Five new features and a fix
1. Recent "users with your books. People tell me that "Users with your books," available from any profile page (example), is one of the most fun things about LibraryThing. But it can be hard to keep up with changes. To alleviate that problem, I've added a "recent" option, which restricts itself to books added in the last two weeks—both new users and old ones adding books. Click on the number and you'll see those books in their catalog.
2. Permanent catalog links. Many users have expressed frustration at not being able to send people to a particular page, sort, tag, author or view of their catalog. As I revealed on the Google Group, most of these can be forced by skillful URL manipulation, but the rules are somewhat complex. To cut the Gordian Knot I've added a "permanent link" link at the bottom of the catalog view. Just copy that (a "right click," or whatever) and you're set.
3. Entry and review date charts. The "fun statistics" page, available from any profile (example), now shows charts for when books were entered and when they were reviewed.4. Searching for blank tags. By popular request, from now on, you can leave the search field empty when you search for tags, and it will give you all the books that have no tags.
5. You and no other. The "fun statistic" page also includes a new list of all the books you share with just one other person and who that person is. The feature, termed "You and no other" or, if you prefer Medieval French, "Vous et nul autre" is just "resting" on that page.
Even before the feature, people have been blogging about this particular oddity, and others, which springboard blog discussion about reading tastes. I hope to create a whole new page of such "meme lists." My current ideas are:- Lonely books. Books only you own. ("Why do you own it? Should others read it?")
- Lonely authors. Authors only you domicile.
- The top X books you share with other users (see The Little Professor for an example)
- The top 100 books (or authors) and whether you own them. ("How does the great unwashed and I get along?")
6. Default library now sticks. Hey, it worked for me. What's up with you people and your kooky browsers?
(Ring image taken from Heavenly Treasures. I hope they don't mind. I AM giving them a valuable link.)
posted by Tim at 11:45 PM
49 Comments:
Tim ...
That "permanent link" thing does some weird stuff ... when I tried it, the sort began by ignoring my first tag, and sorting everything on the SECOND tag. Now, this went away if I clicked on the "tags" header (in the List view) twice (reversing and then re-reversing the sort), but it was disconcerting when it happened!
- BTRIPP
I'm not sure how to read that bug. I suspect it wasn't sorting on the second tag, but by something else that coincided with the second tag. If I'm wrong, the world is higgledy-piggledy.
Incidentally, I made a change to the file just after posting this, so there's a slim chance that caught you. Feel free to report bugs here or at the Google Group. It is a very complex piece of functionality.
Tim
And thanks, incidentally. I don't say that enough. MANY thanks.
While we're talking about bugs, I meant to tell you... Japanese titles aren't working again. Some of the characters are displaying, but most are not. (You'll see some examples if you go here.)
No rush from my side ... but I thought you should know.
In the meantime - thanks for all the great new features. I am amazed at all the work you're doing!
Any chance to have that annoying FireFox flickr bug fixed soon?
Thanks for the you and one other. Very interesting.
Nothing Medieval about "Vous et nul autre". Sure, it's a tad formal, but I would say it anyway.
Anyone want to help me translate them all into Medieval French?
You meant that in jest, but I think it would be a good idea to translate the interface into other languages. It would attract people from other countries who do not necessarily master English, and it might get you mentioned in foreign press :)
I'd be happy to volunteer to do the French translation, if you go that route.
9 of the 20 books I share with only one other user are cookbooks! I wouldn't have thought that any of our cookbooks were particularly exotic, but perhaps other people just don't include them in their library? Or perhaps you all eat out of cans?!??
Here is our modest collection of cookbooks, now that it's so easy to link to them ;)
Very nice, Tim. I'm looking forward to "lonely" books and authors!
On the Japanese: Hang tight. The db got rebuilt in some way last night, wiping out the setting—the setting NOT the data. Austin says he'll look into it tonight. (He has a day job, unfortunately.)
