Tags: speeding up and slimming down
I'm changing how tags work to speed things up a little before the new server arrives.
Selecting tags had become a chore. The list of other people using the tag was taking 1-2 seconds to load. The new one usually takes less than .001 seconds. Tonight and tomorrow I'll be speeding other tag-based functions up similarly.
To achieve these effects I made a decision: From now on each tag cannot exceed thirty characters in length. This is enough for most purposes, even "used modern history textbooks," but not for "things that are almost but not quite dictionaries" (a real tag!). Most processes now already use the "short'" version; the long versions will remain visible and editable until next Sunday. Then the axe falls! Actually, since most of the long tags are really comments or reviews, I will move them to the users' comments field.
Selecting tags had become a chore. The list of other people using the tag was taking 1-2 seconds to load. The new one usually takes less than .001 seconds. Tonight and tomorrow I'll be speeding other tag-based functions up similarly.
To achieve these effects I made a decision: From now on each tag cannot exceed thirty characters in length. This is enough for most purposes, even "used modern history textbooks," but not for "things that are almost but not quite dictionaries" (a real tag!). Most processes now already use the "short'" version; the long versions will remain visible and editable until next Sunday. Then the axe falls! Actually, since most of the long tags are really comments or reviews, I will move them to the users' comments field.
posted by Tim at 1:17 AM
26 Comments:
We can live with that. (I think most of us are so excited we can live with just about however you want to do it.) Most of mine are one or two words, anyways. The couple I had that were longer (though I am NOT guilty of the quoted one) I was planning to change, anyways.
It is rather odd, yet somehow comforting to find the website changing around oneself as one enters books... you do take time to sleep, don't you?
Sleeping much less, that's for sure. I'm glad you find it comforting to find "the website changing around" as you are on it. Even when I wasn't fouling people up, I figured I was freaking people out. More and more this seems like an esoteric bit of performance art.
More changes coming, although most are "underground." If the plumbing gurgles, pay no mind.
This is addicting enough, I'm thinking there are a flock of night owls hovering around. Though I'd noticed you were rearranging the "users" page, I definitely did do a doubletake when "users" changed to "zeitgeist"... thought for sure my mind had gone to bed without me.
And yes, it's comforting. It's good to watch someone creating something that people wanted and needed--- and that we're really NOT the only people out there who like books. And more books.
Some of us Night Owls are on the West Coast, so we have many hours left in the day for hovering! Well, three, anyway. Sleep, hmm, there's an idea…
I didn't know people read on the west coast. I'm astounded! :)
I suspect some of those long tags might be the result of misunderstanding. A friend of mine just signed up, tagged one of his books
"history north_america central_america south_america"
No prizes for guessing what he meant.
--Tikitu
Btw, I went anonymous because Blogger seems to think I'm Korean. Actually, I'm in Amsterdam, and the number of people inquiring about British Library support might explain some of that 'night owl' activity you're noticing.
--Tikitu
Ha! Well, Quiddities and that Borges book have to be categorizable in other ways, much as I love your tag, kukkurovaca.
quasi-dictionary? almost-dictionary? quasi-almost-dictionary?
I'm with Shawna, having the website change as I'm entering books is neat; it just reiterates the degree to which this site is like a living composite organism.
And slimming down tags is fine. I love the fact that the top 100 tags seems to be working. I couldn't figure out how it was working before -- it seemed to suggest that I was holding 90% of the poetry, and I know that's not the case.
I've never had more than a very rough estimate of how many books I have; once again, thank you for changing that.
Actually, some of us even hail from Israel... :)
Along with the British Library, which would be nice, there's also OLIS - http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/olis/ - the catalogue of the Oxford University libraries system (many libraries, including the Bodleian cluster).
There is a difference between BL holdings and OULS holdings, even though both are copyright libraries - Oxford's library goes back further and both have some collection eccentricities that makes it worth checking both for books older than 20th century.
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Great work on the site, keep it up! I'm switching to a paid account on Tuesday morning (earliest I can afford it) and will also pay for a second account in order to keep my son's books separate. One 'problem': the 200-books limit doesn't seem to be enforced right now! I've exceeded it by 100+ (by adding from other people's lists) and haven't yet come across a problem doing so. Please don't delete what I've done so far (!) but you might want to look at this...
