Saturday, March 18, 2006

Widgets! Widgets! Widgets!

I've substantially upgraded LibraryThing's widgets, the little things you stick on your blog or web page to tell people what your reading (and more). The major improvements are:
  • Tag and author cloud widgets! Show your tags or the authors in your collection, either by frequency or randomly. Control the type size, size "contrast," number, style, etc.
  • Cover-only widgets, with fixed width and height options for better display
  • Preset widgets for ease of use, customized widgets for every need, and you can still muck around with customizing them yourself with CSS*
  • Control over showing title or title and author, where links go, etc.
  • AllConsuming-like widgets
  • CSS now includes LTodd and LTeven styles, so you can add striping if you want
  • Super Ajaxorific look and feel; you'll see more of this around LibraryThing
I hope you have as much fun with them as I had making them. I'd love to hear what you think of them, and what you want. Improvments I'm working on:
  • Sorting by the data-read, date-bought fields
  • Connections widgets. Do you want them?
*Julie Meloni's blog post Styling the LibraryThing blog widget remains the best discussion of how to hyper-customize widgets with CSS. The only real change is on odd/even striping; tags don't add much.

UPDATE: Show us how you use your widget and if you've modified it in a cool way by posting the URL in the comments!

39 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Love it! I've stuck the very pretty covers widget on my website. It's a pity about the covers linking to Amazon, but I guess there's not much you can do about that.

Looks fantastic though.

3/18/2006 7:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not to "dis" your work on this project at all ... but I really don't get the appeal of these "widget" things.

Perhaps that's due to my having fairly "unformatted" blogs (on L.J.), where there would be no logical place to drop something like this ... or perhaps it's just a personal "information flow" issue.

I mean, they look cool (especially the ones with the covers), but "what good ar they?". Am I missing something here?

- BTRIPP

3/18/2006 11:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The cover widgets are, indeed, quite charming... but there's no way I'm linking to Amazon.

3/19/2006 10:27 AM  
Blogger Dave said...

Crap. I'm all for adding new options and things, but I went through hell trying to use CSS to get my widget to look like the rest of my site and do (more or less) what I wanted it to do, which was display what I was currently reading. Now, for some reason, it's gone from showing the last three books I added to showing books I've tagged "drinking" (of which I have one).

Is there some reason for this to have changed? I dread the idea of again going through CSS hell to get what I had back.

3/19/2006 12:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The Amazon TOS requires that a link to Amazon appear when I use a cover; it does not require that ONLY an Amazon link appear"
If that is true, I didn't understand this part:

"You may have links within other areas of your Application (ie: that are not Amazon Properties) to websites other than the Amazon Website, but you may not use an Amazon Property to link to such other websites".
The image certainly is an Amazon property.
By the way, isn't the ISBN information a so called amazon property? Don't use it to link to other websites?

3/19/2006 12:47 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Dave. Shoot me or post your URL. There's certainly nothing new in the CSS. I'm not sure how what's displayed has changed, but I'll look into it.

Tim

3/19/2006 1:13 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Nicholas,

I, and Amazon no doubt, thank you for raising these issues.

On the subject of covers, they are not considered an "Amazon Property." First, getting them does not require agreeing to either the Amazon Associates or Amazon Web Services agreements, so neither could really apply. Further, the phrase you quote depends upon the definition of "Amazon Property," quoted here "The term "Amazon Web Services" includes any data, images, text, and content, APIs, tools or other information or materials provided by Amazon through Amazon Web Services (the "Amazon Properties")" As I do not get the images through Amazon Web Services, they do not apply.

Your ISBN point is interesting. I'll have to consider it. At present, the ISBN on the card and social pages opens up a series of linking options, so your objection might be valid. In part it depends where the data came from—often it came from library MARC records; much of the time it came from both.

Tim

3/19/2006 1:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the explanation,
Tim.
I noticed that bookcrossing.com use the titles to link to other sites, it might be entered manually but most of the times they are taken from Amazon Web Services. Just added a book to check. They might have a different deal with Amazon or I am mistaken again.

