2019 Redesign: Daily Progress

Want to see how the sausage is made? Here's a thread on how the sausage is made.

Friday, June 14

Chris (@ConceptDawg) arrived last night. Between meetings we couldn't get out of and a lunch meeting with two LibraryThing employees—one of whom has a new baby, we were only able to work part of the day.

We spent some hours thinking about the global navigation, toying with various ideas—including some rather weird ones. We toyed with putting the global nav on the bottom, and using a LOT of menus under the tabs. But we're gravitating toward a less radical change. (Even so, members may at first regard it as radical.)

Our current thinking involves keeping Home, Your Books and Add Books. There's a strong argument for putting "Add Books" under "Your Books," but in the end I think having it up there gives it prominent. Most of what's good at LibraryThing starts from it being a cataloging app.

A host of pages would combined under a new, global "Explore" page--Zeitgeist, More, Trending books, Common Knowledge, Helpers, etc. and maybe LibraryThing Local and Recommendations. I think LibraryThing needs such a page.

Groups, Talk, and Local are likely to be combined under "Community."

On the right, an "Account" icon would have a drop-down, with links to all sort of standard account actions, including settings, sign out, a profile shortcut (also available as a subnav to "home," as now), comments, etc.

We spent some time thinking through the second-tier of navigation--for example that "Add books" would have options for searching, manual adds and importing.

Besides writing on paper, we did a very close examination of our Google Analytics. "Local," "More" and "Zeitgeist" are used a lot less than the other tabs. But add up all the "Explore" options, and you have something. I suspect some members will miss having a shortcut to groups but, by the numbers, most people use Talk a lot more. Groups will still be available, of course, and work the same way.

We spent the evening talking through some back-end questions, especially about how the catalog should work.

At present, @Conceptdawg is composing a first draft of a new nav.

You can see some photos here. Alas, I didn't take any people shots this time, but be assured that we ate a huge amount of fried chicken!

You can see some photos here.

Nope. Your link takes me to a page that says, "Member gallery: lilithcat: tag "LTDesign2019_Day1"", and, of course, I have nothing with that tag.

A host of pages would combined under a new, global "Explore" page--Zeitgeist, More, Trending books, Common Knowledge, Helpers, etc. and maybe LibraryThing Local and Recommendations. I think LibraryThing needs such a page.

Groups, Talk, and Local are likely to be combined under "Community."

So a link to Local would be in two places?

I like it.

>1 timspalding: Photos link broken.

eta And I'm 20 minutes too late.

I see the pics. On the left menu, there’s a link with day 1 (5) and there are 5 pics of drawings there.

>5 raidergirl3:

Ah, you have to go to All member pictures tagged "LTDesign2019_Day1" (5)

>5 raidergirl3: Or basically, the link should be https://www.librarything.com/gallery/tag/LTDesign2019_Day1

While you're at it, I wonder if you'll consider gaming out what could be usefully achieved with an (optional) radial menu on mobile.

e.g. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/25002/are-circular-menu-button-interfaces... ; https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2012/07/25/the-usability-of-radial-menus.html

Changed the link. Some photos are here:
https://www.librarything.com/gallery/tag/LTDesign2019_Day1

So a link to Local would be in two places?

No, we have to figure out where it goes. I think under "Explore" not "Community."

Community… I wish there were a better word. We toyed with a bunch.

>10 timspalding: "Connections" ? *shrugs*

>11 davidgn:

On the list, but I don't think it'll win.

>10 timspalding: "Communities"?

>13 davidgn:

Nice. On the list.

Slightly more detailed images here: https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/1139735603736543232

Worthwhile, too, perhaps, to group helper stats together somewhere instead of (or at least in addition to?) scattered across at least five locations (off the top of my head), some of which (partially) duplicate one another, and some of which even seem to calculate (or, at the moment, miscalculate) differently.

I'd also like to see a "contribute" grouping with links to various tools that are fairly widely scattered -- some of which I've mentioned in other threads (e.g. venue/add books source linking, library series data integrating, etc.), and some not (e.g. event linking, cover flagging, work combining (when there's an active global queue for that), tag voting, etc.) One particular example is Author Stats: a page I never stumbled across until relatively late in my use of LT. Something that groups them all together rather than make contributing via some of these tools something of a hidden easter egg.

>16 davidgn:

Yeah. I'd like to unify the helper experience and community, presumably under "Community"/"Communities."

>16 davidgn:

Yes! If I didn't have some of those pages bookmarked, I'd never find them again.

What is "Add"? Is that for "Add Books"?

>19 krazy4katz: Yeah. I guess because, y'know, "We're more than great books."
(Oh, no. The jingle. Make it stop. https://youtu.be/DVZqEmH9LKs?t=10 )

>20 davidgn: :-)

>19 krazy4katz:

Yeah. Maybe spelled out, maybe not.

Saturday June 15

Photos: https://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/timspalding/tag/LTDesign2019_Day2
Also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/1140022521728819206

Today—which isn't over—we spent a number of hours working on the top nav. We have some designs for it which we want to run by LibraryThing staff on Monday. (Monday feels very long away!) The key tension is to keep LibraryThing distinctive. Some of the designs we are working with aren't very distinctive at all. @Conceptdawg has experimented with some ideas there, like a very thin top bar that is a background graphic of a shelf of books. Members might not like the "wasted space," but our vertical totals aren't coming in much more than we currently have. And I was thinking that we could allow members to populate the wasted space with their own shortcuts to sections on LT, which might only show when you are up in that area. In any case, a work in progress.

After that, we spent time working on the catalog itself. We're more confident about our direction there, although you can see us working through various ideas in the photos—one of them ends in "HELL." The search box is moving. We're adding a register, but also taking one away, such that what you searched for is going to be combined with the pagination bar. We are going to borrow the pagination interface from TinyCat (see https://www.librarycat.org/lib/timspalding/search/tag/religion) as well as showing the current sort, also as TinyCat shows it. Too many people don't understand the two ways you can sort--clicking on headers and selecting the sort icon.

