Layman's Guide to Computing

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December 22, 2018

[LMG] Issue 2: Don’t reinvent the wheel

Just thinking about recreating the Readmill reading experience in an app was mind-boggling, especially for someone like me with minimal programming experience. I decided to poke around looking for ideas, projects, things I could hop on to.

As a way to have highlight permalinks, Hypothes.is looks really promising. I can link people to highlights I have made, and they can reply inline, and the whole conversation can be referenced via a convenient URL (such as this). It even appears in context if you load the Hypothes.is extension while on the page.

Screenshot of a highlight on the Hypothes.is website One of my highlights in Hypothes.is. It has its own permalink!

The best part? I already have an account, and quite a few highlights in there for use. No need to write the whole annotation system myself! Now I just need to figure out how to get my annotations from there, and put new annotations into the Hypothes.is service.

Screenshot of profile page from the Hypothes.is website My Hypothes.is profile and annotations

First, I will need to figure out how to read and write the data from the website, and how to interpret it.

Next issue: Reading and writing web data-what is all this clutter?

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