Things I’ve built.

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R/W Book Club

A Minneapolis-Saint Paul book club meeting since 2003, and the website that keeps the record of everything it has read.

A long-running reading group, with a shared record.

Status
Active Being built or operated.
Dates
Started Apr 2003
Where
rwbookclub.com/
Topics
Reading MediaWiki
Page views
715 in the twelve months to Sep 30, 2026 2025-10: 02025-11: 02025-12: 02026-01: 02026-02: 02026-03: 02026-04: 1232026-05: 872026-06: 1112026-07: 1662026-08: 1442026-09: 84
Latest evidence
Latest page change, Oct 27, 2026
The front page of rwbookclub.com on Oct 20, 2026
rwbookclub.com on Oct 20, 2026. The collector captures the front page once a month.

The R/W Book Club is a group of technically minded readers who have met in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area since April 2003. R/W stands for Read / Write: the members read, and many of them also blog. The club reads about eight books a year, mostly nonfiction, and members take turns picking the next book (About). I built the website, not the club.

I joined in late 2007, when my friend and former professor John Riedl, who started the club, emailed me about “this small book club of geeky guys” he was part of. I “joined without hesitation” and shared the club with John, Tom, Erik and Dan until John died in 2013 (Goodbye to my friend, John Riedl).

The club’s record has taken several forms. In early 2011 it was a MediaWiki site called the Creative Computer Book Club; that July I hacked on MediaWiki with the book club gang, and by January 2012 the same wiki was the R/W Book Club at rwbookclub.com. In 2017 I built a Jekyll site at rwbook.club. The club has also kept its record in a shared Airtable database. The current site is generated by Oliver, the club’s agent, and offers the reading record as llms.txt files for agents and the meetings as an iCal feed.

The build

  • The website presents the club’s reading history and members’ commentary.
  • Public llms.txt and llms-full.txt files make the reading record accessible to agents for analysis.
  • An iCal feed lets members subscribe to the meeting calendar.
  • Oliver, the club’s agent, generates the site from the club database and publishes it to GitHub Pages.

Static web LLM context files iCalendar

Reading history for agents

Activity

313 commits (181 with Claude, 123 with another agent, 9 by me), the first on Apr 9, 2026.

20 publications collected from its feeds, the oldest from Apr 10, 2023.

The latest weeks with activity

All activity, week by week. Who made each commit is from its author and co-author lines.

Sources and evidence

Observed daily from GitHub, sitemaps, feeds, the Internet Archive, and Tinylytics. Evidence never sets a status.

2025-11: 12025-12: 02026-01: 12026-02: 02026-03: 02026-04: 182026-05: 382026-06: 1072026-07: 1202026-08: 212026-09: 102026-10: 2 Commits and publications per month, last twelve months.

Connections

Connections of R/W Book Clubpublishes the website ofincludesR/W Book ClubOliver
Connections of R/W Book Clubpublishes the website ofincludesR/W Book ClubOliver

  • R/W Book Club includes Oliver

    Oliver is the book club’s agent and sixth member, sharing the same club database and corpus. Source

  • Oliver publishes the website of R/W Book Club

    Every book, meeting and member is kept in Oliver’s database, and Oliver rebuilds and publishes the club website to GitHub Pages. Source

Related

Oliver

History

  1. development R/W Book Club: recorded development begins

    The earliest commit in this repository is a development record; the project or idea may predate it. Source

  2. development Book club Jekyll site

    I build rwbook.club on Jekyll, “rough but functional.” Source

  3. milestone Creative Computer Book Club becomes R/W

    The club’s MediaWiki site, the Creative Computer Book Club, becomes the R/W Book Club wiki. Source

  4. milestone I join the R/W Book Club

    John Riedl invites me. Source