While @conceptdawg worked on styling, I made progress on the data end of the catalog. It's a joy to rewrite such code in a more abstract and extensible way. It's also going to be faster. For example, previously it would get the author names for your primary and secondary author separately. Now it gets them together, which is more database efficient. Database efficient or not, the code is just nicer, and the data more organized, and that can only have good effects down the line.

I just want to be sure I understand what you are doing.

If I search my catalog, it's going to look like this https://www.librarycat.org/lib/lilithcat/search/tag/religion rather than this http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilithcat&deepsearch=religion ?

Is that what you mean?

>24 lilithcat: No. But we are thinking that we're going to offer that as an optional view.
We aren't changing or taking away the default view of tabular data.

We're borrowing the thin pagination bar from Tinycat (or at least using it as a model).
Basically, we are using previous successes—and failures—to make LT better than it was when we developed the catalog 13 years ago. Strange as it may seem we've actually learned a thing or two since then. Mostly it's about cleaning up HOW things work and very little about changing how you interact with them.

So far all of your normal interface elements are going to stay on the catalog page (mostly unchanged) and we might add a couple of new options for viewing your catalog. I think, once we get done, many of you will likely wonder why we made it a big deal. :)

The look of the top bar is changing, but not in monumental ways. Still have logo, tabs, search, place to get to your profile, etc. Hopefully it will be a little more elegant and cleaner looking and it will handle screens of various sizes a little better. But otherwise we haven't changed a ton yet.

Now, we've TRIED to change a lot and at least CONSIDERED changing more. No bad idea has been wasted. But so far we've been steered toward very similar designs to what we already have...only better. We think.

And it's worth remembering that you have chosen LT because in some way or another you've liked the choices that we've made at some points in the past. Well, we're the same people working through things again. You very well may like what we do this time even more.

>24 lilithcat:

As @conceptdawg said, the primary and default view will be tabular. I think members are clear with that. On mobile, we may *default* to the list view (i.e., to TinyCat). Because the tabular view doesn't work in mobile. Probably we'll be having the tabular view "collapse" on mobile--columns become rows.

That gets very long, but there's really no other way to do it. On the web, however, the default view would be tabular.

In both cases, it will be an option only. Nothing is going away, least of all the tabular view. I mean, I've spent all day on the tabular view; if it were going away, I'd have been at the beach!

>25 conceptDawg:, >27 timspalding:

Thanks for clearing that up!

>26 conceptDawg: You are also the same people who decided to replace the nice restful salmon with the high contrast chocolate.

>29 MarthaJeanne: #salmonsmack

Almost done! :)

Hm. Having the covers flush against each other turns them into a "strip" that I find hard to parse visually, especially with designs that are vertically divided, like The English Language: A Historical Introduction and No True Glory.

>32 paradoxosalpha:

Yipes, no. I'm joking!

This is a catalog grid WITH NO STYLING. Zero. It's the data, without any consideration for how it looks at all!

OK then.

>1 timspalding: Groups, Talk, and Local are likely to be combined under "Community."
>10 timspalding: Community… I wish there were a better word.

Domains
Commonwealth or Commons
Views or Vistas
Panorama
Coteries
Bookscapes or Shelfscapes
Library Square
Forum

Agora

Sunday, June 16

We spent much of the day working on the catalog.

I reworked and improved most of the selecting and displaying code for the most important fields—28 fields so far, out of 92 (!). You can see the raw, unstyled date in >31 timspalding:. This looks like crap, but the back-end work is important. I've been able to find some good speed improvements, and our new page is going to be smaller, less layout-complex and therefore faster.

@Conceptdawg (Chris) worked on design, especially the catalog page and the top navigation. He's making great progress with the catalog page, reworking what we have into a much more intuitive design.

After going to Becky's—an excellent local diner—with the family, we had some drinks and worked on the work page. @Conceptdawg HATES that the work-page covers and author-page photos "go in the nav." He wants them in the large middle column, but pushing the title or name over to the right to make space makes me itch. We ended up looking at detail pages for every site we could think of--every retailer from FNAC to Alibris, library systems, competitors, etc. We didn't come any closer to a solution, or even a common understanding of it. But we had some excellent ideas about the rest of the work page. Among other things, we need to get the summary up high.

Photos: https://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/timspalding/tag/LTDesign2019_Day3

The photos are lame today. Most of what we did isn't shown.

>37 timspalding: HATES that the work-page covers and author-page photos "go in the nav" ... but pushing the title or name over to the right to make space makes me itch.

I find this fascinating, mostly because it shows what I've grown used to without really questioning.

Must the images (covers, author photos) remain separated from the text (title, name)? Intuitively, they belong together.
If they must remain separate, could the images go into the right column (pushing Quick Links down, if that design were kept)?
Certainly images don't belong in the nav column, I agree on that point.

I really like the cover in the upper right corner of the page. Could you design the page to have a title bar that goes all the way across the top and have the nav column start below that?

>39 jjwilson61:

After posting, I also thought of a title bar stretching across the full screen width. It could be frozen when user scrolls down the page, as a header, perhaps even in a summary form (1-2 rows) and only be fully viewable when scrolled to top of page (5-7 rows or whatever it is now).

I also wondered about detaching the nav bar entirely: why is it fixed to the page? It could appear as needed wherever the cursor appeared, and/or at a screen touch. But I'm guessing that's as much to do with OS as with site design, too radical a change for this project.

Though this site goes partway there by putting the nav behind one button:
https://www.handheldpress.co.uk/

This is the way that the LTApp works.
It starts as a big cover/title/author and as you scroll up it eventually becomes a single title bar with smaller version of the cover with the title/author.

It's worth thinking about for the web too.

>39 jjwilson61:

Upper right or upper left?

Sorry, upper left, where it is now.

ETA: To extend the Nav bar all the way to the top with the cover and title info to the right of that would look odd to me.

