The goal of this project was to create a basic GoodReads, a reading/book tracker app and website, clone using HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. Within JS, I primarily wanted to use objects, constructors and the localStorage Web API.
This project was made much easier by doing my user interface design and basic logic on paper. Once I finally put fingers to keyboard I was able to fly through the project and complete it quickly and with very few hiccups. One thing that I also worked on during this project was to keep within the original scope and spirit of this project. My goal wasn't to completely recreate GoodReads and all of its features, just one basic feature that I could complete using the base layer of web technologies.
- UI could and should be better.
- Expanding the scope of this project to include a backend would be a great additional step, self-built or BaaS.
The base of this project started from a blog post (not the blog post I read but it’s a good representation) I read about disconnecting yourself from the big technology companies such as Amazon and Google and how difficult it was to do so since they’re so ingrained into our daily lives.
After reading that blog post, I started slowly switching my own habits. I started using alternatives to many Google and Amazon products such as Proton Mail (Gmail), HERE WeGo (Google Maps), DropBox (Google Drive), and Musicolet (Amazon Music, Google Music), however I was struggling to find a good app to replace GoodReads, which is owned by Amazon.
So, I decided to start trying to build my own and this is my very first iteration of that. There’s currently one additional front-end iteration and I’ve started laying the foundation for creating my own back-end as well.