Whatever you do, don't try to "fix" it on your end. Whatever you fix will be broken once the setting is fixed.
Tim
Hi Tim,
Loving the new features. Thanks for the hard work.
Another feature idea for future wishlists would be somehow sorting our libraries to find books WITHOUT a graphic cover... that would remind me to scan them or check if someone else has already provided a cover for that edition.
...not urgent but would be useful.
Thanks again for the constant improvements, ryn_books
The new features are way cool. 'Lonely books' and 'lonely authors' would be great as well. LT keeps getting better and better!
Re You and No Other - funny that ANYONE still has their Versalog Slide Rule Instruction Book. I do, and so does someone else! Apparently two antiques who never throw away a book.
Tim said, "On the Japanese: Hang tight. The db got rebuilt in some way last night, wiping out the setting—the setting NOT the data."
I assumed as much. So no problem, I haven't made any changes to my titles. I'm happy to wait until it's fixed.
Ed
We not only have the insruction book but the sliderules as well. While not spring chickens we don't think of ourshelves as antiques either!
hailelib :-)
It's not possible to search for books that don't have a particular tag?
I can search for fantasy -formulaic
but I can't just search for -formulaic and get all my books that don't have that tag?
(searching space not something gets me all the books with an extra comma at the end of the tags, that was cool)
Here's another suggestion, since you seem to be on a roll. When I'm checking out other people's catalogs and deciding if I want to put them on a watchlist, it might be nice to see whether they are active users. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to sign up for an account, enter a bunch of books in a frenzy of cataloging zeal, then run out of steam. So, if the profile page had a "last logged in" date, it might help us determine whether the person is still adding books, or at least still hanging around.
Any chance of future feature showing who is watching your book list?
Would it be possible for the 'combine with' box under the author search box (combine works page) to *not* default to checked, please? It's too easy to accidentally combine authors this way by careless clicking - much better to make it a conscious decision to do so, surely?
I'd love to second the feature aquila mentioned - searching for tags by both presence or absence. Or - dare I ask for it - general-case boolean logic on tag searching? There are some fascinating queries that could be done with that.
I like the lonely books/authors idea, with the ability to post a review so these lonely ones find the company they deserve.
The competitive nature in me wants to know where my library size ranks overall. I know I'm not in the top 100, but it'd be great to have rank listed in fun statistics.
Thanks for all your hard work!
Thanks - great new features.
One more thing (there's always one more thing) that would be good would be the ability to search multiple tags. I can do it when I search my own library (e.g., search "Classical, History" to get histories of the classical world, but I can't seem to search other's tags and others can't search mine in the same way).
Heilelib, so there are more than two or us! I tried to think of a 'snappy' reply yesterday, but came up empty. Instead, I decided to find my Post Versalog and take a picture of it and the accompanying instruction book. I'll post the picture in place of a cover for the book in my collection. Now I just have to remember where I put it . . .
Hi,
I wonder if you could tell me how old you are...
Sorry for making such a personal question but...
you offer lifetime membership for 25 dollars, I just want to make sure it is worth it...
Any update on the foreign character display bug? It's not just Japanese - Greek characters are affected as well.
aquila and jason:
To search for books that don't have a particular tag you can do this: *, -foo
The * means first look at everything
The rest means stop looking at everything not tagged "foo"
The result is just those books without foo
But I agree it would be better if there is just a single argument and it's negative that LT can treat "-foo" and "*, -foo" the same.
Hi Tim,
Bug report! I was doing a test run with a counsellor today to demonstrate how (eventually) someone outside Hospice will be browse our library, albeit without being able to edit the contents. That's when I discovered a couple of problems.
The first one is very minor, and only happens when you're logged out. When you go to the homepage, and click on the Search tab (hyperlink), it actually opens the Zeitgeist webpage. Luckily the Search link on the Zeitgeist page works just fine; but it does make for an extra couple of mouse clicks. (I suspect this isn't actually a bug, just a hyperlink error.)