I'm happy with the cover at the top of the nav column (or author photo on author pages). What I'd suggest is the left cover+nav not scroll as the page scrolls; as it is now you only have to scroll the work page a little way for that left column to be just wasted white space (same for author pages, and talk pages for that matter).

By Navigation Bar, do you mean the chocolate bar or the list on the left. Must be the list on the left because the chocolate bar already stays where it is.

I think having the list on the left stay in place during scrolling is a good idea.What about everything in the right hand column? Could that also stay where it is? On the other hand, on a small screen, you might not see it all if it didn't scroll… hmm….

By Navigation Bar, do you mean the chocolate bar or the list on the left. Must be the list on the left because the chocolate bar already stays where it is.

You can actually change this, but I'd rather you didn't.

>46 timspalding:, Oh yes, I remember now. The choice is at the bottom of the page. I like it in place.

June 18

Today we had a series of meetings, and ended with a lobster dinner with friends.

The meetings resolved a number of issues, to wit:

1. The rest of the staff dislike one of our ideas about the top navigation, which includes our logo treatment. The dislike was so extreme that that design--which was preliminary and uncertain--is dead. A number of alternate ideas were raised which @ConceptDawg needs to implement and showcase.
2. We made substantial and constructive progress on the catalog interface. I think members will be pleased with it, but I'm not ready to show images of it.
3. The developers decided some technical matters related to doing pages more consistently--centralizing certain tasks that were formerly distributed.

The core issue in #1 is that we set some goals for the redesign. They include that every page, and especially the nav—which is the only constant element:

1. Work at all sizes
2. Be consistent
3. Be intuitive
4. Communicate things we want to communicate about LT (e.g., that it has power and scope)
5. Be distinctive

The trick is largely with #4 and #5, but especially #5--be distinctive.

This is a hard topic to talk about with members here, because you aren't new to the site. You know LibraryThing is powerful, and you know it's distinctive—weird even. But I don't think our design communicates it well.

As it stands our new UI ideas involve removing a number of tabs, relocating the site-wide search box somewhat, and adding some simple graphical icons to the top right (bell, account-person, help). These have the combined effect of making things simpler and more intuitive, because we tap into patterns used elsewhere. For example, we're using the bell icon for alerts and messages--a pattern adopted by almost every side now. And we're using a person icon for "account" actions, with a drop down.

As it was, LibraryThing's looked a big generic—generic and complex. The new version is less complex looking, more intuitive, but still generic.

What can we do that's distinctive? If we had infinite space, we'd add something specifically distinctive to the top navigation, such as a row of books, to suggest that the site is for book lovers, and specifically for book lovers who read a lot, have lots of books, etc. We have toyed with a number of such treatments, and nothing works.

Another answer is the logo. Currently we're using the whole word as a logo for larger screens, and a square white-and-chocolate "L" for smaller screens. The latter shows up for a lot of users, not just mobile.

Most of the staff dislike the "LibraryThing" logo as is. I'm more mixed, but it's not doing everything we'd want of it. @ConceptDawg has therefore played with a number of other logo treatments. He's going to rework some tomorrow, but I'm not seeing a good answer yet.

>48 timspalding: I don't have any suggestions regarding distinctiveness of design. (Crossing over from the avatars thread, I'm very strongly a words person, not an images person. Come to think of it, for me the distinctiveness is that there are so many words and so few pictures.) But I just wanted to say thank you for being so open about the redesign instead of us logging in one day to find something completely different. Change is good, surprises not so much. :)

I'm actually getting really excited about this redesign. Although there will probably be a learning curve, I think it's going to be awesome.

As casvelyn says, I am very very much a words person. (Which I would expect to be over-represented on a book site, but we're so much a minority in general that I suspect even here we're outnumbered.) . So I have no opinion on the logo, but if it's problematic I'm glad you've got more visual people working on it.

I'm looking forward to seeing the new design, though!

Speaking of intuitiveness...

We have the Search Site box on every page.
But LibraryThing's primary purpose is to catalogue your own books.
Yet there are quite a number of places on LT where you must go at least one click away (that is, to a different page) in order to do a search in Your Books.

I think there should be a Catalogue Search box on every page.

>51 Crypto-Willobie: Or at the very least on my profile and homepages. It has never made sense to me that I can search someone else's catalogue from their profile, but not my own from mine.

>52 MarthaJeanne:

You can search your catalogue from your home page. The search box is in the "Your Books" module. What you can't do is restrict the fields searched or do an advanced search.

>51 Crypto-Willobie:

We raised this in our staff meeting today. We're with you.

We are going to add "Search your library" to the drop-down in the site search box at the top. You can choose that, or keep it on that, as you desire. It's the best we can do without having multiple buttons up there--which is ulgy--or two search boxes--which is uglier.

>48 timspalding:

A possible mixed solution to 4 and 5 would be to have some sort of graphical icon representing stats. It could link to either the user's stats or to Zeitgeist? Or, it could link to some central stats "homepage" where the stats of interesting libraries and other member connections could be viewable (although that might make some users uneasy).

timspalding (#54):

We are going to add "Search your library" to the drop-down in the site search box at the top.

My site search box doesn't have a drop-down; it's just a search box. I can either fill it in, or click on the magnifying glass to bring up the search page. Is this something you're going to be changing?

Mostly unrelatedly, a "random stat" each day could be a fun feature to have, although I imagine that might involve more staff work that is desirable. But it could be a cool way to prompt members to learn new things about their collection.

My site search box doesn't have a drop-down; it's just a search box. I can either fill it in, or click on the magnifying glass to bring up the search page. Is this something you're going to be changing?

Yes. Sorry. We are indeed adding it. We have the space, and showing more there will help emphasize what can be done. Also, frankly, I often want to search something OTHER than works, and have to search one, then switch.

timspalding (#58):

Also, frankly, I often want to search something OTHER than works, and have to search one, then switch.

Me too! This is one of the things that's annoyed me about the current interface since day one - I generally click on the magnifying glass to open up the search page so I don't have to search works first. Glad to see this changing.

