings

Another change has been the restructuring of some content to a designated “About” page, which made the “Home” page a little cleaner and easier to navigate. I’ve also worked on the book ratings, which can now be used to search through books and are displayed in the general overview. Don’t be surprised if you’ll only see 4- and 5-star books for a while. As I’ve already read a variety of books, I’ll naturally start dissecting the best ones first and probably skip over a few of the not-so-great ones. So this isn’t me trying to present every book I read as great, but instead only presenting the books I read that I think are great.

Upcoming Content

I’ve done a bit of a speedrun with the first bits of content here so far, as I wanted the website to offer at least something. I don’t want to continue doing this as it increases the risk of making mistakes and overlooking interesting ideas from books. For future content, I plan on releasing it bit by bit, with lots of small updates here and there, and an occasional blog post. With “The Only Skill That Matters“, I relied mainly on personal notes while organizing the content and writing the review. But my personal notes are always incomplete, as they’ll leave out things I’m already familiar with, such as the part on speed reading. That’s why, from now on, I’ll read books from cover to cover and extract information and write the summary & review while doing so. My process will remain iterative, but now lowered risk of missing any interesting information.

Like the good ol’ times

Have you spotted the view counter already? It’s in the bottom right of most pages. I placed it there as an homage to the old days of the internet, where people had their own personal website, shared their interests and ideas, and there wasn’t a company and 300+ cookie partners behind every bit of content you looked at. Back then, view counters were quite common. Mine simply counts views, so visiting a page once will increase the counter by 1. If you’ve got JavaScript enabled, you’ll even see the counter update as others visit the same page. Right now, it’s still quite silent, with 164 views on the homepage, probably all by myself and bots. I didn’t want to actively log any IP addresses or create some session token or fingerprint (note: I have no idea what my hoster IONOS does tho), so I can’t check how many I’ve been myself. It’s still a fun little gimmick, don’t you think?

Personal Update

Working on this is a lot of fun. It feels a bit like I’m talking to myself on here, but that’s not too bad. After all, I myself benefit from what I’m doing here as well, in many ways. First, the organizing of the content makes me think about how topics connect, what’s important, and makes me describe things in my own words, which supports my own learning process and allows me to look things up easily. In the process of doing this, I’m improving my writing, web-development, and illustration skills. As of now, there aren’t a lot of images on this website, but the ones you find were made by me. I’m creating them myself to prevent copyright issues, have flexibility with how I want to present something, and be consistent in style across pages.

In my previous post, I talked about my current interest in the ketogenic diet, which I’m still following. Granted, it’s only roughly a week later now, but things are still going quite well. Sometimes it gets a bit annoying, but I try to keep my approach not too strict. Doing this has made me consider adding a recipe section to this blog sometime in the future, if more information around diet and nutrition is added. I think that’d be quite fun, especially when it isn’t optimized for SEO and will just get to the point. Little rant, but I’ve seen more and more cooking sites talk about their recipe, how they discovered it, how much they like it, and how everybody and the community summer party loves the potato salad. But it’ll take them an eternity to tell me what ingredients I need and in what order to prepare them. I’m not sure if I’m the only one who has had that experience, but it’s really annoying and made me actively prevent looking at a selection of websites, even if the search lists them as the first result.

With that being said, I hope you have a nice day wherever you are, consider going for a walk (they’re usually always nice), and stay safe! :)