GoodBook.Reviews Beta now Live - v0.2.0

GoodBook.Reviews is a book review platform built on top of the STEEM blockchain. The project aims to bring quality content to STEEM and encourage book readers everywhere to share their thoughts and ideas on books.

The latest set of changes brings enough features that the site can start to be used. It’s a little chicken/egg situation as without content it’s not immediately clear what features should come first but without the features, it’s hard to attract users to create the content.

While I would love to bring an all singing & dancing platform in one swoop it’s not possible so I’ll do my best to iterate fast and bring new features often. What’s new since I showed you the barebones preview?

A lot of work went into this update, I hope if you're into books you will find this project useful.

New & Updated Features

• Now hosted at https://goodbook.reviews. ‘Goodbook.reviews’ is not necessarily the final name (i’d prefer something more unique), naming things is difficult at it can wait until there are more features.

• Steem posts are set up and can now be created with custom book JSON that is used across the site.

• Book cover upload via Cloudinary.
  

• Books display in the feed in a small card, showcasing the custom JSON data.

• Finished Steemconnect authentication.

• Added voting with slider & commenting. Having done this before with Finallycomments I was able to reuse some of the code I had written. Clicking the upvote displays a slider, clicking the upvote within the slider sends a message to the backend which votes with the authenticated user.

• Setup feeds to only display the parent permlink ‘goodbook-review’, the site currently relies solely on the STEEM blockchain and pulls in all reviews under the correct tag. In future, it can check the ‘app’ custom JSON but this works for now.

• Added beta message for all but ‘latest feed’, other feeds to come soon when there is more content.
  

• Added user feed that shows posts from who your following (only appears after login).

• Added user profile page showing their reviews on @username route. it has a small user information header and will display reviews from that user in a grid. Additional information for users will be added here in future.

• Modularised JS & SCSS for future maintainability & use parcel for bundling. Trying my best to keep the code manageable from the start.

How to Get involved?

• Visit https://goodbook.reviews
• Login with Steemconnect authentication
• Post a quality contribution
• Your post will show up on the homepage. :)

Ideas from the previous post

I’d like to thank commenters for the positive reception on this project in the previous post. Some of the ideas in discussion.

@didic explained that what made Goodreads and Shelfari great was the underlying database of books. Something like this would be a massive win for the platform and I’m going to look into this further as I get through the more basic features.

@carn also touched on the one book many review aspect. This is planned as a feature in the next few updates as well as having comments/rating for individual books, not just full-length reviews.

@natubat asked about book covers. Ideally, these will be automated in future either through a large database or via a third party API for now (to keep this project reasonable) users can upload book covers themselves.

@techslut asked about monetisation. There is currently no beneficiary or other forms of monetisation on the site. we talked about adding a small beneficiary, perhaps 5% but I am always hesitant because I know people feel a lot of the platforms take to much. The other idea was to add a ‘buy this book’ button which could be an affiliate like to Amazon. I like this idea as in theory if this was used to purchase STEEM it could create an upward buying pressure (albeit very small).

@mslifesteem Asked about markdown features. Markdown works for the main content area although there is currently no preview.

Thank you for the valuable feedback, I wish I could instantly add all of these features for you. This is quite a large project and unfortunately, I can’t dedicate too much of my time, I’ll do my best to address these as we move forward with updates.

Roadmap & Future

I could list a massive amount of ideas/features on the roadmap but to keep it manageable here are a handful.

’coming soon’ features

• Single Book View - each book will have its own page if multiple users review the same book they will all show up here. You can comment/rate a book without having to do a full review.
• Genre’s - show books posted to a specific genre
• Trending/featured
• Non-logged in Landing page explaining the project
• single footer with recommendations
• markdown preview

’planned’ features

• Beta competition for best reviews
• saved ‘read books’ to your user profile
• an incentive to post with a book-review upvoting bot

How to contribute

Please leave any thoughts, ideas and suggestions in the comments below. I welcome any and all feedback.

If you find issues with the site please submit them via github or leave a comment below.

If you would like to get further involved with the project there is plenty to work on so please reach out.

You can contact me on discord at sambillingham#7927

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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