Edited: Hah, found what I was looking for, in the thread from when the current search was introduced:

>57 Kanarthi: I really like this idea.

>59 lorax: My workaround has been to bookmark the search page, and ignore the box.

You can just click on the magnifying glass in the search box without entering anything.

Huh?

I said, in the post you were replying to:

"I generally click on the magnifying glass to open up the search page so I don't have to search works first. "

Or were you responding to the nine-year-old screenshot I quoted as documentation that the current practice has annoyed me literally since day one?

Sorry, yes... I was skimming quickly and responded quickly and I thought helpfully to the last part I read.

I just want to make sure that with all this changing going on that "manual entry" will remain an option for "Add Books." I'm a cataloging librarian and while I realize that many people just want to click an icon or a button and have the book's data populate, I do all mine via manual entry and want to keep doing that.
Thank you.

Please do not use infinite scroll, in case that is in the cards.

I've seen other functional and useful websites destroyed by IS. It is fine for browsing large collections of pictures consuming entertainment, but being able to precisely navigate complex lists of data is the opposite of useful.

>65 Stbalbach:

I agree. Infinite Scroll has made the Amazon Wishlist feature very hard to navigate.

Kathleen828 (#64):

I'm pretty sure there would be a riot if Tim tried taking away manual entry. That said, it can't hurt to spell everything out, in a major redesign scenario!

So, please keep manual entry, Overcat, and all the existing library sources!

What the heck you guys doing? I JUST changed over to the "new" chocolate style a couple months ago. And you want to change it "again" on me? Sheesh.

;)

I just want to make sure that with all this changing going on that "manual entry" will remain an option for "Add Books."

Yes, of course!

Please do not use infinite scroll, in case that is in the cards.

No. We've thought about it for the catalog, but I think not.

What the heck you guys doing? I JUST changed over to the "new" chocolate style a couple months ago. And you want to change it "again" on me? Sheesh.

Chris came up with a joke "Salmon returns" style recently :)

>69 timspalding: Is it spawning season already?

Tim
Any chance of enabling the posting of pictures onto the wiki sites again?
Pictures would greatly enhance the Folio Society (here) and Fine Press forum (here) wikis.
The pictures on these sites are left over from the days when picture posting was possible, then this feature was removed a couple of years ago.

>69 timspalding: Chris came up with a joke "Salmon returns" style recently :)

Where?!? Gimme, gimme, gimme.

The three sections I hugely rely on are "Home," "Your Books," and "Add Books." These are a must to be continued. It would be really great if somehow the Library of Congress subject headings for Dewey Decimals to be incorporated into the program. It is my "go to" for cataloging books for our church library.

Final Two Days

Here are some photos from our final two days: https://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/timspalding/tag/LTDesign2019_Final

It's a mix of things. The "Release Order" is our current thinking. There are a lot of dependency issues we have to work through. For example, we aren't sure if we can release the new navigation without redoing the catalog. (We came up with an idea how to, but we aren't sure of it.) There are other examples. And we aren't sure what else will drop on our head--and on whom on staff. So the order is still preliminary.

>73 WVBC:
The three sections I hugely rely on are "Home," "Your Books," and "Add Books." These are a must to be continued.
Yes. Not to worry. Each of those is still included as a main tab in the new design.
We haven't gotten deep enough to talk about the details of the LoC/DDS question yet.

Chris (@conceptdawg) is working up his own recollection, but in brief, since I last posted we have:

1. Worked on the "work pop-up" together.
2. Worked on the work page a fair amount, including a meeting mostly about the work page. Chris has some prototypes there.
3. Worked on the concept of basic editions (generic editions, etc.) together, both from a UI and a data perspective.
4. Thought through the profile page somewhat, including how to differentiate it from similar pages (e.g., author pages). We may keep the profile picture on the right of the content, whereas work and author pages will put the cover and author photo on the left.
5. Charted out dependencies, charted out a speculative release order, and tried to calculate work necessary overall and by staff member. Tricky, tricky stuff.

And, of course, had meetings about other topics, fixed a server issue and re-ran a bunch of stale data!

Chris departs for home tomorrow, and I depart for the American Library Association in Washington, DC!

Really happy to hear that you're thinking about generic editions!

Release Order: ajaxify totalis!

Love the peek into the sketches and thinking.

June 19
Today we had another staff design review where I presented some new feature ideas that we cooked up since yesterday.

• A mini "work preview" view that can be attached to any work/book title or cover on any page and allows a kind of quick view pop up with a cover, title, author, summary, and a few basic stats. The rest of the staff liked the idea and gave great feedback on minor design changes. I'm working to get this in limited use on the current site so that we can start getting member feedback and improving it.


• We will have a similar popup for member names and possibly authors but those are down the road a bit.


• Not to worry, they are delayed so that you must hover over the item for a bit before they pop up. They likely won't be used on mobile devices (there's no hover so if you're going to click on the item to open the popup then you might as well click and instead go to the actual work page)


• I demoed an early version of what we're thinking for the new work page layout. It will largely stay the same with a three column layout but we're cleaning up the styling and just updating it to be more efficient and cleaner. We're keeping the sections in the content of the work page and you'll still be able to collapse and reorder them.


• @kjgormley came up with the idea that each page should have an action area on it that is the same across pages. I think we're going to implement that. So a work page will have 'Add book', 'Edit book', etc. in that area. Profile pages will have 'Edit profile' etc. I think this is a great addition and will help to make the site more consistent and easier to use.


• Tim went to his happy place and emerged with some ideas about how to make Add Books an easier process. I may have used my outside voice to let him know what I wanted with respect to this subject. He may or may not have thrown office supplies at me.


• Tim and I worked through the bigger roadmap for the changes and it's a bit daunting. It's going to be months of work. But I, for one, am excited to be devoting so much time to making LT a better place to be. A lot of the work is stuff that I've wanted to improve since I started working here.

I'm headed back home tomorrow and Tim and Abby are headed to the ALA conference in D.C. (drop by the Bowker booth and say Hi!).

