commit 76358faff09d898a3b2b73ee8882dcad6206a4f0
parent 9c28b3e86d796ea6579e886722b5dacf4e1cd6e1
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025 20:02:53 -0800
Add Blind Date A Book project
Diffstat:
3 files changed, 81 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/cafe.jpg b/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/cafe.jpg
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diff --git a/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/index.md b/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/index.md
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+title = "Blind Date A Book"
+description = "A website to help you find your next read, with a charming twist."
+date = 2025-01-19T17:20:00-08:00
++++
+
+[Blind Date A Book] is part ecommerce website and part art project. I
+first encountered its physical counterpart at a Barnes and Noble some
+five years ago: I remember thinking to myself even then that it was a
+perfect candidate for digitization. At long last, using the approach to
+making I picked up [in DESIGN11], I've hacked together a boutique
+version of this experience accessible for anyone with an internet
+connection.
+
+
+
+At first I was confused by the lack of digital equivalent to the
+physical stands. Surely ordering books online is a solved problem? I
+mean, that's what Amazon was founded on—and a custom frontend that just
+displays things differently seems a trifling project.
+
+A hyperscaling version might look something like:
+
+1. Scrape books from [some list].
+2. Have a generative model write summaries based on a set of examples.
+3. Display that on a sexy website.
+4. Have Amazon deliver the books to users.
+
+Turns out it's hard to buy things with code. So it actually came out a
+bit more [personal]:
+
+1. A list of books chosen by myself, my family, and my best friends.
+2. Descriptions we wrote.
+3. The website is still sexy.
+4. It sends you to Shopify where you buy *Book #X*.
+5. I see that, go buy the real book, and send it your way.
+
+More of a sensitive touch, perhaps.
+
+
+
+The tech stack of the site bears further analysis. I've [long] [puzzled]
+[over] the best way to go about building web projects, whereas I have
+strong established preferences for [CLIs] and [iOS/macOS] apps. With
+this project, I decided to try a new framework that has been making
+waves in the community: [Web Origami]. I enjoyed a lot of what it has to
+offer:
+
+- The top-level declarative approach to routes reminded me of SwiftUI.
+ That's a huge compliment.
+- You can seamlessly weave between HTML, JS, and the Origami language.
+ This manages to avoid feeling overwhelming, like Rails can when
+ exposing a similar number of possibilities to address problems.
+- Flexible data processing that transparently handles different formats
+ makes navigating nested structures in templates easy.
+
+It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, though. The data processing
+capabilities are something of a double-edged sword: formats like YAML
+and JSON are convenient (especially for source control), but something
+of a hack to avoid interfacing with a real database. I can see that
+design being limiting for certain use cases. Still: I sent a message in
+the [Matrix room] about hosting in production and the author replied
+really quickly and was super helpful. That's worth a lot, in terms of
+goodwill and my hope for the future of the project. I'll keep my eye on
+Origami, though I've got some more experimenting to do before I commit
+to the framework in the longterm.
+
+Check out [the website][Blind Date A Book] for yourself to find your
+next read!
+
+[Blind Date A Book]: https://blinddateabook.com
+[in DESIGN11]: @/posts/stanford-quarterly-reflection-05/index.md#academics
+[some list]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371436
+[personal]: https://bsky.app/profile/andy.works/post/3lclb4jvle72u
+[long]: https://fosstodon.org/@FIGBERT/112812107966936565
+[puzzled]: https://fosstodon.org/@FIGBERT/113683895559149910
+[over]: https://fosstodon.org/@FIGBERT/112893509255400989
+[CLIs]: https://charm.sh
+[iOS/macOS]: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/
+[Web Origami]: https://weborigami.org
+[Matrix room]: https://matrix.to/#/%23weborigami:envs.net
diff --git a/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/notebook.png b/content/projects/blind-date-a-book/notebook.png
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