Language support
I'm spending the day on alphabet-support issues—getting all those diacriticals to work. Doing this requires some database and programming changes, some of which need to go through various steps, so you may see all your diacriticals go bad one minute, then correct the next. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
posted by Tim at 12:58 PM
13 Comments:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.. with a big collection of Nordic/Baltic stuff, it is most appreciated.
Say, how about supporting additional authentication mechanisms, such as OpenID?
Hmmm. Perhaps that is why the tags are showing up in all their linky goodness on the catalog?
Another feature request!
How hard would it be to allow us to import our Amazon wishlist, with every entry tagged as "wishlist"?
Guess you'd need to somehow pass on our Amazon credentials, which may be a worry. Or are wishlists public?
Not an important feature, but it'd be cool ;)
Language: I'm half-way through on language set conversion. I'm only writing here because a process is running. You may have noticed it too, slowing things down a little.
Wishlists: Any way that people want to use it is fine with me. I notice, for example, that people are entering libraries of only ten books because they want to display those ten books on their blog—and nothing else. Odd, but whatever floats your boat.
That said, I think I can't import Amazon Wishlists. Amazon has rules about their data—I'd have to refresh it every day.
As stated before—with no objection from Amazon as yet—I am ignoring this with respect to non-commercial highly-static data (titles, authors, etc.) pertaining to people's personal collections. Besides, Amazon also requires you refresh every day, but no more than once per second, and LT now has twice as many books as there are seconds in a day!
So, I'm pushing the envelope a little by not refreshing titles. As a commercial and often-changing piece of data, wishlists are more problematic. I can understand why Amazon wouldn't want me to be recapitulating out-of-date customer information.
At best I could have a special "wishlist" screen that kept them separate but allowed you to add them to your library when a wish was fulfilled. The data would be permanently tied to Amazon's data, and couldn't be changed within the LT system. I'm not sure how useful that would be.
I really hope you can add full Unicode support. I have books in Arabic, Chinese, Georgian, Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian and I would really love to be able to use the true authors' names and titles. Also this would be a step toward adding support for Amazon Japan.
I figured there may be hurdles with the wishlist idea. It's no biggie.
As for why I'd want to do it, I guess that it makes it easier for me seeing my wishlist and actual books in the same place. Plus there's that satisfaction of retagging them once I acquire the books on my wishlist, inducting them as full members of my library ;)
I only very rarely purchase stuff from Amazon, as there's no Australian outlet and the shipping costs from .us or .uk negate any other advantages. Consequently I don't check my wishlist on there very often.
I still have another 600+ books to catalogue at home, and probably half of those will have to be manaully entered it seems. So the wishlist is really the least of my problems ;)
Full unicode support won't happen on this update. The LT's main database right now is the LC, and the LC sends transliterations.
My next big leap is to offer other libraries, and together with that do parse everything using Marc records. That should allow me to make the leap to non-Latin alphabets.
I'm tagging things as "wishlist" that I want to purchase, and "tbr" for things I want to read. If I was only allowed to catalog stuff here I owned, it wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting to me. That's actually one of the main problems I have with every other computer-based system I've tried, online or software. They're all geared toward the limited usage of a physical collection, and have sort of annoying things that pertain solely to that, but are just in my way. This, on the other hand, is perfect. It can be used for either application, and the tagging makes it incredibly flexible. (Which is mucho appreciated :) (MMM. I'm still working on transferring my wishlist by hand from Amazon, but there are hundreds of things there. This gives me a good reason to sort and edit them.)
The most difficult part of all of this work is not allowing myself to stop and read. Although I did come across a book on Mexico that I hadn't read, and I'm about 70 pages into it. Great book. No time....
Just wanted to tell you that your 'Conscience of a Conservative' comment at alfvaen@LiveJournal cracked me up.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/alfvaen/74147.html
In response to fears about putting your books online:
"To be clear, all suspicious libraries are in fact forwarded to the Trilateral Commission. You can avoid this fate, however, by adding six copies of James Watt's 'Conscience of a Conservative' to your library. It's like garlic to vampires."
Of course, this wouldn't be so funny if LibraryThing could handle Chinese books.
PS: I'd just like to point out I *have* Watt's book. Buck-a-Book is a wonderful place.
On refreshing with Amazon.
I've had to correct a number of records that Amazon UK has produced for some of my books.
One of which is that a number of my Pan paperbacks from the 70s and 80s were being returned with the publisher as TOR. Conversely some recent volumes which were TOR UK were being returned as Pan.
I guess I am a tad obsessive about making sure that the actual imprint is recorded
For that reason alone I wouldn't want data to be refreshed. Also as you point out there is already a logistics problem in refreshing the data and that will only get worse.
Post a Comment
<< Home