Edit tags from within your catalog! (it's Ajax-tastic)
I've made a new feature to make tagging your books easier. You can now edit the tags within your catalog without having to "go into" each book individually.
The tag list now includes a link to "edit."
Click "edit" and type your changes into the box that pops up. When you submit it both changes the screen and the database without leaving or refreshing the page.
"Ajax-tastic"? Programming and "Web 2.0" junkies will recognize this as "Ajax," a term that is supposed to mean "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" but has come to mean "changing the page without refreshing it" or "acting more like a desktop ap." Expect to see more of this sort of thing.
Bugs? As with most new features, my ears are open for problems. I tested it, but not on every possible browser/OS combination (memo to self: buy ten computers). And people end up doing things I never anticipated. So, for the next day or so, treat it as a beta feature. Don't change 100 tags without checking whether the edits are "sticking."
Ideas? In theory, I could make every field editable this way. But I'm concerned about a cluttered user interface. What do you think?
The tag list now includes a link to "edit."
Click "edit" and type your changes into the box that pops up. When you submit it both changes the screen and the database without leaving or refreshing the page.
"Ajax-tastic"? Programming and "Web 2.0" junkies will recognize this as "Ajax," a term that is supposed to mean "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" but has come to mean "changing the page without refreshing it" or "acting more like a desktop ap." Expect to see more of this sort of thing.
Bugs? As with most new features, my ears are open for problems. I tested it, but not on every possible browser/OS combination (memo to self: buy ten computers). And people end up doing things I never anticipated. So, for the next day or so, treat it as a beta feature. Don't change 100 tags without checking whether the edits are "sticking."
Ideas? In theory, I could make every field editable this way. But I'm concerned about a cluttered user interface. What do you think?
posted by Tim at 7:53 PM
40 Comments:
Oh man, that's awesome. I've been waiting for exactly that feature.
Thanks. Let me know what else you've been waiting for...
It doesn't have to say "(edit)", it could be a bullet or other small character at the end of the line like •
The only other field *I* think it should on is the comment field.
As for waiting for -- unless it's already there and in my cluelessness I missed it -- it would be very very handy to copy one entry to the next (i.e., duplicate the last entry -- all fields) when entering new books.
Can you show the whole post in rss?
What do you mean by "show the whole post in RSS"? Can you help me out?
I think you are using Ruby - 37signals use a neat AJAX hover interface on their To-Do lists in BaseCamp. They are working in the left hand column but I guess that you could do something similar with a hover zone to one end of the display box.
Bob
This is an excellent new feature, thanks. I'm not sure whether this is a related bug or not, but since you've implemented it, I now get only five books at a time on the catalog screen, and it doesn't look as though I can change that, unless I've missed something.
The only other feature I would really like is a more flexible search mechanism.
I can see this being a useful feature but it would be very cluttered if applied on all fields. Caliburnpdx's idea of a little dot or whatever sounds neat.
What about an edit button that only appears on mouseover, a-la Backpack? Would that be doable in this environment?
I was wishing for this feature just last night! Eee! It looks great.
I like the tag editing just how you've set it up - but have you look at how Amazon does it? I think everyone sees tags there now. They have some good UI features but no power at all behind them yet.
One very minor tag-editing feature request I'd like to ask for is that ";" be made an alternative to ",". When you get lots of tags like me it would be nice to be able to group them semantically. The only problem would be if people use the semicolon with some current tags.
Excellent! This is a great for quickly comparing and editing groups of books without having to use "power edit," which can be cumbersome when using slight variations in tags between the books. Great work!
I second caliburnpdx's idea regarding the comment field.
Off-topic (sort of):
Could you change the "author" field to "author/primary editor" and do likewise for the secondary authors/editors? It would be extremely useful for cataloguing, and perhaps less cluttering than adding a "editor" field (though I would welcome it if that's the preferred option).
Worked great for me. I'm using Firefox 1.0.7 and it was fast, convenient and easy. Thanks for the cool new feature.
I like this feature. I think it would be good to add it to the "comments" field too, but probably none of the others.
