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Muslim Women's Popular Fiction database

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Muslim Women's Popular Fiction database

Created to support the Muslim Women's Popular Fiction module run at the University of Birmingham.

The database is managed in Contentful, transformed into Schema.org models and then served through a custom JavaScript frontend.

To run locally, run make sync to download the database and transform it into a JSON file. Then make up to serve the application. There's no compilation or build step.

You'll need to create a .env file containing the Contentful space and API key.

Technical decisions

I used the Schema.org architecture because I love structured data and I'm doing other stuff with it elsewhere. It also means the frontend application uses a consistent data structure: any changes to the Contentful model just need to be handled by the transformer.

I didn't use a JavaScript frontend because I didn't need to, and the bespoke version is much smaller than anything a frontend framework would spit out. To keep it feasible I'm also using quite a lot of modern language features, which comes at the cost of older browser support.

I used GitHub Actions because they're easy to set up when the repo's already here, but it's just an rsync job so the task runner is pretty inconsequential.