Archive for the ‘features’ Category

Friday, July 12th, 2013

Happy Thingaversaries

For a while now members have been celebrating “Thingaversaries,” anniversaries of the day they joined LibraryThing. As LibraryThing is now almost eight years old, a lot of our earliest, most active members have been celebrating 5-, 6- or 7-year Thingaversaries. The tradition is to use the occasion to buy as many books as your year.

Yesterday, norabelle414 (Nora), celebrated her six-year Thingaversary, and posted this to the “75 Books Challenge for 2013” group:

“Today is my SIXTH Thingaversary! Six whole years and I still can’t believe that I found this wonderful website that has changed my life, and that I get to talk to you lovely, like-minded people almost every day! It is Thingaversary tradition to buy oneself one book per year on LT, plus one to grow on. However, I’m trying to curtail my book buying this year. So instead, I’m going to buy myself one brand-new, sorely needed BOOKSHELF!”

In Nora’s honor, we’ve done two things:

1. We bought a cake in honor of Nora’s Thingaversary. Unfortunately, Nora lives hundreds of miles away, so LibraryThing staff in Maine—Tim, KJ, our 15-year-old intern Eddy and his two younger brothers(1)—are going to have to eat it for her! Sorry Nora, and thanks.

2. We’ve added a new Selected Thingaversaries module in the (new) “Folly” section on the home page. It highlights your connections who are having Thingaversaries and a semi-random set of members having their Thingaversary today—weighted by how active they are the site now.

So, congratulations Nora, and thanks to her and all the other members who joined years ago, and still love LibraryThing!

Feature-discussion here.


1. LibraryThing is turning into a summer camp. Alas, Jeremy is in Virginia this month for Rare Book School.

UPDATE: I added a notice of your next Thingaversary.

Labels: features, holiday, humor

Friday, April 26th, 2013

A raft of LibraryThing improvements

Our developers have made a whole slew of improvements recently. If you’re not following New Features, you may have missed them. Here’s a roundup.

The person who normally draws our yellow arrows died.

Share buttons on Add Books

We’ve added “share” buttons to the add books page, so you can share your new books on Facebook and Twitter easily. Come discuss.

Date formats and date-read changes

Change your default date format. You can now edit the way you’d like dates to appear in your catalog for the date-read, date-acquired, and entry date fields. 2013-04-26, or “YYYY-MM-DD,” is still the default, but you can change it to M/D/YYYY, or “January 1, 2012,” or several other display options. Change this setting on any book’s edit page, from Edit your profile > Account settings, or in the lightbox which appears when you edit the reading-date fields in your catalog.

“Imprecise” or “fuzzy” dates. Rather than having to enter a full year-month-day (2012-12-23) date, you can now just enter a year and a month (2012-12) or a year (2012).

Non dates and bad dates. You can even enter non-dates (“Banuary 2012” or “Sometime in college”) and the text will save and stick. It will, however, be displayed as red text. Dates from before 1970 now save correctly too.

New lightbox for editing dates. Editing reading dates from within the catalog now works slightly differently: if you double-click one of the reading date columns you’ll now see a lightbox appear, and you’ll be able to edit any reading dates for that particular book.

“Reading dates” catalog field added. We’ve added a new “Reading dates” field to Your books: this uses two columns and includes both the “Date Started” and “Date Finished” reading date fields. It sorts by the latest date in either “Date Started” or “Date Finished,” which is usually what you want. Add this to one of your display styles at http://www.librarything.com/editprofile/styles.

Back-end changes. These improvements required various important back-end changes, basically completely revising how and where the date-read data is stored. These were important not only for the improvements mentioned here, but also as we move into more changes to the “currently reading” structure (coming soon). This is step one of a multi-step process.

Questions, comments, bugs to report? Come discuss on Talk.

View, sort by work’s average rating

By popular request, we’ve adding a way for you to view or sort by a work’s average rating in your catalog. The column is called “Work: Average Rating.” Add it to one of your display styles at http://www.librarything.com/editprofile/styles. The column shows the work’s rating graphically (with stars, making it easy to compare your ratings with the average) as well as numerically, to allow more precision. The total number of ratings is also displayed.

For more on this, see the Talk thread. Over 250 members voted on how to style it, and we ended up coming up with a compromise.

Import/sync improvements galore.

With the recent influx of imports from Goodreads members and others, we took the opportunity to spend some time with our import code, and it is now much improved. There are still some major improvements to be made, but it’s running much more smoothly than before. Key changes:

Importing is much faster. You should see a marked increase in speed when it comes to processing imported files: we’ve dedicated some more processing power to handling imports, and made some speed improvements in the queue-processing code as well.

Syncing. You can now sync between Goodreads and LibraryThing accounts, allowing you to periodically update your LibraryThing library from your Goodreads account. Synced fields include reviews, ratings, date read and shelves/tags.

