Quote champion - Part 1
I've always loved rankings, probably because information has always been abundant, and rankings somehow soothed me. I usually rank or rate my everyday experiences.
Reading is probably my oldest and most beloved hobby, and I use Readwise to collect and store my highlights from Kindle. Even though I like the ease that Readwise introduces to the collection of highlights, I am not a fan of their review system. I guess it's not interactive enough for me; the data collected is not used in any engaging way.
As the year is coming to an end, I wanted to know which highlight (quote) was my favorite. So, driven by curiosity and Claude (an AI assistant), "I" developed a web app that would function as the first stage of my endeavor: selecting my favorite quote of the year.
I started by going into my Readwise account and downloading all quotes from books read in 2024 (not many books this year, sadly). I had around 500+ quotes, which I felt were too many, so I filtered to keep only books with 30+ quotes.
Next, I developed a web app that, based on a JSON file with the previously selected quotes, made it possible for the user to assign a rating from 1 to 3 stars to each quote. My idea was to keep only those 3-star quotes and then create another web app that allowed the user to choose their favorite quote from all of those in contention via a tournament-style selection. Both of these apps were deployed via GitHub Actions.
Below is a table with the books that remained and how many 3-star quotes I currently have per book.
| Book Title | Total Quotes | Quotes with Rating 3 | Proportion of Rating 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| This Is How It Always Is | 21 | 11 | 52.38% |
| The Bookish Life of Nina Hill | 24 | 13 | 54.17% |
| No Worries | 46 | 19 | 41.30% |
| Quiet | 39 | 9 | 23.08% |
| Fierce Conversations | 19 | 11 | 57.89% |
I’ve uploaded the web app files into GitHub in case you want to try and rate your quotes. If you want to rate a sample of quotes you can also do that here.
In my next post, I'll share the second web app and introduce you to the glorious 2024 quote of the year.