Book reviews - the planning stage

By: Dennis Rongo | December 1, 2007

OK, I know that I've been planning my "books reading" section on my site for a while now and as of late, I have been visualizing how the content will be displayed, etc. Before I start a task or a project, I always try to plan first and analyze everything as there's tons of possible pitfalls during the development process. I don't like to settle for a solution without thinking of multiple other alternatives. My goal is to develop my book reading section with the best possible way of achieving the end result.

With all that in mind, here are the conceptualized attributes for the table that will be displayed. First is the field, then the possible value(s) stored, then the field type.

  • ContentID - incremental value - integer
  • Image - URL to image directory - varchar(300)
  • URL - URL to Amazon.com - varchar(300)
  • Rating - ("1", "2", "3", "4", "5") - integer
  • Review - My review such as pros and cons - text
  • Type ("wish list" or "current reading" or "past reading") - varchar(50)
  • StartDate - When I started reading - datetime
  • EndDate - When I finished reading - datetime
  • Category - ("business" or "programming" or "others") - varchar(100)

As a side note, the book reviews section will consist of two pages. The first page is the entry page where it contains a list of books (similar to browsing a shopping site) where book items are enlisted and grouped under 3 main categories (wish list, current reading, past reading). Each book will have a thumbnail image, start date, end date (N/A if current reading), direct URL to Amazon.com product entry, rating (represented by images), and lastly, a link to the second page which will have my full review of the book.

The second page will once again have the underlying rating below my review as well as the items details from the first page. My goal is to work on this in two weeks immediately after my GM 105 final exam. The reason for this is, once I get started on a project, I will never stop, I mean literally be on it on majority of my free time. In the future, once I setup the administrator side, I should be able to add, delete, edit items from the database on the fly. For the mean time, I will have to manually insert items in the database. Wink If anyone has anything to add, feel free to comment here or shoot me an email.

- Dennis 

 

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