Bug fixes. We fixed a number of bugs in the import code. Here’s a sampling:

  • There were a number of issues with imports from Shelfari, Anobii, and Calibre that were causing all sorts of strange things to happen. Imports from those sites should now be much more successful (author names should come in completely, for example, rather than partially as they were in many cases).
  • A bug which caused collection assignments to go awry was eliminated.
  • Books which only include an ISBN-13 are now imported using the ISBN, rather than as ISBN-less books.
  • We’re now blocking any records without any data in the title field, as well as any blank rows in the imported file, from adding as blank LibraryThing book records.

Better tracking. During this process we added a number of new and very useful tracking measures on the back end so that we can monitor imports in a more coherent way and help to troubleshoot bugs much more easily.

Need to import? Head over to http://www.librarything.com/more/import and add or sync your books.

“Left-nav” standardization

As a first step in the direction of a site redesign, we’re working on standardizing various elements of the site, so they all look the same across LibraryThing. We’ve begun this process with the “left nav”—what we call LibraryThing’s secondary, left-aligned navigation menus on Talk, Groups, Recommendations and lots of other pages. Basically the code for these was the same, but a whole bunch of differences cropped up depending on which page you visited.

We’ve now standardized these based on the version previously used in Talk, with the addition of a blue “call out” bar by the item you’ve selected.

Labels: design, features, import, new feature, new features

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, August 3rd, 2011

Import your LivingSocial/Visual Bookshelf books and save your reviews

LivingSocial announced last week that they’ll be shuttering their Books section, formerly called “Visual Bookshelf,” as of August 10.

Living Social recommends migrating to another site, but if you do it you’ll lose all your reviews. Living Social splits your data up into multiple files and only the main one can be imported, the “collections” file. We’ve cooked up a better option that preserves your reviews as well.

As a bonus, anyone importing 25 books or more will get a lifetime account on LibraryThing!

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Go to http://www.librarything.com and click the “Join Now” button to create a LibraryThing account.
  2. Sign into your Living Social books account; you’ll see the large black box in the center of the page with three export buttons (Collections, Ratings*, Reviews).
  3. Click the “Export Collections” button and save the file to your desktop; then click the “Export Reviews” button and save that one too (they’ll be called “collection_books_….csv” and “review_books_…..csv”).
  4. On LibraryThing, go to the Import Books page (via the “More” tab at the top of any page on LibraryThing).
  5. Click the “Choose File” button and choose the “collection_books” file from your desktop, then click “Upload.”
  6. On the Import Options page, select the options you want and then click the “Import books” link at the bottom of the page.

To add your reviews:

  1. To add your reviews: once your titles have finished importing, return to the Import Books page and click “Choose File”; select the “review_books” file and click “Upload.”
  2. Under “Handle duplicates” at the bottom of the Import Options page, select the radio button for “Sync ISBN duplicates, importing user data,” and tick the “Replace Reviews with imported info.” Then click the “Import books” button and your reviews should import right into your LibraryThing catalog.

Come talk about it on Talk. And if you have any problems email tim@librarything.com.


*Ratings: The Living Social ratings export option doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. If it starts working in the future, we can work through adding it too.

Labels: features, import

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Physical description fields added

We’re currently rolling out to all members some brand-new fields for physical description:

  • pagination (both Roman- and Arabic-numeral)
  • height, length, and thickness*
  • weight
  • volumes

In addition to the six separate fields, available for display and sorting your books, there are also two summary fields. “Dimensions” summarizes height, length and thickness in a “8 x 10 x 1.5” format, and “physical summary” replicates the standard library-data format, displaying volume count, pagination, and the height of the book. The latter is also user editable.

The data comes comes either from the library or bookseller record you used to add your book, or, when data is missing, from the ISBN level. As elsewhere, data from your book is shown in black text, and data from another level is shown in green. The green text will turn black if you edit it or tab through the fields to confirm it.

You can edit all these new fields on either the book edit page or by adding them to “List” view on the “Your books” tab. To do that, click the little “gear” symbol on the top bar.**

Once added, double-clicking on any of these fields will bring up an “Edit Physical Properties” lightbox and allow you to make changes. There’s also an option there to convert the data for that record between pounds/inches and centimeters/kilograms, if you’re so inclined.

Naturally all these neat goodies lend themselves very well to cool statistics and charts, so we’ve also added a statistics/memes page. You can find yours here. If you’re not signed in, check out Tim’s here.

Find our how your books stack up (literally) against a hobbit, a giraffe, Michelangelo’s David, the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza and so forth. Discover how many U-Haul book boxes it would take to pack your collection, or the value of your books’ weight in gold. If all the pages in all your books were laid out end-to-end, how far would they stretch? All that and more on the new stats page.

We’ve also included a handy chart showing how many of your books don’t contain data in these fields, in case you want to run off to grab the ruler and scale.

If these fields aren’t yet showing for you, they will be soon; you’ll receive a profile comment when the fields are available. Many thanks to the members of the Board for Extreme Thing Advances for their assistance with getting this feature ready!

Come discuss the new fields and the stats page in Talk.


* height = head to foot of spine; length = spine to fore-edge; thickness = “width” of the book on the shelf

** There’s also an option here to “Show volumes, pagination, dimensions and weight fields.” If you choose to hide them, they simply won’t display anywhere.

Labels: features, new features, statistics