New feature: Improved tag editing
Entering tags when you use the Add Books screen has always bothered me. I wanted a one-step process, but that meant entering tags at the same time as you entered search terms. If you didn't enter tags then, you had to go through the "pencil," which took you away from the page, or wait until you had a whole lot of books cataloged and then use the catalog's tag-editing features.
To fix this I've added the same on-page edit feature that the catalog has. Edits change the tags in a "Ajax-y" way, without refreshing the whole page.
Here are the demonstration graphics:
To fix this I've added the same on-page edit feature that the catalog has. Edits change the tags in a "Ajax-y" way, without refreshing the whole page.
Here are the demonstration graphics:
posted by Tim at 2:41 AM
22 Comments:
This is great Tim. Have you looked at using Ajax to offer Delicious style 'prompting' when adding tags? It would be very useful to have immediate access to select your own tags when adding new books, and also immediate access to 'most popular' tags for that book from all users. Currently you have to switch from 'edit' to 'social' modes and cut'n'paste. Integrating this would be great.
I like it! I didn't even know what Ajax was before LT, and now I want Ajax on everything! Why not save the edit page for bulk editing of a book and let all the fields be edited from the catalog page (especially the date started/date read fields)? Probably because it would massively slow down the site or something, but one can dream, no?
--kelsey
dang, I've been waiting for this feature ever since! thank you so much!!
Oops! Bug report!
When I go to catalog and edit a tag when I change it and hit OKAY I get "- fatal error (31)" and my tags for that entry are gone.
Whoopsie.
Addendum:
The tags aren't gone from the record itself, just from the CATALOG screen. Going out and back in again they are still gone from catalog, but okay in the record.
Well, busy little alarmist this morning, aren't I?
I quit LT, quit the browser, went and made coffee, came back and logged back in, and now it doesn't happen (which is good).
So what is "-fatal error (31)"? I've never seen it before so I'm assuming it's not browser-related; but it might be.
Sorry about that!
PS on the edit thingy: I've always found I enter books in similar batches and the tags are always the same. It would make sense to me to be able to populate the tag field automatically.
What I'm thinking is a toggle: i.e., populating the tag field and clicking the toggle (checkbox); subsequent entries would be populated with the same tags until the user unchecks the checkbox.
Nav-bar issues: Oh, I forgot about the bottom nav bar. What a pain. I'll fix that.
As far as the setting "sticking," I think I don't want it to. If you have hundreds of books the all-pages view is very ugly and excessive. I think I'll keep it a one-time option.
Kelsey: Yes, your idea is good. Every field should be editable from the catalog screen. I've thought about it and it's on my list.
Tag-prompting: I'll look at this again some day. I have various reservations about it, but it would be nice if it gave you tags you commonly use at least.
Bugs: There was some db downtime, followed by server downtime this morning. Believe it or not, we're actually swapping in a new server next week. This one is behaving very strangely. As my db guy says, he runs eight other databases, none of which give him the least bit of trouble. This one, meanwhile, is constantly throwing exotic errors.
So, it's a process...
Dear all,
Jim and I have done -- for the moment. It took 5 months and we have as of today 8,116 books. Of course additional books will arrive. Ooh bla dee, ooh bla day, tra-la-la-la, life goes on.
We wish Tim would improve the search engine some more, but we know we have ourselves to use our tags more
effectively.
Even now as I type this, Jim is backing the whole database up.
Chava
It be great if after you add a book and refresh the page, that you left the last set of tags so they did not have to be re-entered. I suppose a button to simply clear the tag field would be nice as well. If you are entering in your books in any order this would save a lot of time.
Dear Tim,
The search engine doesn't work right. This morning I typed in "Eleanor Munro" to the search engine for the titles and authors to my library and library thing told me I have no books by this woman.
I do.
Usually I can't remember what went wrong by the time I want to write about it.
Here I have a moment to describe one of things that typically still go wrong.
Why can't we have the comments in the database, the year and publisher too.
It irritates because then Library Thing is not basically useful as a Library database.
Chava
Chava. You're Ellenandjim, right?
I signed in as you. In your library I searched for "Eleanor Munro." One book by Munro came up.
Ditto, "Munro." (Which also got Saki) and "Eleanor," which got others too.
Did you use the search page to search for the AUTHOR Eleanor Munro. She's currently split between Eleanor Munro and Eleanor C. Munro, although I don't actually know if these are the same people.
RE: "Why can't we have the comments in the database, the year and publisher too."
What?
Thanks, Tim, this is enormously helpful. I still wind up using the pencil a fair bit, of course, but not as much as before!
I took Chava to mean: why aren't comments, year, publisher etc. included in searches? But maybe that's just because that's what I've been keen to see for a while. At the risk of harping: My fantasy, I would be to have a single search box with a bunch of checkboxes that would let me search everything and anything from a single field to the whole record, tags included.
This would solve a couple of problems. At present, if I want books BY author x AND books ABOUT author x, including books about author x that don't include the x's name in the title of the book, I've got to run two separate searches, OR tag every book with the name of its author, which I've been doing for some authors but not all, and anyway it seems a waste of bytes.