I like this new feature, it's quite a bit more convenient. Thanks for thinking of it. However, I agree that it is a clutter, and would be worse still on more fields. Perhaps you could use a small icon, like a mini-pencil icon based on your other edit icon. If you justified it to the left or right edge of the field it might blend better because visually it would be taken together with the thin line of the table. If you made the icon itself quite light this would help to blend it in visually with the line. Or you could put it in a small grey box sharing a side with the table.
As far as other suggestions, I'd love to be able to mark just certain books private - let's face it, there are questionable volumes in everyone's library, and I'd just as soon not broadcast my occasional detour of that kind. But in general I'm quite happy to open my collection and perhaps facilitate some interactions that way.
Bug (or just aesthetically unpleasing):
The first bracket of "(edit)" seems to be treated as text and hangs at the end of longer rows of tags like this... (
edit)
Yes, that is so aesthetically unpleasing that I'm finding myself (where possible with multiple tags) moving tags around to avoid it! Obsessive? Moi?
< I'm finding myself (where possible with multiple tags) moving tags around to avoid it! Obsessive? Moi? >
Well, I'm just as obsessive - but also lazy! Think I'll wait a couple of days to see if this is something Tim can fix ;-)
How about having no edit button but the whole tags box responds when you click in an empty part of it?
As far as other suggestions, I'd love to be able to mark just certain books private - let's face it, there are questionable volumes in everyone's library
I second the anonymous user's suggestion and I'd also like to suggest being able to make certain tags private for similar reasons.
2 unrelated bug reports:
1) My catalog entry for 百年の孤独 by Gabriel García Márquez had gone missing. I just replaced it. My other Japanese books seem to be in order. I don't know if anything else in my library was affected.
2) When I look at my tag "hardback" I see The Edsel affair: .... what went wrong? : A narrative by C. Gayle Warnock twice, but clicking on his name says I only have one copy! Clicking on the book's other tags does not show this problem.
1b) After going through both bugs I now see the old copy of the Japanese Márquez book showing up again.
Please try to check these out, other libraries may be becoming corrupted too!
Hippietrail:
As I suspected you have the tag 'hardback' listed twice for the Edsel affair.
A week or so ago I noticed duplicates in my catalog and deleted one. Both disappeared. The problem had to do with double tagging, as I soon discovered when I found another set of doubles.
I noticed something that isn't really a bug, but people may think it is at first.
If you make an edit with this new 'Ajax' feature, click ahead to another page, and then go back to the page that was edited, the edit doesn't seem to have taken.
But it's there if you refresh.
This holds for IE 6, Firefox 1.0, and Mozilla 1.8.
I'm finding the new edit feature to be behaving erratically. When I click on "edit", a box comes up containing the various tags. But occasionally, I can do nothing within the box, and a red outline (the size of the text space in the edit box) appears on the page. I have to refresh the page to get rid of it. There seems to be no logic to when it works and when it doesn't, and it will work for a book and then not work for the same book.
(Mac OS9.2/IE5)
Don't know if it's related or not, but a lot of my tags went missing today and had to be re-entered.
It would be great if there was a way to power edit fields other than tag. For example, sometimes one author will show up with multiple versions of his/her name. that could be fixed easily if you could (1) search by author name and (2) power edit the search screen.
The new "edit" feature works fine for me and it's very useful, thank you Tim.
I like the suggestion of being able to mark some books "private" and I remind Tim of my old wishes: the "original title" field and a forum for suggestions/comments/critics.
One other feature suggestion, this one to do with tagging:
Currently tag searchs are absolute rather than substring. Sometimes this is the desired behavior, but let me offer an example of where it is not.
Caesar's "Civil War" needs to have tags "military", "history", and "military history" to be accessible for these three tag searches. It would be great if I could tag it as "military history" and be able to find it on a search of any of those three. Similar cases occur with "programming", "kernel programming", "graphics programming", "database programming" - a single book needs at least two of those to be accessible by the general search and the more specific search.
I can imagine that some user's tag use case would require the ability to search by an absolute tag - "history" search term matching only that exact tag, and not tags containing that word. But I suspect the common case is the one I describe above.
Another different, but also interesting search, would be for books containing tags containing the search terms. For example, if I tag a book "history of sexuality", "sociology", "deviant behavior" it would be great to have a search that would find this book with the terms "sociology sexuality", "history sociology", or "deviant sexuality". This is a much less exact way to find things, more apt to include false positives. But such a search would allow people to build the tag profile of a single volume constructively, i.e. putting "military", "history", "memoir" on a book knowing that it could be found searching for "military history" and "military memoir".
