Power Tagging / Editing has Arrived
"Power Tagging" / "Power Editing" has finally arrived. Now you can select 20 books and add the same three tags to all of them, or take them away.
Instead of making it a "special feature" it is integral to how the catalog works. The feature is available on the gray and yellow control pad, as so:
When you click it, you enter a special mode, and get a special control panel for adding and removing tags. Below that can click on or off the books you want.
"With great power comes great responsibility." I tested it thoroughly. But LibraryThing users continually surprise me. If you find a bug please give me as much detail as possible, including your username, what you were doing and what browser and OS you are using. "I tried to add a tag and it didn't work" is pretty hard for me to act on.
Since it's integral to the catalog, it's also quite extensible. I plan to add a tab for deleting multiple books—useful for people who uploaded the same file twice. Other suggestions for power edit features are most welcome.
Instead of making it a "special feature" it is integral to how the catalog works. The feature is available on the gray and yellow control pad, as so:
When you click it, you enter a special mode, and get a special control panel for adding and removing tags. Below that can click on or off the books you want.
When you're in "Power Edit" you get ALL the books that fit your current criteria, without "pages." Generally this means it shows all your books. Sometimes it might mean all the books that have a certain tag or etc. If you have 1,000 books, it can be slow. If you have a lot of books, it's also advisable to pick a layout without covers, so you don't need to wait for them to load.
"With great power comes great responsibility." I tested it thoroughly. But LibraryThing users continually surprise me. If you find a bug please give me as much detail as possible, including your username, what you were doing and what browser and OS you are using. "I tried to add a tag and it didn't work" is pretty hard for me to act on.
Since it's integral to the catalog, it's also quite extensible. I plan to add a tab for deleting multiple books—useful for people who uploaded the same file twice. Other suggestions for power edit features are most welcome.
posted by Tim at 5:46 AM
26 Comments:
Thank you! That is going to speed up tagging no end - just tried it on a selection of school stories and it worked beautifully.
Wonderful thank you. I have several series that have been waiting for this. :-)
Wa-HOO!
This is very welcome, since a bunch of tags I entered a week or two ago seem to have evaporated. :7(
Works perfectly for me. This is a wonderful addition. Now I get to go play some more. Yippeee!
I notice that since you added the power tagging (excellent move, by the way), the control panel is no longer repeated at the bottom of the page.
I hope that's a temporary situation, because I use those links to move through my catalog far more frequently than I do the ones at the top of the page.
Lilithcat. Good catch! I should start harding out money for bug-finding. Fixed.
I'm getting a weird bug where my list is no longer shown alphabetically by author--they seem to be listed in order of popularity, with least popular first and most popular last (the two Harry Potter books I own are now at the end of my list). I can't be sure this is the order though, because the "more options" button which allows you to see how many other people own a book is gone.
After switching in and out of power editing mode, I can no longer switch back to power edit (click link, list stays in normal edit mode). Cleared cookies and restarted browser, behavior remains.
Firefox 1.0.7 user here
Hey, I figured out the problem. It came when I added back the "power bar" to the bottom of the page. I'll fix it shortly. Alas, I'm away from my computer for the next few hours.
Apologies, I'm new here, but I wonder if there's a bug with Safari -- I'm not able to get the control panel to show up AT ALL in Safari, but it seems to work fine in Firefox/Flock. Is anyone else having this problem? I'm running 10.4.2 and Safari 2.0.1.
Hmm.. LT isn't producing valid HTML, so who knows what could be going on? Tim, a good first step would be to switch to using the right DTD if you're going to use frames: they aren't definied in the "strict" or "loose" DTDs, only the "frameset" DTD.
Not working at all for me on any of my browsers. Is this feature somehow dependent on using Windows OS, or Internet Explorer only? I love my Mac and never use IE.
With a little experimentation I have additional info. I realized that in Flock and Firefox while the grey and yellow bar is there (unlike in Safari), the power edit feature doesn't work. However, when I clicked on one of my tags to view that subset of books, power editing would work. Odd.
