Introducing the Little Library 1.0

Finally, a full version of the Little Library is out in the wild! After extensive testing on multiple platforms in Beta 1 & 2 (and a lot of failure), the Little Library 1.0 is ready for a gig on the mainstage. Take it out for a spin. Expect automatic updates as feedback comes in.

Check out, fork, and modify the source code for the Little Library on Github.

You can also find out more about the Little Library at http://thelittlelibrary.com.

Mobile JWiki

On the side as of late I’ve been working with Tim Jore at Distant Shores Media to help them create ajaxy goodness for their MediaWiki-based site at http://door43.org that features free and open licensed contributed discipleship resources for everyone in every language, including an open Bible, open Bible School, open worship music, etc. Anyway, I’ve just released a new application for them that dynamically has the ability to turn their entire wiki into a mobile online/offline application.

So if you are using MediaWiki, or would like to mobilize someone else’s Web site or wiki, you can find the simple 1-2 pages of code here: https://github.com/rwadholm/Mobile-JWiki. The code can be put on any server anywhere (that supports PHP 5.3), and will create a mobile offline/online version of whatever site you point it  at (out of the box it works with MediaWiki) via PHP,  JQuery, JQuery Mobile, and HTML5 (and it works as well without javascript enabled, so for non-smartphones it’ll still serve up your mobile site just fine). Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but you could even use it to make your own mobile offline/online version of Wikipedia that’s hosted on your own server.

The real purpose, however, is to allow users of wikis in areas with spotty internet connectivity or expensive data plans to be able to learn on the go, using their phones, without a continually active internet connection.

The Little Library Beta 1 Release

The Beta 1 version of the Little Library application was release earlier today (to mild applause by my family). You can check it out here:

https://github.com/rwadholm/The-Little-Library-Beta

Follow the instructions on that page, and you too can be the proud owner of a test library! You’ll be doing the world a service by breaking things now so they don’t have to later. Please send any comments and feedback my way.

Some new features include syncing with other libraries (actually works now!), automatic creation of an online library, a three page End User License Agreement that quotes Patrick Henry, file validation (to avoid loading those pesky malware files onto your computer and in the cloud), optimized iOS page sizes, automatic thumbnails for any items that have images in them, and the ability to upload and view multiple files for every item in your library. This last feature allows you to use your library as a private Web server. You could host every file of a website you’ve made in one item, and when users click on the item–BING!! (not really “BING”, I actually prefer non-microsoft products), they’re at your hosted Web site. So you could share your library with them, they could make changes, share with you, and you can have a dynamic Website between friends. How lovely.

Beyond Web sites, you could include all of the Word documents, books, videos, audio and images you wanted to all in the same library item, so that you can serve up a college course, a series of videos, a compilation of songs, etc. all packaged together nicely. You’ve just got to make sure the content is owned by you (as in, you created it, or you found it with a Creative Commons license that allows you to share it). That’s because the End User License Agreement requires you to only upload and share Creative Commons or Public Domain or other similarly licensed content.

So you can think of the Little Library not as a file repository, but as a multi-device, peer-to-peer, distributed online/offline open content bazaar based on bleeding-edge technologies like JQuery Mobile, HTML5 WebStorage, and CouchDB. Although that is a bit wordy…

More to come.

Open Source Book Reader at www.gracetoread.com

Screenshot from gracetoread.com

My wife, Grace, and I have just released the beta version of gracetoread.com, an open source online book reader (literally–the book is read to you while you read). We’ve opened up the code for the site on Github for anyone who wants to borrow, build, sell, or share it.

Right now we have chosen to release the beta with just two books, both by E. Nesbit. She’s a great  children’s author who heavily influenced the works of other writers in the genre including C. S. Lewis and Tolkien (the masters of modern fantasy and myth as far as I’m concerned). These are simple books, presented online as books, with a cross-browser (and mobile-ready) audio player that allows a person to listen to the book while they read. This is intended as an aid for developing English language reading literacy.

The service and all applications and content associated with it are fully open source and free (the books are available via Project Gutenberg and are public domain, the audio is from LibriVox and is public domain and the code is hosted on Github at https://github.com/rwadholm/flipOpen/wiki). The Web application is still in development, and we’d love to eventually be able to offer the following:

• Include every public domain book on LibriVox/Project Gutenberg
• Support multiple languages
• Allow for user submissions of text and audio
• Automated scripts that allow for much faster content creation and submission (right now it takes about 10-12 development hours to fully put a book with audio into the system)
• Smoother transitions
• Search capabilities
• The ability to create personal collections of books
• User collaboration space (for putting together new books, or for building communities around particular books, authors, or collections)

If you have ideas or suggestions for improvement, or would like a particular book to be put into the collection next, let us know!

IE9 Preview Platform

Internet Explorer has just released a preview of ie9. Very good to see a few more standards being used (and sometimes abused) by the evil stepmother of the Web! Now the canvas element, border-radius, and svg can begin to move forward in a less javascript dependant way (in supported browsers). Of course, you need js for svg and canvas anyway, so there is not much great here. And really, noone’s jobs will be any easier as a result — not for a good long time (because ie9 requires vista or 7). But still the preview is fun to play with, and will maybe help to move along further standardization and implementation of CSS3 and XHTML5. Maybe.

JQuery Tools

I have begun to use JQuery Tools for tabs and other minimally animated content. You get six JQuery related plugins in one package, all of which are hosted on a CDN so scripts don’t take up server space or bandwidth. Pretty clean coding and easy to expand. I’ve reworked their tabs and pop-up descriptions on a new site that I’m developing for the IU Theatre and Drama Department here: http://www.indiana.edu/~coas2/thtr/facilities/layout.shtml. This tool has allowed me to focus on specialized scripting rather than patching together many different JQuery plugins to do what I want them to. Also exciting is the release of JQuery 1.4 in January. I’m loving their new API documentation on their redesigned site, and some of the new features that come standard now.

The beauty of frameworks and tools like these are that they are easy to use and learn, and they allow us to focus on content and specialized tasks, and leave the rest to the framework. They are also open and heavily documented all over the internet. And extending them is very simple. This allows us to save time and money and hopefully allows our pages to be more accessible and interactive at the same time. If you haven’t already, try them out. There’s nothing like the feeling you get making stuff move around on a screen in a useful way.