Chris and I have finished up a neat, possibly major new feature: home pages for each member. We think it’s going to make LibraryThing a lot more dynamic, while not compromising our strong basis and roots in unchecked, unapologetic bibliophilia.
I made a short screencast about it if, you know, reading gets you down.
The basic idea was to give members a “center” from which to visit the rest of the site. Until now, sign-in threw you into your catalog. New members went to a special welcome page. And the profile also felt like a center.
The new profile centers you. It offers pieces or “windows” into the site—your library, your connections, your recommendations, Talk, hot books, hot reviews, Early Reviewers and so forth. It gives you an idea of how much LibraryThing has to offer. But, it’s also editable, so you can control how much of each piece you want to see, and even remove the ones you don’t care about. (Anyway, that’s the theory. We haven’t implemented reordering and removing the pieces yet, because we want members to tell us what the defaults should be.)
You can check out your Home by going here. Or check out my Home. (Normally you can’t see other member’s Home pages, but you can see mine!)
Some highlights. Home includes a summary of recent recommendations, so you can keep up-to-date on what LibraryThing has found for you, as well as a very handy Connection news piece. You can decide just what you want to see—new books, ratings, reviews. And you can decide whose news you want to see.
I’m also very taken with the Local events piece, based on LibraryThing Local. It should give Local more prominence. It’s really a unique resource—driven by members and more comprehensive than anything out there.
In addition to the “Daily Me” stuff—news about you and your world—Home also provides snapshots of what’s happening on the rest of LibraryThing, including a totally new “Popular This Month” list (The Host, of course), a weirdly fascinating up-to-the-second window into books being added to LibraryThing, an area for interesting reviews, a new “On this day” feature that sucks birth- and death-days from Common Knowledge, a peek into the current Early Reviewers batch and some featured LT authors.
In the near future we plan to make the order of pieces editable. For now, though, we’d love some thoughts about the best default order. After all, most users will never change the default.
Other planned improvements include:
- Making it the homepage for non-signed-in members too (ie., the right stays the way it is, but the left is taken over with a description of the site).
- Adding specialized pieces, like a Combiners! log, a wiki log—whatever you want, in theory.
When it comes to making LT more “current,” the aching need, as everyone insists—Sonya has taken to closing every email with a plea—is for collections, particularly a “currently reading” feature. We know, and we’re working on it. The Home page isn’t complete without it.
Thanks for everyone’s help critiquing early drafts of the page. Come talk about what we made in Talk.
UPDATE: The first thread is pushing 250 messages in eight hours. It also got sidetracked into tab issues. (I relented; the Profile tab is back.) So I’ve started a New Thread about the Home page.