3/19/2006 2:15 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

I strongly suspect they don't have a separate deal, and I'm sure they're not manually entered. There certainly are a lot of violations out there, and a lot of gray areas. Any action by Amazon to shut down a site like Bookcrossing would, I think, meet with some pretty bad press, and to what end?

3/19/2006 2:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love the new covers widget! And, it looks like I may be in the minority, but I like that they link to Amazon (I admit that this is because I can use my associate's ID, though).

3/19/2006 6:15 PM  
Blogger Mark Barnes said...

Tim,

Thanks for the additions. It's been a great asset. Can I make some suggestions for us CSS junkies?

1) Can you add [span class="LTTitle] and [span class="LTAuthor"] so that we can do even more tweaking and styling?

2) The HTML generated by the clouds is quite cumbersome. I feel that if we want to style our own widgets, we shouldn't have to bloat our pages with style="text-decoration: none;" and target="_top" throughout. It's up to me to add those things. I want text-decoration on mine!

I also think it would be best for all users to set a minimum and a maximum font size, rather than just a minimum and the "size contrast" dropdown which doesn't make much sense to me.

It would also be brilliant to have the option of (un)ordered lists rather than spans, though I appreciate this would need to be an option to avoid messing up existing users display. It would mean I could add bullets or numbers (linked to my last suggestion).

del.icio.us also adjusts the colour of the text as well as the side. This is really useful visually.

I'd also like the option of adding book counts (in brackets) after each author.

Finally, I'd like to have the option of changing the order from alphabetical to frequency.

With all these options I could have my top 10 authors in an ordered list, complete with book counts.

I don't want much, do I? ;-)

3/19/2006 6:22 PM  
Blogger Mark Barnes said...

I forgot one more suggestion!

I love the max width option, but it doesn't quite work (and I could do it with CSS styling anyway). The problem is that the images aren't downsampled at the server, they're just resized in my browser.

I'm sure you could write a snippet of ASP code that downloaded to the server, resized it, the displayed it. I've written just that in ASP.NET so these two images are both produced on-the-fly from the same 600 pixel jpeg.

300 pixel width (13k)

150 pixel width (5k)

3/19/2006 6:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I always enter books using the ISBN to make sure that I get the right edition, so the ISBN is never an Amazon property in my catalogue. In the (rare) event that I can't find a book by it's ISBN, I grab the "closest" edition and then edit my catalogue record to reflect the correct details.

3/19/2006 7:22 PM  
Blogger Dave said...

Tim,

I'm certainly not in the business of shooting anybody, much less someone who created something useful and cool like LibraryThing!

My blog's at http://tikilounge.blogspot.com. I'm not sure why it changed over to show books tagged "drinking" (though it's certainly appropriate to how I spent my St. Patty's weekend).

Cheers,

Dave

3/19/2006 9:54 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

[Note sent to Dave about his blog. Alas, his blog *is* asking for the drinking tag—I can't change the text of his blog, I promise! I suggested how he could fix this, but can't post it here because Blogger forbids script tags in comments.]

3/19/2006 10:20 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Oh, mea maxima culpa!

I was wrong. Dave was right. It turns out it was a case of two bugs canceling each other out. The tag was in there, but it wasn't activated.

As a result of the change, if you added a see-books-by-random-tag since the new widgets came online, you'll find it now drops the tag. Come by and remake it, or just add &version=1 to the URL.

Happy to be wrong!

3/20/2006 12:03 AM  
Blogger Melora said...

Tim,
I love the new widget! It was neat before, but now that I have bigger covers & smaller text, it looks much nicer. Thank you so much for adding all the options for those among your users who are Not technologically proficient!

I Like that the covers link to Amazon and add to your "river of cash." As a cash strapped LibraryThing fan who truly appreciates all the great new stuff you are doing but who can't afford to pay up, I'm thrilled to think my widget might send a little money your way.

Cordially,
Melora

3/20/2006 12:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How are LJ-friendly widgets coming along? I've just discovered that MySpace doesn't allow JavaScript either, and I still want widgets on both. Not as much as I want an editor field, but... /whining

:D

3/20/2006 2:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Could you add the option to link to the different Amazons (uk, jp, de, fr, ca)?

