The other day there was a post by Seth Godin in which he talked about the opportunity for an online bibliography creator that allowed you to just enter the ISBN for a book, and it would automatically find all of the relevant information for you, incorporate it into a bibliography, which you could then share with whomever you wanted to. I was sort of looking for some project where I could incorporate Amazon Web Services and also start using Google AdSense. So this project basically slapped me in the head and said “Build Me”.
The upshot of all of that is that I did. Checkout Biblio - Online Bibliography Creator. It’s all very basic at the moment, but you can search for a book, build a bibliography and print it out in 5 different citation styles. There’s alot of things I need to add to it: Search by Book Name, Manual Citation Entry (for sources not listed on Amazon), other Citation types (articles, web pages, journals etc etc). Still, it’s a start.
I built it relatively quickly in RubyOnRails. I have spent most of the past few months pretty much back in the world of ASP.Net and C# for a couple of projects that I’m working on - GradDirect (I’m subcontracting for IBC) and on a new site for KVM Australia which is just about getting ready to launch (man, talking about WebCentral is a whole new post .. sigh). The upshot of it all was that I had slipped out of the RubyOnRails space, and I had forgotten just how damn cool it is. Good to know that she fits back on like a smooth glove.
Anyway, check out Biblio. Kick the tyres and leave a comment about what you thought of it.