Logbook Feed

A plugin that integrates with Logbook, a student project implemented in RoR that provides users with the ability to discover and share their friends? or their own travel experiences. Users can select Logs from their Logbook, which will then show up in a widget on their WordPress blog.

Idea

Users on Logbook can create Logs where they publish entries about where they are currently at, combined with a photo and an interactive map showing the progress of their trip. (Fig. 1) Those Logs aren?t normally available to the public, since Logbook is a private community where content is only available to a user?s friends. The idea is, that Logs be made publicly available by integrating them into other online Platforms via Plugins, such as Logbook Feed for WordPress. By doing so, users don?t have to waste thoughts about privacy settings and access control, since everything in Logbook is private, unless you integrate it with another service.

Feasibility

The fact that Logbook is implemented in Ruby on Rails allows for an easy providing of public interfaces that can be used from the outside. By default, most content on Rails apps can by requested not only as standard HTML but also in JSON notation. For the WordPress blog, it?s first of all necessary to find ways for users to authenticate with their Logbook profile, so that the plugin may request the initially private log data. This would be possible mainly via two options, the first being standard authentication via username and password and the second being a unique hash string that could be generated on a Log and then inserted on the plugin settings page.