ShelfReferential

Amazon price links have been on shelf listings for a while now. They look like:

Amazon Price | Page

When you click “Price”, it queries for a current price from Amazon. Until now, this price was sort of dumb, because it was the “lowest new” price offered by anyone selling on Amazon. But who buys from those people? We all buy from Amazon if we can, because it ships faster, works with Amazon Prime, and is probably better supported if you have a problem.

Well now, the price returned is in fact Amazon’s own price, finally!

At the same time, I also added such links to the single-item page, and to the Amazon search results page. In fact, for Amazon search results, I go ahead and get the price at query time and just put it in there directly.

I’m super-excited that we were mentioned in the press, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. That’s the good news. The reality check is that it’s due to the class and professionalism of Tim Spalding over at LibraryThing, who always makes sure to mention some of the competitors when he’s interviewed.

Thanks, Tim. Time to go check out Shelfari…

When you search your own items, each item now lists which shelves it’s on. I think this is pretty useful and necessary information, but I’m most pleased about the way I implemented it. I hope the new mechanism I added will be useful in many more circumstances, as it’s quite general. Sorry it that was TMI.

A cataloging site is worthless without a way to search your items. It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got around to this crucial feature.

For this initial implementation, I prioritized doing a simple search consisting of just a single text field. Whatever you type is searched in the following fields:

• Title
• Authors, Artists, Conductors, Composers, Actors, Directors, other people fields
• LCSH subject classifications for books

This behavior is modeled on the iTunes search box, which searches pretty much all fields. Of course I expect to add a full fielded search for the nerds out there, but until the site scales a bit more I don’t think it’s needed.

Also notice that the results are very unadorned. You get a simple list of items with just their titles and pictures, and a useless checkbox. I’ll fix that soon, putting in some filtering and sorting and controls for moving the items around and whatnot. Also, it doesn’t show you what shelves the items came from, another obviously useful bit of result.

I’m happy to have worked out all the proper SQL to add this feature, so that I can focus on expanding it rather than feeling lame for not offering it!