A web interface to 750book-script.

Used to live at 750books.com. Now defunct. (No link: I let the domain expire, and it's now a parking page.)

My second serious Django app. I've learned a lot since, but this contains some bits I refer back to occasionally, particularly the CSS.

Definitely should not be run as-is, as it eg. hardcodes SECRET_KEY. (See above about having learned a lot since through painful trial-and-error.)

If you're currently also learning through painful trial-and-error, I cannot recommend Daniel Greenfield and Audrey Roy's Two Scoops of Django. I wish it had existed when I was working on this project, as it will teach you, in a friendly and engaging fashion, to avoid all of the things I got wrong, plus many mistakes I never got far enough to make. (I don't have any relationship with them; just a big fan.)

I never really launched the site -- I always had just a few more things to do before I announced it -- so it never saw serious use. This was one of my big lessons in "the perfect is the enemy of the good."

The site uses CLSI to abstract using LaTeX to render PDFs. The site specifically used the public CLSI test server, which the Scribtex folks took down after one of the big Rails vulnerabilities. (Not coincidentally, that was when I pulled the plug on the 750books.com service, having not gotten around to those "few more things" for over a year.)

So I present the site more as a historical curiosity than anything.

Despite these failures, I spent a lot of time getting the CSS just right, and I am still proud of how good it looked: