Three new features
Email comments: You can now have LibraryThing email you when people leave comments on your profile. Go to your profile and choose "edit profile" to enable this feature.
The profile now also allows you to choose whether to make your email public or not. Whether you make it public or not, I recommend everyone add an email, in case you lose your password.
Show number of copies: When looking at your catalog in list view, select "more options." Not only does this add some buttons, including the delete button, as before. It now also lists by every book how many other users have it, as so:
You can click on the row-title "shared" to sort by this.
Recommendations: Book-by-book recommendations have improved again, with a lot of the pointless stuff removed. I also added a number by each book, showing the ratio of owners of both books to the owners of just the recommended book.
For example, here are the recommendations for Learning Perl. The 16/32 by the Perl Cookbook means that out of 32 copies of the Perl Cookbook, 16 are owned by people who also own Learning Perl.
The profile now also allows you to choose whether to make your email public or not. Whether you make it public or not, I recommend everyone add an email, in case you lose your password.
Show number of copies: When looking at your catalog in list view, select "more options." Not only does this add some buttons, including the delete button, as before. It now also lists by every book how many other users have it, as so:
You can click on the row-title "shared" to sort by this.
Recommendations: Book-by-book recommendations have improved again, with a lot of the pointless stuff removed. I also added a number by each book, showing the ratio of owners of both books to the owners of just the recommended book.
For example, here are the recommendations for Learning Perl. The 16/32 by the Perl Cookbook means that out of 32 copies of the Perl Cookbook, 16 are owned by people who also own Learning Perl.
posted by Tim at 4:26 PM
27 Comments:
Just keeps getting better and better.
While we're on the subject of features, how far away would something like batch tagging be?
Cool, I particularly like the 9/24 thing on the suggestions.
How do I stop the shared icon from showing a book is shared when it isn't? I have several books with the same "title" but a different subtitle. Even when I change the colon to another character they still seem to display shared...
Other than that I do like the number being on the shared icon :)
Beautiful! LibraryThing is like crack for bibliophiles, and it just keeps getting more addictive!
Thanks for using "Learning Perl" as the example!
Love the little numbers. I think it's almost more interesting to see what books you share with one person than with none.
Wow! I managed to conjure up Randal Schwartz to LibraryThing by mentioning his name. I wonder, what happens if I mention Nyarlathotep?
Just don't say Yog Sothoth 3 times, mmkay?
Or Beetlejuice!
I find that the Recommendations/Suggestions, more often than not, are books I have read already but which aren't in my catalog. Accurate, yes!
I also like the green "add this book to your Catalog" button. Could you put one of these buttons on the Suggestions page to facilitate improving my catalog?
(Now, I personally like the idea of having books in my catalog that I've read that I borrowed -- i.e., from the library: I'm way cheap. But others may object. And as for that guy with all the bootlegs and no books in his catalog, cool!)
-wde
P.S. LibraryThing, you make my heart sing.
P.P.S. Wow, you summoned Randal Schwartz. Be sure only to use these powers for good.
When I modified my profile, I got this response (but the data did save):
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/saveprofile.php:2) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/saveprofile.php on line 10
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/saveprofile.php:2) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/saveprofile.php on line 106
Oh, and what's up with the author cloud?
I am thrilled with the new features. I do second what wm. said above. Having the "add" buttons in the reccomendations would be great!
Thank you!
While I'm at it, the amazon.co.uk add-to-library search rarely works for me.
For example, I just went over to amazon.co.uk itself and searched for the new Harry Potter book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0747581088/qid=1130348113/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl/026-7683772-5043667) and copied the ISBN (0747581088) from that page. I put it in the Add to Library search-term thing and chose Amazon.co.uk/UK libraries, but it says 0 results.
There is no magic at work here. Only self-googling. Self-googling is condemned by most major religions, but I've been known to indulge, too.
I'd like to third wm.'s suggestion, since I add "wish list" titles to my catalog so I don't forget to buy them! I love both the big list & individual suggestions!
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The new features are wonderful. I especially like the recommendations based on the suggestions. Fine work!
I wonder if separate sections or wish lists would be possible, so people who want to do so can keep track of things they'd like, or have read, but not confuse that with the actual contents of their personal libraries. If I added my 'desired' books, my 'read-but-not-owned', my catalog would swell quite suddenly, and certainly look better than it does now. Personally, I don't think that's what LibraryThing is for (hey, we all have ideas of our own!), but if people could add that kind of associated data in some other way, it would be great.
The new features (as usual) are terrific!
This is a quick note: I have not died. I am merely working on power-editing, which feels like it. Nor am I ignoring posts. I figure users want me to give them power editing more than they want blog responses.
More tea, please.
I'll share mine. :)
Is ISBN searching not working anymore? I just plugged in the ISBN 0770428215 and searched on Amazon.com, .ca, .co.uk, Library of Congress, and the National Library of Scotland, and came up with nothing. I put in the title (Robber Bride, Atwood) and it immediately came up with not only the book but the edition (Seal 1999) and when I checked the publishing info it had exactly that ISBN. This has been happening quite a bit - is there something wrong with ISBN searching, and should I stop trying to use it? I'd be sorry, it was far the fastest route, when it worked.
Another ISBN, same problem as last one: 0143051385 fetched nothing, but the title (Fifth Business, Davies), got a list, the second member of which was the very book and ISBN number. Perhaps it's just new publications, in 2004-2005, that it can't find the ISBNs for? Though the last one was 1999, so that isn't it.
I love the ranked recommendations, btw, just to come back to the actual topic!
Now THAT is interesting. Okay, I'll bet I have to turn the ISBN into an EAN for British and Canadian titles. I'll get on it, I just can't stop working on power editing now.
Fifth Business is one of my favorite books.
Bug in search :
I have a book called "Professional XML". If I search for "XML", I get no results. Searching for "Professional" or "Professional XML" shows the book.
Similarly, searching for "C++" does not find either "C++ Primer" or "The C++ Programming Language", both of which are in my library.
Amit: Since you're a programmer I'll level with you. The standard text search in MySQL doesn't index words of 3 letters or shorter. This will change when I revamp search, but that's the reason. Sorry about it.
Ahhhh! The three-letter search has been confusing me for some time, as I have been trying to search by surname for authors that I know are in there, like Jean Ure and Umberto Eco...
Some entries appear to have disappeared entirely from my initial bouts of data entry, though. Where I've received an error message during addition but the book appears to have saved anyway, it now isn't there. Because the record appeared saved at the time it didn't occur to me to flag it with you then. I've searched on title and author without success so they really do seem to have vanished, and when I add them back in LT does not flag up a duplicate.
The other odd blip I've noticed this week is that sometimes editing a record removes it from a set of search results. It seems to be a result of erasing the title field somehow, but I can assure you I don't intentionally do that! I know that words have been disappearing from titles that include "" but the record I noticed this week did not include those. (Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Macmillan Master Guides) by Dennis Butts, for reference. I've put the title back in, now.) Any idea what happened?
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