Reading Tracker with Local Authorization

This is a place where you can write down all the books you plan to read, are currently reading, have finished reading... or gave up on reading, because it was just that bad.

No longer will you have to say "That looked like an interesting book. I wish I could remember what it was called..." Now you can add it to the list! Or check your list and see you already had it planned. Or have already read it. Or already tried reading it and dropped it - and put it on this list so you wouldn't be fooled by it again!

Includes local authorization, so you don't have to download anything and no one else can see your list and judge you for your tastes.

Try it out: My Book List

How It's Made:

Tech used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, MongoDB

Packages/Dependencies used: bcrypt, connect-mongo, dotenv, ejs, express, express-flash, express-session, mongodb, mongoose, morgan, nodemon, passport, passport-local, validator

This program uses a local Passport solution to keep users' book lists separate.

Once users have logged in (or signed up, if they are first-time users), they are directed to their list of books. Those who are not logged in can only access the login or create account pages.

In their book list, users can add titles to their list along with specified genre and a status (Plan to read, Currently reading, Finished, or Abandoned). Users can also change the status of a book in their library (from Plan to read to Currently reading, for example, or from Currently reading to Abandoned). And, of course, users can delete titles from their list.

All of the list storage and management is handled with Mongoose and MongoDB. Rendering out the lists is done with EJS, along with some static CSS to make things not hideous, and client-side JavaScript to handle button functionality.

Optimizations

Make no mistake, this is a pretty good Minimum Viable Product for less than one day of build time. That said, it's bare bones. Given more time, we would implement some of the features we tabled due to time crunch:

• Connection to a books API to provide additional functionality (e.g., an autocomplete search bar for adding titles) and design features (e.g., display of book covers)
• The ability to sort the book list by status
• Additional data fields for each book beyond title and status (e.g., genre, author), which the list could also be sorted by
• Page numbers for Currently reading and Abandoned titles, so users can see where they are/where they finally couldn't put up with the author anymore
• A notes field for Currently reading and Abandoned titles, where users can store favorite quotes, ideas sparked by their reading, or grievances about terrible books
• The ability to add ratings to Finished titles
• And more!

Lessons Learned:

This was easier than we expected. Passport and Mongoose do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Coding this as a group was also surprisingly effective. Rather than being a case of "too many cooks spoil the broth," we would each catch issues the others would miss and could cover for each others' weaker points. Although the asynchronus features of git probably offer a more powerful approach to collaboration, as a group of developers still getting a handle on some of the tech and working with very limited time, replit was king.

If you want to run this code yourself:

In addition to running npm install or putting this code in a cloud provider of your choice, you'll need a database to put this data in, and a connection to that database.

To do this locally:

• Create a .env file and add the following as key: value
  • PORT: (can be any port, example: 3000)
  • DB_STRING: your database URI

Doing this on a cloud provider will vary between providers (and presumably between UI updates.)