User:ConceptDawg
From WikiThing
Interesting stuff?
- My changelog (or, what I'm working on today)
- My plate of things (or, what I want/need to work on).
- What kind of technology and tools do we use at LibraryThing?
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.
- 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.
- 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 colleciton 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.
- 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.
- 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.