3/20/2006 5:13 PM  
Blogger BeA said...

I like the covers widgets very much and I don't mind linking to Amazon at all. It is helpful to have it on my blog since I write about books anyway.
http://beatanna.blogspot.com/
It was not the easiest part to add it to my blog because I am using Blogger and the script is so long and my HTML knowledge is as it is, but it works and I like it. Thank you for making it for us.

3/21/2006 3:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Another vote here for LJ-friendly widgets. Javascript is useless to me...

3/21/2006 7:04 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

The trick with the LJ widgets is: they are ugly! I hired someone to do it—an Indian programmer specializing in the GD library—and no matter how many times I asked for changes it never got pretty.

I'm thinking I'll open source it. I don't care if Reader2 or whoever wants to use it with their code.

Any PHP GD programmers out there who want a crack at it?

Tim

3/21/2006 7:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Another person clamoring for a non-CSS widget. Yes, LiveJournal is hopelessly teenaged (and me seemingly twice as old as the average user!), but I still would love a module that I could drop onto my page!

3/26/2006 12:23 AM  
Blogger graham old said...

I like these widgets. The only issue I currently have is that when I entered the books I searched thru amazon UK. Yet, the covers link to amazon.com.

That means my associate link does not work.

3/27/2006 11:19 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great great stuff!
I've just discovered LibraryThing yesterday, and have already bought it, cataloged over 300 books and posted a widget to my blog.
(Check out AviDardik.com)

The only request I have is, IMHO, a very simple and obvious one.
I would like to have the ability to setup the widget for a specific book. This would enable me to set up a "Now Reading" book cover and link.

Or is there an existing way to do that?

Thanks!

4/21/2006 8:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I cannot get the covers to show up on my blog in wordpress...all that shows up is the text "Recent books from my library" with the option to click on my library. Can you please tell me how to get the covers to show up? I'm very new at this stuff so excuse my ignorance if I'm missing something very obvious!

8/28/2006 3:47 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Kari: Shoot me your blog, with widget installed? It could be a few things, and I can rule at least some out.

T

8/28/2006 4:20 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim,

As requested.

Kari

8/28/2006 4:36 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim,

As requested.

Kari

8/28/2006 5:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tim,

Were you able to rule anything out?

Thanks,

Kari

8/29/2006 11:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

do you need a paid LibraryThing account to use the LibraryThing widget in a blog website?

8/30/2006 12:49 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

No, certainly not. If you're having problems shoot us a line. Tim

8/30/2006 9:50 PM  
Blogger Chimo said...

I use the widget on this page: http://chim0.dyndns.org/?page_id=21

It'd be nice if we had the option to sort by author though.

Anyway, love it.
Thank you. :)

2/25/2007 7:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Any chance of getting a widget that shoves the HTML into a passed (or hard-coded) div id? I'd like to move the script tags to the bottom of my page because LibraryThing is slower than my web site.

I'm happy to help out with changing the code (I see a post above threatening to open source the widget, but not sure what the state of the art here is).

Thanks!

9/12/2008 9:05 AM  
Blogger Tim said...

Hey. Email me if you want more info. The JS API is here http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/LibraryThing_JSON_Books_API .

9/12/2008 10:16 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

is there anyway to have the covers in fixed width and fixed height together at the same time?

1/02/2009 3:41 AM  
Blogger mememememememe said...

Can you make it work with Windows Live Space? I don't mean in blog but on the space page.

2/03/2009 11:00 PM  
Blogger Sandy Fussell said...

I am wondering why all covers display in Library Thing but a few don't in the widget on my blog. I've seen a few other comments saying the same thing around the net but no solution. I am new to Library Thing so hope it's not something embarrassingly obvious!

2/25/2009 3:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sandy: We're working on a new, improved widget thing at this very moment (well, when I'm done typing this). Stay tuned for more news.

2/25/2009 9:06 AM  

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