Hope this helps.
I clik "power edit" and nothing at all happens. I use FIREFOX 1.0.7 on Windows XP. user books4life
It seems to be fixed in Firefox (power edit that is) but still no love for Safari -- no control strip at all.
I've had no problem in either adding new tags or removing old ones in under the same setup (WinXP, Firefox 1.07)
I know it's the evil empire and all, but I've had no luck using power edit with IE. I use IE 6 with both Win2000 and WinXP Pro, and in both cases, when I can get the power edit toolbar to come up, after I select books and then go to click on "Add tags", nothing happens. I do see a little "Error on page" message down on the status bar. I thought it might be some kind of Java error . . . any thoughts?
I like it! One of my favorite uses for LT is keeping track of books I want to read (or at least taking a look to see whether I want to read them).
Though I buy a lot of books, I try to buy only ones that I know I want to keep (which generally means ones I've already read).
For this reason, my first option for getting my hands on a book is the library (I'm a librarian in fact). I just used power tagging to put "toberead" in my LT catalog to make it easier to keep track of these reading candidates.
Aside: Is it common to agonize over tags or is that just a librarian thing? What tag transparently expresses my intention? And if the intention is best expressed by "to be read" should that be given as ToBeRead, to_be_read, or toberead? It's a good thing we can now alter tags globally.
I think it would be helpful to have a widget that automatically searches for books in libraries. An organization called OCLC makes one available. The address of the site that describes the tool is http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/open/isbnissnlinking/default.htm
They say: 'Now any Web site can create "Find in a Library" links for specific titles. The syntax for link URLs is straightforward and keyed on common numeric identifiers.'
Jeff aka Owain
Great idea, Jeff. I sometimes forget that there's a library just down the road where I could go borrow a book... Maybe having such a feature in LT could save my book budget a few bucks.
As for agaonizing over tags, I think that's a geek thing in general, not just for librarians. :)
I just wish the very long standing bug with using *'s in tags would get fixed :(
Ooooooh, I would *love* to have a widget that takes my local public library's catalog URL (which I'm more than willing to supply: hey it's only fair for us to do some legwork here!) and then format a request straight out of LibraryThing.
Oh man, I think I gotta go lie down now.
On tag-agonizing: I agree, it's definitely not librarian-exclusive. I do my share. I am still doing my share. I dare not even give examples of the quandaries, it makes me so dizzy. (Or maybe it's the idea of querying the local library straight from LibraryThing that has me swooning??)
Power editing is great! I have run into a serious problem, though - not with power editing, but with the "change tags" feature.
I have a number of books that I've identified with multiple tags. (a bunch of myth books, which I've also identified by kind of myth, whether they deal with critical theory, country of origin, so on and so forth). I noticed I'd tagged some as "jungian" and some just "jung', as one of their several tags, so I went to "change tags" and changed all "jungian" to "jung".
This worked fine, EXCEPT that every book that had had "jungian" as one of its (several tags) now had ONLY the tag "jung". All of the other tags identifying type of myth, country of origin, etc etc, were wiped out.
I wondered if I was just misremembering what I'd tagged them, and so I restored some of the tags, then tried it again, and definitely it happened again. If you "change all tag X to tag Y", EVERY other tag associated with that book will be erased.
I will avoid using "Change all tag X to tag Y" until the bug is worked out, but I hope that will be soon, because I use that function a lot (pausing here to worry about how many other tags I've wiped out in the process and this is the first I've noticed it). Because when tagging books as I catalog them I usually don't remember how exactly I'd defined the tags the first time round, so I wind up with a cluster of different spellings etc, and I've been routinely changing all tag X to tag Y whenever I remember to. Augh!
Hoorah! I've been waiting for this one, and I'm thrilled!
lbowman, I've had the same problem, too. It is very frustrating, to say the least!
I disabled the changing; use the power edit feature instead. Books remain selected, so it's easy to delete and add. I'll add back an explicit change feature, but on that page.
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