One RSS feed made. So what RSS do you want?
So, I've added one RSS feed—recent books from your or someone else's library. You'll find the feed in users' profile pages, marked with the familiar 
icon. The feed shows the last twenty books entered, linking to the book's catalog page. The "description" field includes the user's review (if there is one), their tags and the books publication data.
I made one feed to test the waters, and to provoke comment. So, what else do you want? I suggest:
Another suggestion: I'd rather have a single page with feed buttons and maybe a way to create just the feed you want. I'd rather not be strewing orange buttons all over. Am I a fuddy-duddy?
PS: Forum is coming.
icon. The feed shows the last twenty books entered, linking to the book's catalog page. The "description" field includes the user's review (if there is one), their tags and the books publication data.I made one feed to test the waters, and to provoke comment. So, what else do you want? I suggest:
- A feed of someone's recent reviews
- A feed of someone's recent books, but restricted to a given tag
- A feed of others' review of books owned by someone (so you can track reviews of books in your library)
Another suggestion: I'd rather have a single page with feed buttons and maybe a way to create just the feed you want. I'd rather not be strewing orange buttons all over. Am I a fuddy-duddy?
PS: Forum is coming.
posted by Tim at 8:24 PM
19 Comments:
I'm not sure how to do this one, but perhaps 'Books newly added to the site' just as a curiousity feed.
I have to say that I would prefer comments rather than reviews (perhaps I'm just being picky) or maybe an option to decide between them? Some reviews are links, but they are not clickable in RSS. There needs to be a space before tags (right now it runs into the publication information). It is a bit long of a feed name, but I honestly can't recommend anything shorter.
And, you are not a fuddy-duddy. One neat page (perhaps in extras?) would be nice, except for, perhaps, the single 'recent books' in a profile. And, I do look forward to the forum.
What feeds do I want? All of them. No kidding.
For example, I want to be able to search for anyone's books (or one particular user's) that are tagged both "religion" and "ferrets", then subscribe to recent books from that list (I'm not saying that I would subscribe to that particular example, just that I'd like to be able to). As a starter/teaser to this, I'd like to be able to subscribe to any particular tag for whichever user.
Like what's available on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/
As an example, here's a feed of everybody's photos tagged either "green" or "cats": http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cats%2Cgreen&format=rss_200
As for how you give that to us (whether as a link (with or without an orange badge) at the bottom of a search-results page, or on its own special page… I'm far less needy on that point. (=
This is a classic example of the freelancer's dictum: don't ask the custom what he wants, ask him which of three options he wants. Everything? Everything isn't an option! :)
I can do some "globals," like most recent books and most recent reviews.
I'm interested by parelle's desire to do comments, not reviews. I see comments as being a place for comments about the physical object, not the content. Thus, reviews are globally exposed—you see others' reviews when you look at any copy of a book—and comments aren't. I wonder if the comments/reviews distinction is mine alone, or if LT should nudge people more strongly on the topic.
I'd be interested to know what people are reading the RSS *with*. This has something to do with how it presents. So far I've only looked at in Bloglines, Google's personalized start page and as code. I'm pretty confident it's well-formed, however, as I'm using XML libraries and validating it.
I'm interested by parelle's desire to do comments, not reviews. I see comments as being a place for comments about the physical object, not the content.
In fact, that is exactly what I use comments for. Hence chatty nonsense about my sister kidnapping my duplicates, where's this from, and what's available to borrow. In my particular case, I don't have the desire to review my books, but I would like people to be able to easily access why I have them, or what's interesting about my particular copy. Perhaps others don't have the desire for comments then.
As for RSS readers, here's a basic RSS to HTML version
http://www.rss-to-javascript.com/?p=151,381&chan=1&simple_chan=1&desc=1&src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.librarything.com%2Frss.php%3Ftype%3Drecent%26view%3Dparelle&as_html=1
in Ablion
in Firefox’s Sage Reader
i'd be interested in a feed for "new onlies added".
also, i'd like to be able to create a "currently reading" feed from my own library, and a "just finished" feed with reviews, and a "recommended" feed. :) hey, you asked!
i use comments right now for cover artists and illustrators as well as for awards. oh, and to note that the displayed cover isn't actually the cover of the book i own :/ (there should be a way to dissociate the cover the amazons come up with, but i presume that'll be possible when we can upload our own cover images).
i read RSS feeds via livejournal, or opera's built-in reader. yours reads fine in both.
bug report: i am getting a "fatal error (5.1)" with every book i am adding by clicking on any of the books that come up in a search right now -- the book gets added alright however. i am using opera 8.5 in case that makes a difference.
