Being the administrator and active user of my highschool’s alumni website, masalumni.org I have noticed that the most active post in the forums is regarding book recommendations for the literature class. As anyone who has been paying attention to my sidebar knows, one of my hobbies is reading books (just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows :)). Given this background, I decided to create a specific site to list all the books that have been mentioned in this forum (restricted registration required).

Here’s the link, for those of you who can wait to finish reading:
http://mas.gbtopia.com/books

Books site screenshot

I used the same Wordpress plugin that powers my sidebar, called Amazon Media Manager. I had to make several changes to add support for ratings, comments and dynamically retrieving book descriptions. The result is an AJAX application that displays a list of books, allows users to rate them and add their own comments. Users can also filter the list to display only the recommendations made by a particular user. I had to brush up a bit on my PHP skill. It was rather easy, and was ready in about five days during my free time.

Update (2007-08-25): Now you can sort the books by different criteria. Added screenshot.

A lot of people reach my site by searching for Modern American School (or Escuela Moderna Americana, in Spanish), which is the school where I spent 15 years receiving kinder, primary and secondary education in Mexico City. About two years ago, I started a project to create a website for ex-alumni. However, due to time constraints and other priorities I wasn’t able to finish this project.

Chris Gehringer has step up to this task and set up a new site for MAS alumni, based on his Alumni Channel software. I am the administrator of this site, which has turned out to be quite popular. The URL for this site is: http://masalumni.org.

The following page includes more details on this project (in Spanish): MAS website.

Update (2007-02-05): The Modern American School celebrated their 55th anniversary on Feb. 3, 2007. Click here to view a few pictures from my class (1996).

Update (2007-04-05): Added information regarding the MAS alumni website.

Update (2007-04-02): Organized this post a bit to better reflect the current status of the MAS Alumni website.