I for one wouldn't mind alphabetical, but I suspect others would disagree with me. Perhaps the option to swith between them?
And yes, I've just barely started... but it's addicting :)
Guess that means I have to come up with a shortened version of "I have no idea where this book came from or how it ended up on my shelf" which is also a sadly accurate description of an entire category of my library-- things I don't want to add back into the permanent collection because a) I half suspect they actually belong somewhere else and b) I just don't like the idea of someone looking at them and thinking I actually acquired them deliberately.
On the features front, any chance of getting the ability to export to EndNote or BibTeX?
As well as OLIS, there is also Newton which is the Cambridge equivalent and can be accessed from http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/
There may be differences between which books get requested by each university and how they are categorised so there may be a point in adding both.
amvhoward said... "Guess that means I have to come up with a shortened version of 'I have no idea where this book came from or how it ended up on my shelf' which is also a sadly accurate description of an entire category of my library...
Ah. I call those books Interlopers.
chamekke said "Ah. I call those books Interlopers."
I suppose that'll do. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'm west coast. And I was up til almost 3am messing with this. My former mother-in-law/current neighbor just wandered in the back door, and actually had the nerve to laugh when she realized (and brought to my attention) that I haven't even made a dent yet. Sigh.
I did see some tags that had dots rather then underlines connecting the tags, also.
And librarything... you must be missing out on Powells. In my family, we're not sure if winning the lotto or moving in to Powells might be better. :)
I have some books I suppose i could catagorize as "almost but not quite dictionaries", but instead I think I'll mark them as writing and reference and decide what else they need called later. All the long tags I was starting out with really had two or more elements I could just tag them with separately... I'm hoping sooner or later there will be a way to find or sort by say, tag#1 and tag#2.
Traffic Rank for librarything.com
Today 1 wk. Avg. 3 mos. Avg. 3 mos. Change
24,256 29,158 -- --
Reach for librarything.com:
Reach per million users:
Today 1 wk. Avg. 3 mos. Avg. 3 mos. Change
25 31 4.35
Site statistics for librarything.com show a great spike from August 29 till today. May the spike be with you librarything :*)
Hey, my friend Joe and I just got started with Libray Thing and love it. We both were residents of New Orleans, in grad school, and have had our entire libraries litterally taken from us. I'm in better shape than Joe is because I live on the 2nd floor in my building. Anyway, this is really neat and when I get more books, I will add them. Thanks for creating this.
Not sure if anyone's pointed you at the National Library of Australia catalogue yet:
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/
Also not sure of a machine-queryable interface, but you may have a better idea of where to look ;)
All my wife's crime fiction turns up on the LoC or Amazon catalogues no problem, but nearly all of my Sci-Fi (mostly published in the UK) has to be entered by hand :( Even switching to Amazon.co.uk searches doesn't seem to help, for some unknown reason.
I'm loving LibraryThing anyway, and will have to sign up for the paid account shortly or else I'll hit my limit ;)
Amazon.co.uk seems to be working intermittently - perhaps to do with server load? Searching for the same items an hour apart gets different results.
Hi, I discovered library thing last night, and I think it's fantastic.
I'm glad international searches is on your to-do list - this would be great - particularly uk/australia :)
I see a comment up above regarding the National Library of Australia, but i don't think it has a free z39.50 - however I believe the University of Sydney does (http://library.usyd.edu.au) [The app i use on my compter, Books (books.aetherial.net) has a heap of free international Z39.50 sources it searches,and this is one of them]
Perhaps a bug, perhaps already known: my "author cloud" doesn't seem to be working at the moment. It was the same yesterday. It brings up a blank page under Firefox, Mozilla, Explorer, Konqueror, Opera, etc.
Your changes to the tag system are fantastic. I tried a global change of one particular tag, and it worked beautifully. Thank you so much.
Hi - I'm the one who left the comment here about exceeding the free limit... I got it up to 500+ before I paid this afternoon (I'm in the UK). You definitely want to watch out for that.
It seems as though the author cloud is a measure of which authors you have tagged instead of a measure of how many works by each author are in your collection. Is there a way to change this?
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