This is the project I’ve been working on since Feb 2020. It’s a web app for the web fiction community that is both a review aggregator and a way to keep up with new chapters. It is currently in open beta. Check it out.
Tech: the app is built on Mysql, NodeJS + TypeScript + Loopback, and React/Redux on the frontend. Because it’s a single-page app, I’m serving the frontend out of S3 + CloudFront. The backend is running on EC2, RDS, and S3. Everything builds, tests, and deploys automatically via GitLab CI/CD.
I also have a Discourse server set up as the forums with an integrated single-sign on system.
The website sits somewhere between Goodreads, NovelUpdates, and Steam.
Features include:
- Uploading and viewing web novels with novel information, statistics, and aggregated ratings
- Account authentication and security
- Posting reviews and ratings, as well as feedback on the reviews
- A ranking system that updates aggregated ratings several times a day using a Bayesian average to account for uncertainty
- A novel title search
- A read-chapter tracking system to help you keep track of where you are in a web novel
- An automated Mocha testing suite for the backend
- Webscraping chapter links from popular web serials
- An RSS bot automatically pulls new chapters when authors post them