Actually, the RSS feed thing kind of worries me. I have a LiveJournal, but because of a certain person that I feel threatened by, most of my posts have become "friends only". Being a "book person", I kind of have the idea that somebody can tell a lot about another by the books that they read. And I'm kind of nervous, should the above-mentioned person find me at this site. I know I can have a private library, but I think it would be a cool idea to have friends' groups, like LJ or Flickr, so that there is some control on who has access to stuff. (I wouldn't mind people reading my reviews if they were looking for a particular book, btw.) I guess the RSS thing worries me a bit more, because if somebody were trying to keep tabs on another, they wouldn't even have to come to the librarything.com site - they'd just have to set up an account somewhere (and even LJ has this capability) and watch to see when there were any updates.
-Katja
What kind of RSS feeds would I like?
I'd love a weekly Zeitgeist feed, perhaps with the number of users and books added this week, and the new total number of users and books.
Katja:
I'm sitting back and observing what people are requesting, but I wanted to respond to your concern. First, I'm sorry that's happening to you—yuck! Second, the system gives an empty feed for all private users. Indeed, it gives the same feed for non-existant users as it gives for private users. I will make sure this applies as LT offers other feeds, such as recent reviews.
I'm thinking about adding private books (in public libraries). I might also consider some sort of way for trusted people to examine your library without having your password. Those are a few weeks off, however.
Best,
Tim
just out of curiousity is it possible to do negative tag searches? A search for books that aren't tagged with a certain field?
I also echo the multiple tag search.
Re: "I'd rather not be strewing orange buttons all over." Do this instead: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="foo">
It would be useful to be able to get feeds of various things for all users on my watchlist in one fell swoop.
I agree with Piranha's comment about covers that don't match. I'd like to remove non-matching covers or re-search for the correct edition if I have accepted the wrong one.
BTW, why do there appear to be totally different covers for matching editions? I just added a 2005 Ballantine paperback and my cover doesn't match the 2005 Ballantine edition LT found. Do covers change that often?
Tim, I am all for private books option within public libraries.
books4life
RSS Feeds:
- Recent books per person
- Recent books per person for a tag, or perhaps multiple tags?
Similar but not the same:
- add a new 'style' for the blog widget where it will output XML with all the data rather than RSS, that way we can process the widget data in applications etc
The catalogue does appear online, but after updating an entry, the page remains blank, although the update is in the system.
Any data that I can get from a search (especially any future extra-complex boolean searches) I will be **dying** to have available as an RSS feed.
eg. Show me any new books posted by my friends user123, user234 or user345 that are tagged with "history" or "geography", but not tagged with "shitty". Or, show me any users who have recently added to their library any of the books that I have tagged in my library with the word "favorites".
Basically, I would love to see the most complex "advanced search" page you can make available to us, and then to have the results of any search available as an RSS feed. (Simple searches, too, could also lead to RSS feeds, of course.)
I'm afraid I haven't figured out how to use RSS feeds, so I only get a page of code and am not sure what to do with it; so there's no point my asking for more RSS feeds until I figure out what they're for.
However, I have figured out a feature I would truly love to see - a way to select a group of books and then add a tag to all of those books at once (and only those books). As I catalog more books I keep realising that I should have, oh, identified all of my Buffy criticism under the tag "fantasy" as well as the tag "film" (for a random example). But I don't want to have to go back and put in the tags laboriously by hand individually into all 230 volumes. I like the fact that you can globally change tags, and globally delete tags; if there were a way of adding a tag to a previously-selected group of books, tagging would be perfect.
Dan's nailed it. Take a look at, say, jobserve.com, where any search query can be RSS-ified on the search results page.
Once you've got a decent query tool, every RSS feed a user could possibly want will fall naturally out of that.
I've looked but can't find a simple, step by step "this is how to put the feed somewhere" set of instructions - could someone kindly direct me to it? Thanks,
(tole_lege, for some reason I'm not being recognised) :}
I seem to be having a problem with the "Recently Added" rss feed that is on the profile page. Once subscribed to, it seems not to be updating, just displaying the same books added some time ago. The recent activity section of my profile appears to be working fine, just not the rss feed (which I imagine would grab info from the same source as recent activity). Has anyone else experienced this, and does anyone have some advice about how to fix the problem? Thanks!
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