Archive for the ‘connection news’ Category

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

New: Search your groups and connections

We’ve added a new cross-library search feature. You can now search:

This opens up all sorts of possibilities: you and your family members or friends can create a group together and easily search across the all the books in your libraries, or start a neighborhood group*. You can look for interesting books within a given group. For example, Tim enjoys searching for “Alexander the Great” in the Alexander the Great group.

Be creative, and if you do something really nifty with this feature, make sure and tell us about it!

Come discuss it on Talk. Many thanks to members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances for help developing this feature.


* I’m already seeing Tim combining this new feature with the “what should you borrow?” recommendations so that he can plunder my bookshelves!

Labels: connection news, features, groups, new feature, new features, search

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Who has a book?

I’ve added a small section to work pages. The “Members” section shows who of your friends, interesting libraries and other connections have the work.

It also surveys the Legacy Libraries, a member project to catalog the libraries of famous dead people. So you can find out if Hemingway and Marie Antoinette owned, say, the Lusiads (Yes, they did). I think it gives this project—now growing quite impressive—a deserved boost

Discuss here.

Labels: connection news, new feature, new features

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Connection News, again

If you haven’t recently, take another look at Connection News. I’ve given it a few new features and much faster.

Connection News has been the best feature nobody uses. It was good in theory, but it was slow. It’s much faster now. As SilentInAWay put it:

“… [T]his afternoon, it took about a minute and a half to load this page for my interesting libraries. With this speed-up, it took several seconds to load the page the first time that I invoked it; for all subsequent loads, however, it has taken about a second. Wow!”

Connection News now tracks “newness”—putting a little “NEW” marker next to books, reviews and ratings if they’re new since the last time you looked at Connection News. To discuss the feature and suggest improvements, check out Talk.

Labels: connection news, optimization, speed