Paper Trail is a small Rails application I use to keep track of my reading. The source code is available on GitHub, licensed under the GPL. Some extremely rudimentary documentation is included in the README file, and I noted its intentions and shortcomings in this article.

URLify is a library extracted from Paper Trail for converting accented characters to their ASCII equivalents.

Incompleteness

In truth, Paper Trail needs a fair bit of work. Here’s a list of the most major outstanding issues; patches are welcome.

• Comprehensive test coverage
• RDoc for all the source code
• Autocomplete for author names
• Fragment caching for HTML pages
• Allow draft articles
• Add author synonyms, e.g. Iain M. Banks vs. Iain Banks
• A more serious authentication system
• Arrow icons for the next/previous page links
• Sort a book’s authors by input order
• Replace BlueCloth and RubyPants with RDiscount
• Dependency documentation
• Support for multiple authors
• A frequency graph
• Page caching for feeds and XML
• Book and author pagination
• Custom 404 and 500 error pages
• Cleaner transitions for Ajax editing
• ‘Cancel’ buttons for the Ajax editing forms
• A more elegant form design