While Tim and Abby will be partying like international rock stars I'll be slaving away in the Texas heat continuing the work we started this week (and hopefully getting enough done to give more updates).

>79 conceptDawg:

Also, he ate like a king.

>80 timspalding: I DID eat like a king. Duck Fat for lunch and Bonobos wood-fired pizza for dinner. That's a solid lineup.

>81 conceptDawg: UGH I miss Portland.

>71 wcarter: You can definitely still upload pictures as far as I can tell, but it's a bit hidden and that does need fixing. In the meantime, I'd recommend bookmarking this page: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Special:Upload. That's where the uploading happens. Then it's just a matter of linking to them in the wiki page you'd like to attach them to. Feel free to ping me over email (loranne@librarything.com) or on another thread if you have further questions about this!

>82 lorannen:
Thank you. I will experiment with this link.

conceptDawg (#75):

We haven't gotten deep enough to talk about the details of the LoC/DDS question yet.

I wasn't even aware this was a question! Is there seriously talk about eliminating them? Please, please, please keep them! I thought this was primarily a *design* re-do, not a *functionality* re-do where eliminating data would even be on the table!

>84 lorax:: Please, please, please keep them!

Seconded.

>84 lorax: I hope #75 was a reference to the browsable LoC concept. ;-)

>84 lorax: Certainly no plans to remove ANY data or fields that we currently support.

I meant that we haven’t gotten deep enough to say whether or not we will support anything new. Just bad communication on my part.

Not removing anything, except maybe the title field on all books.

>88 timspalding:

Be more creative. Keep the titles. Keep the authors. Remove the relationship between the two!

Removing titles would help with combining. A single work per author, nice and clean

Catalog will no longer have covers or titles.

>91 conceptDawg: To be replaced with QR codes, I presume?

I thought that was obvious.

#67 :-)
Thank you, I feel much better now

#91
I feel as if I've taken a "slow" pill here. You are joking about removing titles, right? Maybe I've been working too hard this week...

>95 Kathleen828:

I know I've been working too hard this weekend!

>96 timspalding: Of course you have. I know that every single book title has to be removed manually. That's 135,662,398 titles. It will take some time before you are done!

>97 anglemark: Of course many people who are not following this thread will try to add titles back, which will lead to thousands of bug reports. Tim will be working on this forever!

>98 krazy4katz: Those will be two long weeks!

LOL. I love the Monty Pythonesque turn of this thread

I worked it out. Figuring 10 seconds per book, 12 hours a day, but no days off, it should take him about 10 months. It will take a lot longer if he takes time for other LT tasks.

>101 MarthaJeanne:

It will take a lot longer if he takes time for other LT tasks.

Like reverting to salmon.

>103 bnielsen: I see what you did there.

Perhaps we could have pollack?

June 27
I haven't updated since being in Maine last week. That's because I've returned home to sweaty Texas and have been head-down working on this stuff. I've been working on getting the idea of a popup quick view for works turned into a working example. That's 99% done and, in fact, is actually live on a page on the site. See if you can find it! :) It's like our own LT Redesign Mini Hunt.

There's still a few details to work out with that feature (hover location in certain cases, for instance) and it will get some fixes before we roll it out everywhere.

I'm also continuing to on the work page redesign and the top bar redesign. Hopefully the topbar redesign can be released before we go all in on everything else. That's the plan anyway.

I know this is a less detailed report than before but the fact is that we're in work mode now.

Oh my, which page could it be?
ETA Ha! Think I found it, but I don't visit the page routinely so maybe that's been there awhile. I'll say I like the pop-up, new or not. It's a little odd when there's no cover or description, etc -- but it doesn't look bad, and don't see what else could be done for such cases. (Maybe a prompt for me to add a cover!)

One point: for entries in which the Book Description scrolls off, it would be nice for that to be browse-able or at least be a quick link to the full description. It's maddening not to be able to read the rest behind the ellipse. Maybe that's one of the areas you mention needing more development.

Like the plan for piecemeal roll-out where applicable, like with the top-bar redesign.

>107 elenchus:
and don't see what else could be done for such cases
Yes. We have ideas about that sort of thing. As things roll out.

Book description ...
Hm. Well, there are a couple of options here but you're already going to be linking to the main book/work page by clicking on the title/cover. I think that will solve the issue in the next version of the work page.
If you'd rather it be viewable inline, whithin the popup, then that's another thing. But I don't think that's the use of the popup anyway. It's to give you a "taste" of the book/work so that you know whether you need to click through.

>108 conceptDawg:
Could the ellipsis be hyperlinked the same as title/cover for those of us who'd automatically click there rather than think to go back to title/cover?

So, now that the planning is over and the actual work is underway, daily updates aren't really going to be feasible, but maybe we could get an update every other week or so?

Maybe an alpha or beta site for those of us who want to play?

We aren't quite at the point where there's an alpha/beta site. And honestly, I'm not sure it's going to be feasible anyway. We're going to try and roll things out in a piecemeal fashion so we aren't actually working on a wholesale second site anywhere.

But things are progressing, albeit a little slower now because while we DID take a solid week or so to work through all the plans and designs we kind of stepped away from the daily work during that time. Now day-to-day stuff has to get done too. But I'm continuing to make progress.

I'll be rolling out a minor feature (work popup) soon. Technically it's already available (Zeitgeist->Recs) but we've made a few tweaks and improvements to it and soon we'll roll it out to some more pages.

I'm still working on refinements to the design of the top bar. Once I get that nailed down then my plan is to try and release it to the live site. THAT will be the most obvious change for the site in this whole rework, obviously. That being said, it isn't even scratching the surface of the work that we plan to do over the next months to a year.

But we're a (very) small developer team and we're "rebuilding the car while it's driving down the highway" so things are going to seem slow even when we're working furiously.

>112 conceptDawg: It looks nice on the recommendation page!

>112 conceptDawg: well said. I certainly understand. Being very small is something I know all about even after working in big pharma for 37+ years. . . many times we ran like a small company!

