Barklund.org

Bibliotekr (a badly hidden pun on Flickr) is an idea crafted by a group of persons trying to create a book-sharing site “competing” with the Danish libraries. And one of the organizers had thrown together a small Hackathon, which I just had to attend.

The Hackathon turned out to be more of a Conceptuathon or Possibilithon, because the concept wasn’t really ready for implementation yet. But we met up 8 persons and discussed our views on the project. Some were developers like me, some were librarians and some just interested parties.

The key points remaining to make the concept ready for alpha-release to the public was how to conceptually identify the lending of a book in a WordPress post. How does the post change to visualize, that the book has been lent out. This has to be done via some extension to WordPress. I looked into creating WordPress plugins – and that seems to be very easy. So when that time comes, I will probably create that.

The second challenge is to display books for lending on a Google Map. This is however quite easy – even applying filters on the sections to show (only sci-fi, only paperback, etc.). The funny thing comes when zooming on the map. Of course the map cannot handle thousands of displayed icons in the same view – the javascript is simply too slow. Thus on different zoom levels, different levels of detail must be applied. The easiest is to switch to zipcode view at a certain zoom-level, and then just count the number of available books in the zipcode and display a single icon for this.

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