Now when you view your shelf, you don’t see ugly text edit fields in each item. Instead you see formatted notes, like the visitors to your shelf see. But when you click on them, they become editable fields with a Save and Discard button, so you can still edit them. This obviously only happens on your own shelves. It’s the best of both worlds. Neat!
You can now limit all your Amazon search results (currently that’s all your search results :)) to items sold directly by Amazon. This is helpful for those who don’t like to use zShops, who prefer to deal with Amazon, or who have Amazon Prime. The default setting is off, meaning you’ll see Amazon-sold and non-Amazon-sold items as usual in the search results. To change the setting, visit the My Account page.
This feature works, which is really cool, but it behaves a bit poorly in a couple ways. These are consequences of the fact that I had to implement this as a post-filter after Amazon gives SC the results. First, the total number of found items reported at the top of the results page is not accurate. It’s returned by Amazon and so doesn’t take the filter into account. Second, the paging behaves a bit strangely, since if you ask for 10 results per page (the default), but 4 of those items are not sold by Amazon, then the first page you see will have only 6 items on it!
The solution I implemented is really a workaround for a well-known bug in Amazon’s web services. Actually, it’s a giant missing feature of their web site as well. They don’t offer a way to filter searches in either place to return items sold directly by Themselves. Actually in the case of the web services it’s worse. They do offer a mechanism to do this, but it doesn’t work, it returns items not sold by Amazon. Some bug. I’m starting to think that they actually want it this way, because they are in a bind with their partners. Actually, it’s a conflict of interest. If they make it easy to filter away all their partners’ goods, then that’s not likely to please the partners, is it? This is the problem with being a store that is also a storefront for other stores. Amazon Prime makes this worse, because now you actually pay Amazon to treat their items specially (better shipping), but they won’t filter search results to show you items that benefit from Prime.
Free-form items can now have a custom image, no more stupid notebook-and-pen! When you create or edit a free-form item you’ll see the new field — just paste the URL of an image anywhere on the web, and it will use it as the product image. You can get the URL of an image by right-clicking on it and selecting “Copy Image Location” or “Copy Image URL” or something similar.
Amazon price links have been on shelf listings for a while now. They look like:
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:
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!
Executive summary: there is a new preference in the My Account page that gives you control over how links to external sites behave. You can have all of them open in a new window (in which case a little icon will adorn all external links to remind you) or you can have them open in the current window. Just a tiny convenience feature. The default is to open in the current window.
I personally hate it when I click a link and a new window opens that I wasn’t expecting. This has been mitigated recently by Firefox, which lets you direct all such links to a new tab instead. Safari has this feature, except it only applies to apps that aren’t Safari. So when you click a link in an email, it opens in a new tab in your topmost Safari window, but if you click a link in Safari itself, that link will open a new window instead of a new tab. Sigh.
Yesterday LibraryThing turned 1 year old. Happy birthday! LibraryThing is the leader among sites like ShelfCentered. Tim’s eye for clean design coupled with his nerdy book-hoarder philosophy make a perfect fit for the data-crazed digerati out there who want to catalog their stuff.
When I originally felt the pull of this idea, I really wondered if there was anyone else to whom it would appeal. Well, Tim’s growing community and 5 million cataloged books are testament to the fact that we’re out there!
I wish LibraryThing continued success for many more years. And if any of you LibraryThing users also want to catalog your movies, music or video games, or make wishlists, or read some history and background information about your items, check out ShelfCentered and subscribe to this news blog!
I am proud to announce that ShelfCentered moved a big step closer to its vision today, with the addition of Library of Congress data for books!
Now when you click all the way to the single-page view for a book on one of your shelves, LoC data will be displayed if it exists. This includes all sorts of cool stuff: not just the call number in case you want to grab the book from a library, but also its subject classification(s) and sometimes links to sample chapters and the table of contents.
One of the pillars of our philosophy is to give you rich information about your items. This always meant we wanted to use many data sources to gather background information. LoC is not so much a rich data source as an authoritative one, but the factual data forms the bedrock for further expansion.
When searching starts to be deployed, I look forward to opening up the search criteria to include the subject headings and the call numbers. Imagine browsing a virtual shelf that shows what books would be nearby at a library!
For you tag-crazy folks out there, don’t worry. Tags are in the works, too. For now, think of the subject headings as tags done by a central authority that is smarter than you, but doesn’t like lots of tags 