Finally, is there a minimum search term length for book information now? A "book search" for "go" shows nothing, despite the presence of several books on the game Go with that word in their titles.
Bug Report:
This is probably related to hippietrail's issue. Several of the books I tagged using this new feature show up as duplicates, but only when I view them by tag. Click on "pop culture" in my catalog to see this. Actually, it shows duplicates regardless of the tag chosen, but that is the tag I added with the new (edit) button. The regular catalog view does not show these books as duplicates. I purposely added a duplicate book to test this. Also, using the feature, I just added the tag "pop culture" to Seabrook's Nobrow, but it did not become a duplicate. Any ideas?
Despite possible glitches, it's still an excellent feature, Tim!
dennis said...
As I suspected you have the tag 'hardback' listed twice for the Edsel affair.
Thanks dennis. This seems to be a serious bug. It can be hard to see that you already have a certain tag when your tags have been shuffled by the old power edit bug which seems to be fixed now. But being able to group tags with ";" would help even more. LT needs to check for already-existing tags and disallow dupes.
anonymous said...
Currently tag searchs are absolute rather than substring
In the early days of LT tag searches were by substring. I use tags such as "french" for books in French and "from french" for books which have been translated from French. Back then a tag search for "french" would find both kinds. If there's a UI-friendly way to allow both it would be handy.
And another bug:
Both the new tag editor and the power editor do not allow as much length as is available in the "social view"'s tag editing box - where I do most of my tag editing. Instead you see a truncated string. If you don't notice the truncation it's easy to lose tags.
A book needs 5 five tags before this can be calculated.
Just saw the new "similarly tagged" feature - very cool! But could you please fix the above? Also, does this mean that five people have tagged the book, or that the book has been given at least five different tags?
And I so agree with the idea of being able to power edit author information! I had to edit that field for about a dozen different books by the same author, and kept thinking how much a power edit would have helped!
Another aspect of the "duplicates" issue/bug:
I double-checked the number of books in my catalog view against the number of books listed in my profile (517), and they matched. When I add a duplicate book, it shows up in catalog view and shows the increase in books on my profile. These "duplicates" that show up in the tag view are not counted as real books. They are, however, counted in the number of books tagged when in the tag view. Hope this helps!
Yet another quirky facet of the duplicates bug:
(Sorry, I'm a multiple-angles problem solver.)
If you click on a tag that is used for an affected book, it includes the "duplicates" in the tag count next to my name among the users using the tag. (eg. 12 for "pop culture") However, if you click on the "Tags" tab, the tag frequency count is correct. (9 for "pop culture")
Oh yes, also could you somehow arrange the tab order on the "add books" page so that tabbing from the "Search" box goes directly to the "tags" box? Right now it stops on the "?" hyperlink.
A little 37 signals thought on tagging
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_interface_as_a_spec_including_stories_inline.php
Greyhead, your URL was cut off because it couldn't wrap around inside the column.
Luckily, there's TinyURL to the rescue!
Try this:
http://tinyurl.com/7loon
Thank you chamekke
Unrelated feature suggestion:
On others' profile pages, under Connections, where it lists the books we have in common, I would like that list to sort by author (I don't mind that the author is listed after the title). This would make it more visually obvious whether our large number of shared books is due to a huge pile of, e.g., Terry Pratchett books or something else.
So I have more blog posts "flagged" than I know what to do with. I did get right on the sorting of shared books within a profile. It now sorts them by author's last name. Good idea.
Thanks! Tim
The quick edit feature is badass. It's got a couple of quirks, though: it seems to accept a much smaller list of tags than the book edit screen, and some characters aren't allowed (e.g. the "++" in "C++") while they are allowed in the main edit screen.
It's great functionality, though. I'd recommend it for all the fields! Cheers for such an awesome project.
Thanks, Tim! The duplicates have gone away. Great work as always!
Hi Tim -
I'm new to LT, and very excited about the project. Just wanted to mention what a great feature this is, and to second the request for a similar ability with the "comments" section. I'm including shelving information in my library (not useful socially, but very helpful for me) and it's an arduous process to go into each book to edit the comments.
Thanks, and great work!
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