The second problem is more serious, and happens whether or not you're logged in. If I open the Search page, go to Search LibraryThing > Search tags, and enter two tags that I *know* are frequently found in combination in our library (e.g. bereavement, grief), it doesn't find any search results. However, LT yields the correct results under Search your library > Search tags.
This means that our counsellors won't be able to search our library effectively unless we give everyone login privileges - which, for various reasons, we really don't want to do at this point.
I noticed that LT seems to do OK with Search LibraryThing > Search tags when I search for only a single tag (e.g. bereavement); but that's not much good to us. The eventual value of our library will be in our counsellors' ability to search on *multiple* tags to find exactly the books they want... without having to log in first!
And one last thing, not a bug report but a FERVENT request nonetheless. Do you think you'll be able to see your way to allowing us the option of sorting our tags alphabetically per book? Some of my tags went higgledy-piggledy at one point (still not sure why); so the logic of the original order of entry is now out the window. Rather than manually re-entering dozens of tags, I'd much prefer to view them sorted by alphabetical order. (I think there might be a few other people who would like this, too.)
Thanks very much!!
Given Mr LThing has just had a kid, the chance that he lives long enough to make lifetime membership better value than buying 3 individual years.
If the person that asked the question is considerably younger than that, then his chances of dying in that period would be less than yours, most likely. :)
"Do you think you'll be able to see your way to allowing us the option of sorting our tags alphabetically per book? ... I'd much prefer to view them sorted by alphabetical order. (I think there might be a few other people who would like this, too.)"
Oh, yes! Pretty please. ;-)
****I wonder if you could tell me how old you are...
Sorry for making such a personal question but...
you offer lifetime membership for 25 dollars, I just want to make sure it is worth it...****
The question is, bentinho, how long do YOU expect to live......what does Tim's age have to do with it? And it isn't really a matter of years, but of how many books you want to catalog. Some of us have thousands in less than a year....
Actually, LibraryThing's lifetime membership is not tied to either your lifetime or mine. Rather, as is common in the formation of trusts, I have selected the entire population of a small town in the Republic of Georgia—where hard work and yogurt-eating makes people healthy. Thus, LibraryThing's lifetime memberships will expire when all the individuals listed on the current census die. In order to prevent demographic tampering, I am not releasing the name of the town. The recent renaming of a town to "LibraryThingia" is entirely coincidental.
Incidentally, lots of good stuff in these comments. I'll get to responding soon.
Thanks, Hippietrail. It hadn't occurred to me to use the wildcard. Some librarian I am!
*heads off to play*
Hey, thank you for the permalink feature. I didn't realise how much I wanted this.
Librarything teh coolest.
Hello.
Just found LT and I am absolutely delighted! What a fabulous idea, marvellously implemented.
Of course a feature request comes up immediately (not fair, I know, but I'll mention it anyway).
I would love to add books to my catalogue directly within LT - search for an author, see their books, and just "click to add to my catalogue", preferably tags and all.
Or is this already possible and am I overlooking it?
Thanks for this great site!
Cheers,
j.
Jaydot -
It is possible. Do a search for the book (or author) and go to the "book information" page. On the right, you'll see a green "plus" sign with the words "Add to your catalog". Click on that, and there you are!
Aquila said...
Thanks, Hippietrail. It hadn't occurred to me to use the wildcard.
I can't take the credit. I got the answer from somebody else a while ago when I asked. It didn't occur to me either. Some computer programmer I am!
Lilithcat:
Oh, stupid, I missed that! There's so much to discover on a new site like this. A FAQ or a forum would be good, or am I overlooking that too?
Thanks for pointing it out!
Cheers,
j.
Can we get a "search your books by ISBN" added to the search possibilities? I understand it's not something a lot of people will want, but i have some ideas for using it ... and currently a search with an ISBN pulls up no books, no matter what.