August 4

As some of you may have noticed, we've been stalled out for a while, or seemed to have been anyway. I went on vacation for two weeks, in France. And @conceptdawg has been on vacation, returning Monday. FWIW, Chris recently received a promotion, to the director of UX here. His first and primary job is to redesign LT. So give him three cheers for that!

Today I finished part of something I've been hacking away at for two weeks--a key part of the new catalog.

The new catalog page is a large project. It can't simply be edited, it has to be rewritten. I'm taking a giant ball of code started in 2005 and added to--without major refactoring--every year since.

The first thing has been to break the core code apart--taking some 6,000 lines, and breaking them into a series of logical units for each field. These units vary, but generally include a "prepare" function, a "getting" function," a "data assembly" function and a "formatting" function.

Progress had to go field by field. Every time I tested it, I'd get a list of the ones I hadn't done--a slowly declining list. Anyway, I finally made it through all 67 fields, rewriting and refactoring the code as I went. Some went quick--ten minutes; other took hours. And they are DONE!

If my wife were around I'd tell her. She's learned to say "yay!" or something along those lines, because she knows I need it. Instead, I tell you.

On Monday Chris and I will circle up about the LT redesign. I think he's going to be working on our template page, not the catalog page. But I'll be turning my attention to the next catalog task--dealing with up and down sorts for every field that allows it!

With luck, the step after that will be to give members a super-simple catalog to test--one that has the data, but no editing--to check and make suggestions about.

>115 timspalding: Yay! (What the heck, you ought to have one, right?)

yay! or something along those lines

:)

>115 timspalding: Yay!

Yay!

Yay! and Three rousing cheers for @conceptdawg!

More Yay (and an extra one for Chris - Yay)

What >121 anglemark: said :-)

Yay, Tim! And yay, Chris!

Imagine the LT membership doing the football stadium waves for both of you :)

First off, yay for Tim and Chris!

I really appreciate how open and thorough the staff here is in letting membership know what's going on, be it site updates or sara33 spam. And I love that we won't be blindsided with site updates we hate and had no opportunity for input for, like some social media sites I could name.

>115 timspalding: Whooooo! And also yay!

From 119 on down, DITTO!!!

Oh, yeah: I don't code but I do work with large amounts of data for analysis and reporting, and in my experience that "lay the foundation" work is both tedious and unnoticed but so, so crucial for the final result. Even if there's nothing to see from the user end, I know the elation of getting through that conceptual and grunt work. So a sincere YAY from me!

Well I'm back in town and with a new title. I've pretty much been in that role for years but we don't really "do" titles around here so I'm not sure what this gives me other than a verified target when Tim gets angry about a decision and wants to throw a book in my direction. Before he had to throw it at himself. The new structure, presumably, is better for him in numerous ways. :)

I am, indeed, working on the overall site template. We had a short design review with staff yesterday and I'm changing some things based on that. I did very quick work of the template while in Maine a month ago but now I've reached the point of toiling with the details. It's important work and hard to nail down when we're dealing with such a large (and legacy-laden) site but things are moving along. I'll try and get something to show soon.

>115 timspalding:
Yay!

>131 conceptDawg:
Yay!

Yays all around!

Yay to everyone!

The Yays have it! (Sorry, I never could resist a pun.)

Sounds overwhelming! Yay to Tim and Chris! I've appreciated your hard work for years! :)

To Tim and Chris: YAY!

Translation: I am in awe of and appreciate greatly your knowledge, skills and persistence.

Blessings,
Bevianne

PS Congratulations to Chris on being a UX, even tho I have no idea what that means. So long as it's meaningful and something good, may you long enjoy being UX.

>138 VicRML: At some point in the recent past UI (User Interface) became UX (User Experience) although I'm not sure what the implications of that are.

>139 jjwilson61:

That's interesting. There does seem to me to be a difference in perspective. UI sounds more objective, programmer's point of view, while UX sounds more subjective - user's point of view.

But I could be totally off base.

I'd vaguely assumed that "UX" was a fashionable rebranding of boring old "UI" on the logic that modern consumers are supposed to be all about the experience provided by a product or service.

WP tells me however that UI is merely one aspect of UX, which covers basically everything to do with how a user interacts with, feels about, etc. a system.

August 9

I'm still working on the "sorts" section of the code--the code that decides how to sort the results in the myriad ways one can sort. As there are 64 fields, so there are almost 64 sorts. Most are easy; a few are wretchedly complex!

Once that is done. It's time to do some basic integration with @conceptdawg's work. So the next step is a catalog that shows results, paginates and sorts, but isn't clickable or editable.

>142 timspalding:

Now would be a good time to complain about sorting within the catalog. What doesn't sort but you want it to? What ways does sorting fail, etc?

Note: I just fixed a bug with sorting by Lending status. I'll push it to production later.

I suspect people will want more fields to sort. Generally there's a good reason why a non-sorting field doesn't sort, but I'll keep an open mind.

>143 timspalding: Generally there's a good reason why a non-sorting field doesn't sort
To forestall sidetracks, perhaps you could provide a quick list of non-sorting fields and the rationale. But maybe that's easier asked for than supplied.

Commend LT on the plan to roll out a non-editable catalogue page first, rather than waiting for all functionality to be there before sharing. You've said LT is in perpetual Beta for years now, but are you contemplating a limited roll-out or push to production?

>143 timspalding: I'd like to be able to sort by more than two fields. I mostly sort by author and then title, but would like to be able to sort my author - series/tags - title. I want to be able to check my Agatha Christie collection and have all the Poirots together, in alphabetical order. That's not possible right now.

Also, I'm not sure if it's a bug, but this week I've logged into LT from other computers than my own, and each time, the sorting has defaulted to title (down) and no subsort. Fairly annoying.

I think the most common ask for sorting would be the OPD field, which should sort on the earliest OPD for that work if there is more than one. Next would be series order I think, but I don't know how to pick which series when there is more than one. Perhaps you could enhance series to allow a primary one that's used for sorting?

