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User:ConceptDawg

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Interesting stuff?

Projects Past and Present

These are a few of the projects that I've worked on or are currently working on. Because I've worked on pretty much every part of the system in some way or another I'm only going to list the projects that I did a significant portion of the work on. I try to do at least some user documentation while I go along, but sometimes there is no time and I have to make it up in the end with plenty of help from LibraryThing members. All of the help is appreciated.

LibraryThing.com

  • Common Knowledge
    • A community-driven data compilation system. It works much like a wiki, except that it is constrained to predefined fields. It was first made available on all Work and Author pages on LibraryThing but it has since migrated to other parts of the site. It is also being used as the backbone data for the Series feature.
    • Common Knowledge on LibraryThing
  • LibraryThing Local
    • Connects LibraryThing members to local book venues like bookstores, book shows, conventions, libraries, etc. It also has listings of events near members' locations and other nearby members. It helps bridge the gap between the virtual LibraryThing space and the physical world. To be released soon.
  • Services XML API
    • Designed the XML Services API, format, and mechanisms.
  • Catalog Search
    • I wrote the catalog search and indexing code. It's a very, ummm, creative solution to searching extremely large amounts of full text data. Basically, we use grep (with a healthy collection of regexes) to do most of the work. I can't say that I came up with the idea, but I did get stuck implementing it. Not my favorite project, but it needed to be done, and in the end it is actually a pretty cool piece of code: it's fast and it solves the problem in an interesting way.
  • Catalog In-Place Editing
    • This is the feature that allows you to edit all of that book information from within your catalog by just double-clicking on individual items. Incredibly complex data and DOM wrangling there that is more or less transparent to the user. This was written in 2006 before all of the fancy-schmancy Javascript frameworks (jquery, prototype, and the like) became popular, so it's pretty deep and complex code. I'm proud of what it does, given it's age. I'm less proud of it when I actually look at the code.
  • Collections
    • Possibly the most anticipated new feature for LibraryThing since it was launched, the Collections features let members group books into individual "collections." These collections can have various preferences that allow them to be treated different from other collections (whether or not to include the contents of the collection in recommendation computations, for example). I did nearly all of the UI and underlying code for collections other than the (by no means trivial) bits on the Tags/Organize page.
  • WikiThing
    • The part of the site that you are using now. Along with setting up the mediawiki installation and creating an LT skin I also wrote the user-account handshake code that allows your LibraryThing and WikiThing accounts to be merged. It also creates a WikiThing account on the fly the first time you load a WikiThing page while you are logged into LibraryThing.
  • HelpThing automated help
  • Non-member Throttling
    • I wrote the code that allows us to redirect visitors to the site who are not logged in. We can turn this feature off and on with a click of a button (or automate it based on server load) and it has a whitelist of pages that aren't affected by it.
  • Caching Layer
    • I designed/wrote the caching layer for the application. It interacts with memcached, eaccelerator, in-memory object caching, and disk caching to provide faster data access. There is also a queuing layer that handles memcache-aware queues and pools.
  • Media Reviews
    • The Media Reviews that appear on work pages are an interesting amalgam of a straight data table that has records that are linked through the Common Knowledge database so that change history can be tracked. Interesting stuff, to me anyway.
  • Local Books iPhone App
    • Design, project management, and partial development of the app along with development of the REST API that the app uses to get data from LibraryThing Local
  • Legacy Libraries section
    • Designed and implemented a section of LT specifically for Legacy Libraries and the specialized data related them them, including a collection of Common Knowledge fields and general modifications.
  • Currently Reading 2013
    • Design and front-end implementation of the Currently Reading feature with social features, percentages read, progress bars, etc.

LibraryThing for Libraries

  • ShelfBrowse
    • Interactive virtual representation of a library's physical shelves.
      • Designed and implemented interface code
      • Designed and wrote some of the backend code as well
  • Library Anywhere mobile app
    • Mobile interface into nearly any library's OPAC.
      • Designed and wrote the front-end code, iPhone application.
      • Interfaces with middle-ware called Matrix via JSON.
      • The UI design was also used on Android and Blackberry platforms with minor modifications.
    • Custom apps also developed.
  • UI overhaul for Tag, Series, and Awards browser catalog enhancements.
      • Enhanced the UI/UX for better usability and aesthetics
  • BookPsychic
    • A sort of Netflix ratings for books and libraries.
    • Connects a library patron with books that match their interests based on rating books using a simple and elegant UI.
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