Book rating added; no "pencil" required
I've added a five-star book rating system. The pro vote was overwhelming. If you don't want it, don't add the field to your catalog. I was against it, but once the feature was up I found myself obsessively rating my whole collection.
The system is technically cool. You can add stars to multiple books without leaving the catalog page. You do not need to use the "edit" pencil. There's no "submitting," "saving" or anything like that. Just click to add stars one by one; at five it cycles around to none again. (Loosely, the technique I'm using is called AJAX, and is very "hot.") I'm going to be adding similar on-catalog editing soon for tags.
Your catalog may not be currently showing the ratings field. If not, go to change fields and add it.
As with tags and reviews, ratings are totally optional. If just here to catalog, more power to you.
I haven't added stars to any statistics pages yet. I'll do this as the data warrants it.
The system is technically cool. You can add stars to multiple books without leaving the catalog page. You do not need to use the "edit" pencil. There's no "submitting," "saving" or anything like that. Just click to add stars one by one; at five it cycles around to none again. (Loosely, the technique I'm using is called AJAX, and is very "hot.") I'm going to be adding similar on-catalog editing soon for tags.
Your catalog may not be currently showing the ratings field. If not, go to change fields and add it.
As with tags and reviews, ratings are totally optional. If just here to catalog, more power to you.
I haven't added stars to any statistics pages yet. I'll do this as the data warrants it.
posted by Tim at 2:42 AM
27 Comments:
Very cool. Thanks for the ease and flexibility. It's a great feature to have available, but even better that it's so completely a matter of choice! It's easy and looks great. (Better on both counts than Netflix.) I like the fade as you rack up stars. The only 'problem' is making up one's mind!
Eurydice: Thanks. I particularly like that you noticed the fade. LT's gotten some well-deserved UI criticism recently, so I'm redoubling my efforts there.
Sounds great. I'll look forward, as usual, to being happily surprised by the refinements and developments you dream up - and make reality of.
LT is one cool Thing!
The rating field is blank for me, in both Safari and Firefox. All I get there is a blank square.
Cool little feature, and in my Firefox it seems to be working exactly as advertised.
Thanks!
Very shiny feature.
I didn't notice any fade on Firefox 1.0.7 WinXP, so maybe that's an IE thing?
Also occasionally doesn't work when I click in the box... I have to click in another book's box to get it going again. Not a big deal though.
What a great feature - wasn't fussed either way about it when discussed, but now it's here, yet another thing to play with. Obviously very subjective and the reviews will have more value, but love it anyway.
Won't have time to do anything else but visit Librarything....
I have the same problem as Daniel Drucker. In Safari (my only browser), the box is just blank.
I've got the fade in Firefox and IE on WinXP (it's subtle).
No problems so far.
For those who say that the box is empty, have you tried clicking it? It seems like an empty field till you click it.
I've noticed that in IE you have to wait a half second or so between clicks, but in Firefox you can click rapidly. I'd find that annoying if I were an IE user, but then again I find IE annoying.
Would it be possible to add ratings or reviews to books not in your own library. I don't keep every book I read.
Very cool! Any plans to AJAX-ify other parts of the site?
I like this very much. Any plans to incorporate this rating field into the import feature from other sources like Bibliophil?
Daniel and Ojnet: Just click in the blank area (the ? will tell you that too). If you can think of a better way, let me know. I don't think I want to have something like "NO STARS." Hmmm..
Selfnoise: Hmm. Can you tell me what browser and OS?
Dennis: Half a second. Yuck, that's bad. I wonder if it's loading the star number for the first time or if it stays that way after you've gone through all five.
Hippietrail: "Read" and "Wishlist" buckets are on the way. What you suggest seems to be to do this even when you don't add it to any bucket. That's an idea. I'll think about it.
Gfvonb: Yes, I plan to AXAJify it a lot, but not completely. I'm not totally sold on AJAX, but I do see the value.
Megan: No, sorry. Import is for the forseeable future just going to work on ISBNs. With ISBNs it doesn't even need to try to separate out fields and records. Adding fields like ratings would require it to parse that info, which is different for every single import target.
Using Firefox 1.0.7 the first time adding ratings, I had to click rather slowly to get the stars to appear. After several were added, I was able to click more rapidly and the stars appeared almost instantaneously. Hey, it's all magic to me.
Okay, Daniel gave me a dressing-down for it being unintuitive. He writes "There's a common, widely-known, widely-accepted metaphor here, so use it. You start with empty greyed out stars, and you click the first star for a 1 star rating, the 2nd star for a 2 star rating, etc..."
Is this so? I could see adding grayed-out stars as the initial state, but I rather like clicking through the stars one by one.
I'm also fond of "blank" stars. They don't imply un-doneness to others. Maybe it could show grayed-out stars on your own catalog, and blank ones to others.
Responses? Citations of other uses?
Tim,
I don't know if you've been able to try it yourself but the delay in IE isn't a matter of loading the images. You can click all day long and you'll still have that bit of delay.
My experience with the star ratings, with regard to the 'greyed out' issue, was quite simple - having a blank area makes it harder to know where to click. I don't even have more than two hundred books listed yet, but when I was trying this feature out in the lower-middle of my list I found I was clicking fairly randomly before I hit the first star. Having it blank just makes it sorta hard to tell.
I think with this being an optional feature you've hinted at the right idea - greyed out stars when you're editing your own catalogue, nothing at all when you're viewing someone elses.
As this is the first time I've posted in the blog, please allow me to just add what a wonderful, wonderful site this is and thankyou for it very much.
I've added a gray border around the graphic when you're on your own catalog—that might help.
Welcome danielrobot. Thanks for the advice.
I really like this feature! Or, I would if I could make it work. :(
When I input a rating from within the edit-content page, it "sticks" but when I do it using the catalog window, it doesn't. That is, let's say I click three times to rate the last book on the page three stars. The stars show up, I move on to the next page of the catalog. But if I back up, the book I just rated is again unrated. :(
I'm running Safari, if that matters.
(I don't want to sound all ungrateful, btw; I was doing okay without this feature, so I'm sure I can survive if I can't get it to work. :) )
It'd be awesome if there was a way to search for null or blank tags. I did about 300-400 of my books without tags before recognizing the greatness that is tags. I then went back and not sure if I got them all.
ts, you can find which books don't have tags by sorting by the tag field and going to the top or bottom depending on the sort order.
Hope this helps!
I vote against the grey outline boxes. I liked it better when it was just blank. The boxes look strange when so many of the entries are different heights.
The idea of having 5 stars outlined and then filled in when you click them is just an apple/iTunes fixation. I wouldn't worry about that either.
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks hippietrail. I feel stoopid not to have thought of that. *grin*
I'm running Safari 2.0.2 (416.12) -- I just applied the 10.4.3 updater last night -- and my ratings aren't saved when I load a different page.
However, if I edit a book's record and use the pop-up menu, they do stick.
Any ideas?
www.librarything.com/catalog/wenestvedt
I'm having the same trouble in Safari. The ratings are only saved when I edit the item, not when entering it from the catalogue page. I've been using Firefox in the mean time which has been working out fine. :)
Very nice new feature!
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