Reverse mashup

I barely remember when was the last time I updated Gelman. This project starts as an exercise to practice my Django + dojo skills, and also to manage my eBook collection, I were stuck in UI design which I suck and the authentication/registration which I takes little interest in.

What if we take a different approach to avoid the reinvention of the wheel? Let’s take an online eBook management Web2.0 application, for example LibraryThing, to manage the Read, Reading, Wish to Read list, if an electronic copy is available, it will be inserted into the LibraryThing search/detail page, and we can add it to Reading list for quick access later. We just mashup our web service into LibraryThing!

This application can be decomposed to two parts:

• A Web service to CRUD eBook collection hosted in home-brew server
• Firefox Add-on or GreaseMonkey user script for mashup
• A web service client to automate importing books
• Find your favorite app, then mash it up!

A more portable solution to glue the pieces is to leave the mashup in the server side, using a proxy server to insert all the mashup data.

As all comments, tags, reading history has been hosted in the cloud, it is essential to do something against the raining day:

• Big name may endorse the availability. I would seriously consider Shelfari only after it is acquired by Amazon
• Open API is the key. This is the trend, the web site could not lock on the user by closing itself, the users may cold feet in the first place. Douban, the leader in the Chinese market, did an excellent job to open its platform.

I am working on an prototype of the RESTful web service using Django, stay in tune.