>143 timspalding:
Sort by CK: Orig. Pub
Sort by CK: Series

Also please put a label on the "sort character" field

Slightly at a tangent here, but it would be useful to have some columns filterable as well as sortable. I'm thinking especially of Number of tags. Sort of like a complex spreadsheet - you can apply sorts and filters on as many columns as you choose.

It would be desirable too to be able to save sorts & filters.

>142 timspalding: Here's a small thing, but I'll mention it since you asked: words with special characters sometimes end up in odd places in an alphabetical sort. One example (on the first page of my catalog) is author Zoran Živković; his "Ž" falls between "A" and "B" when I sort by author.

>146 jjwilson61: If it was possible to pick a series to sort by that would be amazing.

Aug 9
I'm still working through various changes on the work page—using it as a testbed for the site as a whole. LT has so much navigation in its current form that I'm working on restyling the navigation in ways that don't necessarily remove it or even move it, but make it more functionally obvious.

I'm also working on making the site structure handle multiple screen sizes—scaling some items, hiding some, moving others at different sizes. Of course all of this work is done with an eye on keeping site and page structure as close to the current form as possible, only updating it.

I'm still too deep into the moving things around willy nilly to be able to give you a decent screenshot. Soon.

We also made some improvements to the work popup that is on the zeitgeist recs page. The summaries are now picked much more accurately and usually we even pick one in the correct language now! Technology is hard. I'm still making some minor changes to the popup so you should see a few more fixes over the coming days. Then we're going to start rolling it out to a few more pages....then the WORLD!

>149 JacobHolt: Yes! I have a related problem. Å, Ä and Ö are separate letters in Swedish (and other languages that use them), and not just varieties of A and O (with diacritics). When I add authors whose names begin with these letters (I'm assuming the same issue exists with titles and other fields, but I haven't come across that yet), they're sorted before A, which is annoying and frustrating since they're sorted after Z in the Swedish alphabet. I understand that this might be a complex issue (especially since not all languages sort these letters in the same order) but I'd be very grateful if *something* was done.

>143 timspalding: I get not infrequent questions about/requests for sorting by publication years, specifically handling of BCE years better.

Best explanation of UX vs UI I've ever seen...

>143 timspalding: Now would be a good time to complain about sorting within the catalog. What doesn't sort but you want it to? What ways does sorting fail, etc?

Not quite what you asked for, but I'd really like it if the sort could be defined as part of the style. For example, you could define style A to start with the Author column, and be sorted by author, and style B to start with the Title column and be sorted by Title.

And yes, definable multi-level sort.

>152 PawsforThought: In German vowels with Umlaut are usually sorted after the same letter without the Umlaut, although sometimes they are sorted as ae, oe, or ue.

>155 r.orrison: Oooh, yes. Being able to specify a specific sort for a specific style would be groovy.

>156 MarthaJeanne: I know, that's why I specified how it's done in Swedish (and, afaik, the other Scandinavian languages). It'd be amazing if it were possible to choose which version you wanted to sort by, though this is probably tricky on the coding side.

>154 lesmel:

That's wonderful!

>154 lesmel: The moral of the story:
*checks notes*
UX is butts?

Commend LT on the plan to roll out a non-editable catalogue page first, rather than waiting for all functionality to be there before sharing. You've said LT is in perpetual Beta for years now, but are you contemplating a limited roll-out or push to production?

No, I'm not promising I roll it out. That's just the next step for me.

I may well roll it out before it's done, but a crappy-looking, non-editable catalog will only irritate people.

I'd like to be able to sort by more than two fields. I mostly sort by author and then title, but would like to be able to sort my author - series/tags - title. I want to be able to check my Agatha Christie collection and have all the Poirots together, in alphabetical order. That's not possible right now.

Yeah, I was thinking that might be something I could do. It's an edge case, but doable.

Also, I'm not sure if it's a bug, but this week I've logged into LT from other computers than my own, and each time, the sorting has defaulted to title (down) and no subsort. Fairly annoying.

Yeah, all these settings are computer dependent. I suspect this will stay.

Also please put a label on the "sort character" field

Explain more?

Sort by CK: Orig. Pub

I'm not sure the CK fields can be sorted, frankly. But it's on my list to see if it's doable.

words with special characters sometimes end up in odd places in an alphabetical sort

Chances are this will not be fixed, unfortunately.

Not quite what you asked for, but I'd really like it if the sort could be defined as part of the style. For example, you could define style A to start with the Author column, and be sorted by author, and style B to start with the Title column and be sorted by Title.

So, I can see the idea, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be more trouble than it's worth. Can you explain why you want it? Ditto >157 rosalita:

In German vowels with Umlaut are usually sorted after the same letter without the Umlaut

So, part of the problem is that different languages sort in different places. We are really stuck with one sort system.

>161 timspalding:

I'm not the OP, but about the label on the sort character field, it is one of the most unclear fields on the site, one which leads to many Talk topics because people either don't know what the field does and are curious, people who want to adjust the sort character and don't know how, or people who wonder why some titles sort on the word after 'The' and some sort on the T of 'The'. It needs some good UX things done to it.

>163 divinenanny:

It needs some good butts?

>162 timspalding:

I realize that being able to chose which collation order to use may be too much of a pony, but it should be possible to improve the one we got. There's no language that puts z-hacek between A and B, as in >146 jjwilson61: 's example.

(Don't have time to dig up an example, but I also seem to recall that Å ends up in different places depending on what encoding the source uses.)

>162 timspalding: sort could be defined as part of the style Can you explain why you want it?

I would like to be able to define a style for listing by authors, where author is the first column and it's sorted by author, and another style for viewing by title, where title is the first column and it's sorted by title.

>165 r.orrison: On the other hand, I often realize that I need the fields from a different style, but want the same books in the same order, just the other style. So for me changing the sort with the style would make a lot of hassle.

