Various small changes
I have made some various small changes to the catalog page and I wanted to give you a chance to offer some feedback on these and the new catalog in general (except color scheme, that is for another discussion). Leave your comments here or bring them over to the Google Group for more discussion.
- You can now search subjects via the catalog search box. Just select 'Subjects' in the drop-down menu.
- ISBNs are now included in 'Book' searches.
- Titles are now links to the social info page.
- Multiple fixes to lingering in-place editing problems have been applied. If you know of a problem that has not been fixed, please let us know. It's better to have too many reports than to have none.
- The list of pages at the bottom of the catalog now displays correctly when you select "show all."
- Subject pages are now displayed with correct links to the global subjects and the global pages have correct display of the subject path.
- I'd like to know if people are still getting the stack overflow errors. I applied a work-around last night but I'm not sure if it is correcting the problem for everyone.
posted by Anonymous at 4:38 PM
36 Comments:
My books went away today! I had changed my user name when I had about 100 books entered. About 80 came back this afternoon under my old username, but they've disappeared again.
We are working through some issues with the new servers. And by "we" I mean Chris, Tim, and Abby, not me. I can't answer any questions about that. I'm just not involved in it. I can really only answer user interface and catalogue questions.
Oh, and in case people haven't noticed: We have TWO people named Chris at LibraryThing. Yes, very confusing for us too.
I am the Christopher that handles all of the stuff that you see and touch on LT and I'm the one that you usually see on the Google Group.
Chris is the hardware guy and handles that stuff (like the new servers, database maintenance, etc.). We've decided that I'll be called "Christopher" and he'll be "Chris."
Multiple fixes to lingering in-place editing problems have been applied. If you know of a problem that has not been fixed, please let us know.
I am still unable to use in-place editing. Same goes for adding and searching libraries other than LOC and amazon. (Mac OS9.2/IE5)
I did have stack overflow errors on my work computer this afternoon (Windows XP Professional/IE6).
I got the "stack overflow" error just now, too. Also, I added a book and the catalog count number on my profile page did not change.
Sharon (on LT as Ex_Libris)
Lilithcat,
I hate to say it, but I don't foresee in-place editing ever working for your particular combination of browser/os. We just have no way of testing it. I don't even have a Mac around here that runs 9.2 (I'm a "Mac guy" but all of mine are OS X and won't run 9.2).
It's not that I don't want it to work. It's just that I have no way to run down bugs and strange browser issues.
Thank you for the overflow comments. I was just taking a shot in the dark and didn't really get into the real problem. I promise to spend some time on the issue during the coming week.
Christopher. As regards IE 5, you can get it for OSX. It runs exactly the same as the OS9.2 version. That said, I'm not sure we can solve the problem. Let's pool our Ajax knowledge.
Catalog count is now OK. Maybe the system was running a little slow.
Sharon (on LT as Ex_Libris)
I had not realized that IE5 was still available for OS X. I've got every other browser under the sun installed, might as well have another. Funny, it's kind of like hearing about some old movie star and you say, "Wow, they're still alive?!"
I'll take a look and see if I can get things working for you, lilithcat.
Re the search function: I notice that it still isn't yielding any hits when you search on a term containing an umlaut vowel (such as Schönberg). Could this be fixed, please?
Well, I'm not sure if this is related to the various small changes, but yesterday I had Japanese characters displaying quite nicely in the title and author fields. Today, some--but not all of them--have turned into nonsense characters. Hardly fatal as glitches go, but a bit perplexing.
Silvernfire
I had a comment entered, laid out with returns.
I edited it with double click, where these apear as BR after saving it looked right. but next time I called it up all the BRs had disappeared.
The double-click edit feature only works once per box. If I make a mistake in my edit, or accidentally hit < enter > before finishing, I can't get back into the edit mode by double clicking until after I first refresh the entire catalog page (say, by clicking on the "edit entry" icon and then on "submit").
When I do a search using a - then a tag in the past I would get what doesn't have that tag. Now it gives me everything. Were the search functions changed? Is there a way to search for something that doesn't have a specific tag.
i am still getting stack overflow messages every once in a while
also some of my titles display something other than the actual title (even though the title displays correctly in the title field)
for instance:
a spanish english dictionary as a french english dictionary (i think this was entered by ISBN)
almost all buffy comics display as buffy: haunted (these titles were entered manually)
account: mariss133
Tag bug?
When I enter the tag "unread&shelved" on the add books page, it gets truncated to "unread". Entering it elsewhere isn't a problem.
paperkingdoms -
that sounds like a bug which should be easily fixed. However there is no need to string everything together like you suggest you could use "unread and shelved". However in that case I would prefer to use two separate tags.
