A couple months back I built a “Books” section of the site to house my library. This is something I’ve been keeping in a spreadsheet for a while now, and still maintaining on Goodreads. But I wanted a more data-driven way for me to be able to manage the info, like a CMS. Since I write book reviews with regularity, I also wanted it to function as reference data that could be included in book review posts, without having to replicate the data I want to have displayed.

Using Jekyll’s collections feature, the library section starts with...