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Little Free Library, part 2
January 09th, 2019
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I originally wrote part 1 of this build back in October [0] and
I have a few little things to add.
First, I want to call out a major hurdle I'm facing: Captive
Portal browsers don't allow users to download files. It's
a security thing. That's annoying for a library that's designed to
give you ebooks, but it might not be a barrier for your uses.
Someone on Mastodon mentioned making a video based thing, and that
should work just fine entirely in captive portal.
Second, captive portal browsers are way behind the times with
regard to css support. No CSS-Grid here, folks. Sadly I had to
fall back on some older methods to make my page pretty.
Speaking of pages, here's a link to the repository that houses my
web interface to the library [1].
If you're reading this as of the moment of posting then you'll see
that I haven't addressed problem #1 yet. If you're finding this
later in time, hopefully it's all fixed for you. Here's my current
plan of attack:
- Create a very simple captive portal page that advertises the
little free library and instructs users to open a regular
browser and navigate to http://littlefreelibrary.local
- The generated library page will be hosted at the root url, not
the captive-portal location, and will allow full downloads.
This is going to take some testing to get right, but once it's all
squared away I'll update that repo to contain both pages and
deployment scripts.
Finally, I've purchased a solar battery that I'm going to try out.
It's a very basic solar charging battery pack of Amazon that I'm
not going to bother linking. It's likely not the real solution
here since they're notoriously bad at actually charging from the
sun, and when they do they overheat and destroy the battery. But
it will finish my proof of concept, and that's what's important.
Once that arrives, I'll hopefully have time this weekend to give
the project one last push and get it working in the woods.
[0] Little Free Library, Part 1
[1] Little Free Library Web Source
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