Colandria

The Reading Directory for Bookworms

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Inspiration

As information streams become ever more bloated, it becomes difficult to organize, moderate and discover content in a stress-free way. Colandria aims to fix this by providing a clean, distraction-free book directory to organize your reading.

Feed Discover new books added by others in the Colandria Community. The feed is minimal, using the sunk-cost principle to help your discover new books you would have never though of!

The sunk cost principle states that, once you have invested some amount of time/energy into a task, you are thus inclined to continue spending time/energy until the task yields a reward. Colandria uses by displaying a minimal interface for each book - this encourages you to learn more about the book through the amazon/goodreads link. Once you have made this initial "investment", you are more likely to spend more time investigating the book, hence exposing you to a wider variety of books that you would ordinarily come across.

Library Save interesting books to your personal library, and return to them later.

Journal Keep track of your thoughts by making notes on the books saved in your library!

Mind Palace Block out the distraction which keep you from focus, and listen to lofi/atmospheric music while you read.

The name Colandria derives from the words Column and Alexandria, referring to the Sumerian's use of tabular inventory as one of the earliest forms of recorded information, and the library of Alexandria, one of the most comprehensive libraries in history.

What it does

Colandria flips the sunk-cost principle on its head, using it to help you discover new books. As the number of users on Colandria grows, so does its database of books.

How I built it

The frontend, hosted on Netlify, is a React-Typescript application and the backend is an express-ts server connecting to a mysql data store. Both the frontend and the backend run on the NodeJS runtime.

Challenges I ran into

I several issues when configuring my database. While I initially intended to use postgres, a version compatibility issue meant I had to switch to MySQL. MySQL workbench then itself failed to run a local instance - I spent several hours trying to fix this before finding a solution. Nevertheless, I now have more experience with troubleshooting local RDBMS instances!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud to have fully planned, built and presented a solo hackathon project for the first time!

What I learned

I learned to integrate the Netlify ID api to simplify Colandria's authentication process. I'm also proud to have implemented my own system for switching between light and dark mode to aid site aesthetics.

What's next for Colandria

I'm intending on building out Colandria's functionality through better music options, more detailed note-taking, and hierarchical organization within your library.

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