This semester, I spent a good amount of time revisiting a project from Connections Lab, called Petty About Books. I was wrong when I anticipated that I would be able to revisit one project a week for Recode. This project in particular was a great learning experience about going from a proof-of-concept to deploying something to be publicly shared and experienced.

Original project work: https://www.politetype.com/blog/petty-about-books

Solving Deployment

This project was originally deployed on github, but I wasn’t able to pull in the live data from the NYTimes best sellers list. To solve this, I ended up needing some server-side code which I had mapped out during the fall semester. So while I had the project running fine locally, I needed to re-look at my deployment strategy, since github Pages does not allow for server deployment.

After ensuring that the code was working well locally, I tried porting the project to glitch. After working through a few different bugs and with lots of googling, I started to figure out that there was some type of blocker preventing me from using fetch through glitch. I decided to try cutting my losses here and try a different solution for deployment.

I decided to try heroku for deployment. While it wasn’t an immediate success, I was able to get it up and running: https://petty-about-books.herokuapp.com/ This felt like an ok moment to press pause. With the busy work done, I can now go back and do the fun stuff. Next steps here are to build out more interactions, include a way to capture the final cover and restart the experience. This is a goofy little project but I think it would be fun to share it with people and want to get it to a point where it feels complete and shareable.

Project Structure

At the end of this project session, the deployment link had less functionality to experience than it did last week. The irony was that it actually had more. I spent this week looking at the introduction to the experience. Since I was already accessing the information, I wanted to give users more control over what books they could interact with. I also felt like this helped to better orient users to the idea of the “bestsellers list.” Lastly, I think it would be great to be able to “reshelve” the messed up book cover, to give the user a moment to continue to play while reflecting on their experience.