As for non-latin character sets - that stuff gets hard real fast. However I think it is fair to say that the current situation is worse than it was at one time. ISTR - that the problems are linked with the database layer and not the UI layer (the author page shows that the content-type is being set to UTF-8). Presumably now the storm has been weathered and the new servers have bedded in Tim will have more time to address issues like these rather than fire-fighting all the time.
I have been just sitting quietly and not complaining because I know I deserve it for being so strange, but since you asked --
I have yet to have in-place editing work on my browser of choice (Opera 7.5 for XP), either the old tags-only version or the new edit-everything version. It'll bring up the text boxes and let me type, but it won't let me save the changes. (Sinilar things happen on several other sites, though, so I suspect it's just an incurable Opera-being-silly thing.)
When I put a subject in the search box, the result was 5 entries for the same book!
I am happy with the changes, but here is another one I'd like to see. Could there be an option in the 'your catalog' that enables the owner to see the books listed IN THE ORDER in which they were entered into the system. I am just cataloging entire shelves at a time. A chronological catalog listing on library thing would enable me to truly see a mirror image of my collection.
oops, sorry, NOW I see entry date in the catalog choices!! guess it's time to get new glasses.
the "search this library" function is out of whack. It searches my library intstead of the library of the other user
you say that ISBN'S are now included in the book search...which works in my catalog book search, but the book search for all of librarything did not work with my ISBN's. Did you mean only the in-catalog searches? :)
Thanks! Great stuff. :)
49shelves: Are you speaking of the search tab at the top of the screen? If so, there are two search functions, one is only for your library and the other is for all of LibraryThing. :) It seemed to be working for me just now. Hope you get it working! :)
<< 49shelves said...
the "search this library" function is out of whack. It searches my library intstead of the library of the other user
6:57 PM >>
Silvernfire, re: Japanese characters. I wish I understood why that would have happened. The bad news is, I'm not sure we can fix it. The good news is, having done the huge server migration, this will never happen again.
Can you tell me how you got the Japanese in? If from Amazon.jp, I can, perhaps, just reload them.
Tim, my Japanese characters are hooped too. This happened only a couple of days after I'd gone through all my books and manually corrected the last round of corrupted characters.
Is there any chance these can be restored, please? It would be a huge relief to know that I didn't completely waste all that time. (For what it's worth - almost all of my Japanese titles were originally entered via Amazon Japan, although of course there was a fair bit of manual editing later on.)
Also - re: "The good news is, having done the huge server migration, this will never happen again." Are you really, truly sure of this? I guess I could face one final round of corrections, but I'm feeling very discouraged right now. Please reassure me!
Stack overflow still occurs
Still getting the infamous stack overflow message...
In-place editing continues to have problems. I've been trying to edit dates acquired, and it's only worked once. Otherwise, I type in the date and hit save, it flashes 'Saving' in the box, then goes blank--with nothing modified. I haven't been able to notice a pattern. WinXP/IE6.
-- Brian (LT: bdhamilton)
I hope that the site soon will incorporate a Norwegian library - several of my Norwegian ISBN numbers don't go through...And I have so many of them :(
Hi. I just thought I'd chime in - I'm a new member, running IE for Mac 5.2.3 on OS 10.3.9 - and I'm another member who hasn't been able to see my catalog for several days now.
I'm just sayin'.
-
Brian Hamilton said...
I have also noticed the in-place editing does not work for dates acquired, but I have one thing to add. This is only true if the date acquired is blank. if a date acquired already exists, it CAN be changed with in-place editing.
I'm still getting the stack overflow errors when editing books in my catalogue.
- tripleblessings
AsYouKnow_Bob: What sort of problem are you having? I need some specifics. We have issues with in-place editing on OS9*, but you should be able to "see" your catalog. I'm wondering if this link will help
http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=AsYouKnow_Bob&shelf=list&sort=title
Tim
*problems I can't promise we'll fix; OSX was released more than five years ago, with very different capabilities than modern browsers.
tripleblessings: On the catalog page, right? (Not just when adding book covers.)
I'm emailing Christopher to turn off something he added. The stack overflow error arises from "sensing" whether Amazon sent an image back or not. It appears to be a problem on IE6, particularly when there's limited memory.
T
Tim: Yes, the Japanese books were pulled in from Amazon.co.jp, if that helps any. (Even before the character set glitch, I was torn between leaving the titles/authors as is, or romanizing them. As is, they're authentic, but if I romanized them, the books would stop clumping together at the beginning of my library. Decisions, decisions.)
Silvernfire
Any way to delete an account? I created one and tried LibraryThing and its not for me right now.
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