Bookmark Manager

Makers Academy Week No. 4

Instructions

We worked through the challenges throughout the week in rotating pairs.

You're going to build a bookmark manager. A bookmark manager is a website to maintain a collection of URLs. You can use it to save a webpage you found useful. You can add tags to the webpages you saved to find them later. You can browse links other users have added.

Below are the high-level user stories that this project was intended to satisfy:

As a time-pressed user
So that I can quickly go to web sites I regularly visit
I would like to see a list of links on the homepage

As a time-pressed user
So that I can quickly find web sites I recently bookmarked
I would like to see links in descending chronological order

As a time-pressed user
So that I can save a website
I would like to add the site's address and title to my bookmark manager

As a time-pressed user
So that I can organise my many links into different categories for ease of search
I would like to add tags to the links in my bookmark manager

As a time-pressed user
So that I can quickly find links on a particular topic
I would like to filter links by tag

Objectives

Are you having fun?
Are you a better developer than you were yesterday?
Can you build a web app that uses a database?

Using my application

Download the source code using $ git clone
Navigate into the root of the directory using $ cd
Install all the dependencies by running the command $ bundle in the root directory
Download PostgreSQL (if you do not already have it installed)
Enter $ psql in the command line and create two databases (needed for the app)
- Type $ create database bookmark_manager_development;
- Then, type $ create database bookmark_manager_test;
- Enter $ \q to quit PSQL
Run $ shotgun in the command line to run the app
Go to localhost:9393 in a browser to view and interact with the app

You can also view the deployed version here.

Running the tests

Within the root of the directory, run $ rspec to run the tests and see the results in the command line

Dependencies

Application written in Ruby 2.3.3
Built using the Sinatra web framework
Based on a PostgreSQL database with DataMapper as the ORM
Uses BCrypt for password encryption
Unit tests written in RSpec
Feature tests written using RSpec and Capybara

Approach

With regard to the data structure used:
- We set it up to have a many-to-many relationship between links and tags, which allowed links to have multiple tags
- We then had a one-to-many relationship between users and tags
The web app architecture follows the MVC pattern, as with other projects

Reflections

Found this a really interesting project and felt like we were building something 'real'
Was interesting to read up about password hashing
Deploying to Heroku was quite tricky - but interesting to see how you set up a production database
Was also interesting to see how the models changed from this project and the last (see Battle) as they went from classes full of methods to essentially schemas for the database tables

Ideas for extension

Would be nice to give our app some styling
Would also be good to add proper buttons for the links filtering, rather than just leaving them as routes

Collaborators

Eleanor Kavanagh-Brown, Katerina Loschinina, Shoniwa Marovatsanga, Irene Canuti, Barbara Shinkarenko

kathicks / bookmark-manager