Thanks,
Adrienne
To follow on Adrienne, you can sort by ISBN, or you can add it as a tag to each book. Just an idea as a quick-fix.
I'm loving this place since it was pointed out to me. I'm almost done with my first frenzy of adding, and heading on toward fixing things and commenting etc.
I'm really impressed with the number of features constantly (seemingly) being added! Thanks for your hard work (and late congrats on the kid).
One nice feature that I'd like to see (unless, of course I've simply overlooked it), is a way to browse the library through the Edit Page. Being able to move that way rather than having to pop back and forth to the catalog page.
What about adding a visitor counter? Is it also possible to put the comment link right on the front page of the catalogue like what you see on blogs where anybody can comment. The owner has also the right to delete a comment.
I'd like to see a list of the 50 most obscure libraries added to the Zeitgeist page.
Also thought I'd point out a new ISBN to be aware of 978-1-4116-8655-7 - Why so? Because it's written by a LibraryThinger - your truly. (http://www.lulu.com/content/239206).
Told you I liked obscure!
Dear Tim
Upon seeing Miriam's list on her blog (of 25 top shared books), I asked my husband if we should do this. It looked interesting.
But when we clicked "shared," we discovered that because of the lack of disambiguation what is being counted as the same is not the same.
Extrapolating out from say mistaken identification within a category, we find that the categories themselves are screwed up ("The Third volume" by Jane Austen is not the same as her _Pride and Prejudice_, a bad quarto of _Hamlet_ is not Hamlet, a translation of a book is utterly different from its original).
The same problem afflicts the assertion that we own this particular book and someone else does.
Chava
Here's a couple of gimmicky feature ideas I recently had:
Zeitgeist: Most common duplicate books - works that people have more than copy of
Title cloud: along with author and tag clouds, a cloud of works for which you have more than one copy - useful for collectors
Chava,
There's been a lot of back-and-forth about the translation thing. I personally agree with you, that the translation is not the same as the original (and that two translations of the same work into the same language are also not the same), but Tim thinks otherwise (except in some cases, and I'm still not entirely clear as to what his distinction is, but it seems to amount to "old stuff that wasn't in Modern English originally doesn't get combined with its translations, but all the translations still get combined with each other. Unless it's the Bible, in which case the translations don't get combined with each other, either." Since LibraryThing is, after all, his creation, I respect his preferences and haven't been separating translations. For more unambiguous mis-combinations, though, go ahead and separate them!
Dear Lorax,
It's more than a matter of translations versus an original text. Different editions of selections of say Johnson's _Rambler_ contain very different numbers. If you've ever read Feynman, it's cargo cult counting.
In Primo Levi’s story, "Potassium" in his _Periodic Table_ he does an experiment by substituting sodium for potassium (after all they are so close, just about the same thing, no?), and ends up with a smashed set of equipment and no meaningful results whatsoever, from which he deduces the moral:
one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing [the smash-out] would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch point; the chemist’s trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effect. And not only the chemist’s trade.
On Amazon marketplace I thought I was buying a "Books-on-Tape" edition of Ayala’s Angel, only to discover I had about a "Recorded Books" set of cassettes of the book. Utterly different readers; different text used. Different object.
I know he'll do nothing, but I point it out because imaginary identifications are frustrating.
Chava
Since you have entries for when books were started and finished, do you think you could add some interesting stuff using those entries? Say a calander depiction of a person's reading habits (sorted by date started or date finished) Or perhaps, going way beyond the call of duty here --- possibly figuring up the # of pages the person has been reading/day or week or month. LOL. Just a thought! Really enjoy using this site! Thanks a million!
Thanks for the suggestion. I think it's a good idea someday. At present, however, VERY few people use these fields. If you use them, let me know more about how, and what sort of displays you'd want.
Tim
I am so happy with the permanent link feature! Thanks!
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