Book Club Mini

August 17, 2022 - Reading time: 2 minutes

A few years ago I created a Bookclub site (you can see the public-facing side of it here. Use the username 'guest' and no password), initially to serve my book club of 20 years and 200+ books. 

We'd been tracking our books and meetings in a shared Google Sheet, and honestly, that's all it needs.  Only two of us even care about tracking the data, unless we start a debate about whether or not we've read a given author or book.

Building the site was actually just an excuse to learn about a responsive CSS framework ... I think I started with Bootstrap but ended up on Bulma ... and a little Javascript.  And it got out of hand, as unplanned applications always do.  It had a home-grown login system, a private Manager interface, tie-ins to an Amazon Associate account, and a MySQL-based data model to support multiple book clubs.  In other words, complete overkill gathering dust on a virtual shelf.

"Book Club Mini" is a revised site that embraces a few simple truths:

1. There are about 300 books ... this is not Big Data
2. A bookclub site usually doesn't need member management ... view the lists or don't.  It isn't secret stuff.
3. If you commit to CSS and JavaScript, it will take over your whole life

The revised site is open to the public.  Books and Meetings are maintained in small, delimited text files.  Graphics are provided by Bookshop.org widgets.  PHP is used for setting up files and lists, and managing the server-side tasks.  And the look and feel leverages Lit.css, a 500 byte responsive CSS file, which is about all the CSS I'm willing to deal with.