Second, it would let me search the comments field, which I'm using to list the names of the contributors to anthologies. For academics who have a lot of edited essay collections (many of which have gems in them whose locations we can't remember!) this would be a real boon.
Thanks again -- Patchen
Ah, okay, I get it.
I'll do an experiment tonight, to see how much additional fields slow things down.
T
caliburnpdx,
I also got "fatal error (31)" when entering tags, but then I went back and corrected my mm/dd/yyyy entry in the "aquired" field (I had tried to get away with just entering "/2005"). After the correction, everything was peachy.
tim,
Stupendous! I love the new & improved tag editing -- better than sliced bread with sliced goodies on top. I'm glad that you hope to bring in tag prompting -- I'm tempted to wait until that feature is introduced to move into any heavy tagging (me Mum always told me not to rush into those things...;). LT is such a quickly evolving creature, great work.
-patruska (who will be listening w/crowd of librarians to your sirsi dynix blog thingy wed. morning)
Tim, I have an urgent request. Can you please expand the Tags field to allow more characters?
As mentioned elsewhere, I'm helping to catalogue books for my local hospice. Some books require a LOT of tags, since a single book can cover multiple subject areas.
I have several books to which I would like to assign multiple and complex tags. Several of these come close to 300 characters' worth of tags (including spaces), and one is up to 327!
However, the tags I've tried to enter have been truncated due to the existing limit. This makes mincemeat of the classification system we are trying to establish.
Can you kindly expand the character limit on the Tags field so that we can continue to classify our books according to our needs? Otherwise, I will have to redo our entire classification system to find a "shorter" way of expressing common (but lengthy) counselling terms such as stigmatized grief, palliative care or pain management. I hope that won't be necessary, since it was the flexibility of the tagging system that helped me persuade Hospice to consider LibraryThing in the first place.
Many thanks!
Hiya,
With all the Ajax-y fun it's nice that most things have a method of working without. I use the Firefox NoScipt extention to prevent possible XSS vunlarabilities.
Also your Blogger RSS feed seems to be truncated now.
I have to second the anonymous user's request above. Due to the lack of author tags I was yesterday adding "nobel prize winner" to all my García Márquez and Hermann Hesse books. Only later did I notice that quite a few of these tags had been silently truncated.
So the first is a request to expand the tag space.
And the second is a bug report becuase all cases of potential data loss or corruption should be reported to the user rather than silently creating tags such as "nobel prize win" or "nobel prize w" to be discovered later.
Tag-length:
I'm in something of a bind here. The easy thing to do is to add a script to the various places where you can add tags, alerting you either individual tags or the aggregate goes over the system limits. (These limits are 30 characters per tag and 255 characters for all the tags together.)
The harder thing is to change the limits. I'm going to go ahead with changing the aggregate limit, but not the single-tag limit.
Making the change requires a fairly length re-definition of the underlying database "schema." This will take about 30 minutes, followed by some debugging and so forth. I can't do this during normal hours. So I'll do it tonight (Monday) at 3:00 EST.
It's possible the change will degrade performace too much, in which case I'll switch it back and we'll have to discuss other ways around this problem.
Best,
Tim
I've noticed there is a subtler problem at least in my case, but the net here is not 100% reliable right now so I can't dig around as much as I would like:
In the view, some of my tags are truncated and when I click on them I am taken to a page of the truncated tag, but I am told I have no books tagged that way. It seems the space allowed for all tags is greater than the space given for displaying them! Furthermore the links of truncated tags could still link to the non-truncated version.
More subtle again and I don't know if it's related or not: When I look at all books I have tagged "nobel prize winner" I am told there are 25 books. And the only authors are Hesse and García Márquez. But when I click on one name and then on the other, the total only adds up to 21 books! I think I am using the same spellings for all author names but even if I'm not this should be handled by the author combining. - This is the problem that the slow net is making it hard for me to investigate...
Thanks for listening Tim!
Tonight I get database/script errors on manually submitted books. At first I thought I had lost the entered data, but after checking my collection, I could see that it had indeed been added to the database. After selecting an item for editing from my library, submit works without any issues.
Error on manual submissions: Thanks! Good catch. Broke something and didn't realize it.
Tim, thank you so much for making the aggregate change for Tags. It's a great improvement. (I'm not bothered about the single-tag character limit; the existing one is fine with me.)
May I please dare to request that you additionally expand the aggregate limit from 255 to 300 or more? I discovered that there are still a few books that go over the 255 limit. Hence (for example), the intriguing tag called "death of moth" - which in itself we are not likely to require often at Hospice! "Death of mother", sadly, is an entirely different story.
I did spend some time puzzling over whether it was reasonable to delete some tags outright, so as to get under your 255-character limit. However, this would mean rewriting whole categories and thereby having to make extensive changes to other book entries as well.
I'll do this if necessary, but if you're OK with making the aggregate limit just a bit bigger, that would of course be utterly FANTASTIC.
Thanks again for your responsiveness and kindness in doing this work. The scope of LibraryThing, and its many applications, really takes my breath away!
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