For the last six months I've been alternating between freelancing and working on my own personal projects.  It's one of the main reasons I went freelance, so it was great to finally make the time to do it.  In particular though, there was a itch I really wanted to scratch.  I first learnt of the Harvard Classics a few years ago and since then the idea has really struck a chord with me - a sort of popular list of books that one should read to have a liberal education.  As I read more about the collection of books I became more interested in what the modern equivalent would be - what are the quintessential books one should read 100 years later?

Today I can announce 5ft Shelf - a site to do just that:

In 1909 Dr Eliot, then President of Harvard University, claimed a liberal education could be achieved by reading a collection of books that would total no more than 5ft in width. A local publisher challenged him to name them and he responded with what became known as the Harvard Classics. Shifting forward 100 years and into the age of the internet, we're trying to find out what the modern equivalent would be.  A lot has happened in the last century and we felt it would be impossible to get a fair representation of people’s interests without introducing two quintessential formats for modern living—music albums and movies. Rather than use a single authoritative source for the modern shelf, we've taken the opposite approach by allowing users to create their own shelf.  We then combine all the users' shelves to find the most popular items and create our top 5ft shelf ("the ultimate shelf").

The sites offers a little more than the introduction eludes to.  Amongst other features, mini-shelves contain the most popular items in a given subject area and the recommendation algorithm makes personalised recommendations based on the items on your shelf.  For more details read the 5ft Shelf blog Going Live post

As with all projects there has been big highs and hard lows but overall it has been great fun and scratching a personal itch was particularly satisfying.  On a more technical / agile development note I intend to publish two separate blog posts on the results of my endeavors.  The first will be on Getting Real and my experiences using the 37 signals development approach, along with some productivity experiments I performed myself during the time.  The second will be on how long it takes to get a startup to market.  I'm used to tracking time spent on projects for clients so I did the same for this project and found some interesting results.

Look for both blog posts in the coming weeks and in the meantime please do check out 5ft Shelf and pass it along to anyone who you think might be interested.