>164 AndreasJ: There is also, to my knowledge, no language that puts Ö/Ø/Œ before A, which is how it is not in LT. Of the languages that consider it a separate letter, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Estonian, Icelandic and Faroese all sort Ö towards the end of the alphabet; German, Hungerian, Azerbaijani, Gaugaz and Turkish sort them after O. (Sorry if I missed any language.)

>166 MarthaJeanne: So also allow an "unspecified" or "unchanged" option. In fact, that should be the default to maintain the current behavior.

>162 timspalding: Why I'd like to have specific sorts tied to specific styles:

I have my styles set up for specific purposes. This may be too much information, but you did ask! :-)

Style A is all Common Knowledge fields after cover/author/title. This is where I check books I've just catalogued to look for holes in CK that I can fill, check to see what number in a series a particular book is, etc. Orig Pub, People/Char, Series, Awards, Places, Dedication, First words, Last words, Quotations. I would want this style to sort by Series most of the time.

Style B is used to see where I last left off when cataloguing new books. It shows entry/acquisition dates, From Where, and the Comments fields. I'd want this style to sort first on Entry Date, then From Where.

Style C is my "main" viewing style. This is where I manage my Currently Reading collection. It has cover, author, title, tags, rating, collections, start/finish dates, from where, and Lending to help me track when library books are due back. I always sort this style by Finished so I can see which books are waiting for reviews before I move them to their permanent collection.

Style D is good for catalog cleanup. Cover, author, title, sort character, media, ISBN, publication, subject, original language, tags, collections, entry date, source. I'd want this style to sort by media, then author.

Style E is one I don't use a lot. It's set up with title, rating, review, summary, tags, reading dates, entry date. I don't have a specific sort in mind for this one.

>161 timspalding: On the edit book or manual add page, the field next to the title doesn't have a label. Some people know what it is, but lots of people don't and ask questions about it.

>143 timspalding:

I want to be able to sort by dewey in the phone app, as this is the sequence in which I shelve my books.
Not being able to do this is the main reason I don't use the app.

Like >145 PawsforThought: I'd like multiple sorting - sorting by one field, then keeping that, sort by another one.

>172 ScarletBea: You can already sort by two fields. Use the arrows up and down for the sort pop-up OR if you click on a column the previous sort becomes the subsort. So to get your books sorted by author, and by title within each author, you first click on Title, and then on Author. >145 PawsforThought: wants to sort by three or more fields.

I'd also like to be able to assign default sorts to specific viewing styles. Basically there's one view with the fields that I edit when I've just purchased a book, and it would save some clicks if that view could always sort by entry date.

I would NOT like sorts to be linked to views, or at least it be an option that could be turned off. I switch between styles and sorts quite often and having the last sort I used for a view "stick" would drive me bananas.

YES to sorts tied to styles. (And thanks @rosalita for giving such a good example of power-using the catalog!)

I don't want sorts to stick to styles either. I switch between styles to see different info about the book/s, reordering them would drive me nuts

Can we talk about Collections and Tags?

I can view only one Collection at a time, or else all Collections. If I want to see the "To Read" books that I own ("Home"), that's impossible. So I have to resort to creating additional Collections ("Home To Read") which clutters up my catalog.

I also have a stubborn belief that Tags should not be used for this kind of book-level characteristic, but instead to be limited to work-level characteristics (genre, subject, etc.).

So, my wish would be that Collections be turned into private tags, or else that a system of private tags could be implemented in addition to the current Tags and Collections.

I must agree with >174 _Zoe_: and >177 SandraArdnas:.

Unless this were a setting we could choose.

I generally stick to one style, but often change the sort within it.

One way to avoid tying to a style would be to have a *separate* saved-sort function. Being able to save two-column sorts to apply in the future would be great. So sorts would not be tied to a style; instead, a user could quickly chose from his/her previously defined sorts and apply them to a style.

Here's an example of why I want to be able to save defined sorts in some fashion: I really like sorting by the number of members who own a work--it's a good way to catch books that have not properly found the appropriate work when I added them to LT. There's no column to sort by, so the sorting menu has to be used. And on an iPad, which is how I frequently experience LT, the sorting menu is kind of a pain. So, because I can't save a sort to a style/view, or have a quick saved-sort option, every single time I want to sort by number of members I have to do the tedious sorting-menu thing.

(Tangent: that said, kudos on having made LT work so well with iOS! Please don't lose that!)

>178 NinieB: Go to your Stats/Memes. At the bottom right, click on Collections. There you can view the Collections overlap between any two collections, and all the way down see the books that are NOT in each collection.

To Read and Home http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=NinieB&special=collectionsoverl...

>181 MarthaJeanne: Wow, that's pretty cool. Thanks!

But . . . paging UX @conceptdawg . . . this feature is not just not in Your Books . . . it is buried in Home > Stats/Memes > Collections (unless I'm missing something again). And I think it is limited to two collections at a time.

>182 NinieB: I have to agree that it would be great if this were easier to access, and more obvious. Still, I use it quite a bit.

I can understand not wanting sorts to be irrevocably tied to styles, for all the good reasons people have pointed out. It would be nice to have as an option, though. I envision it working somewhat like this: When you switch styles, a dialog asks, "Apply default style sort?" with Yes/No buttons. Click No if you want to maintain the sort you were currently using. It is an extra click, but perhaps not too onerous?

>180 NinieB: NinieB's suggestion of being able to save particular sorts would be another way to approach it, and one I could certainly live with if it's not possible to make sort/style linking optional.

>139 jjwilson61: Thank you! I had come up with some strange ideas like Unfriendly Xercise...

>143 timspalding: I do a lot of exporting and searching data using Excel. So a very annoying problem is when an automatic space gets put in before the author name or first item in a list in tags if I'm choosing something from a drop-down offering list. This space messes with the Excel ordering of material in columns.

Sort by CK: Orig. Pub

I'm not sure the CK fields can be sorted, frankly. But it's on my list to see if it's doable.


Then give us an "Original Publication Date" in our catalog? It might also reduce the number of people who re-purpose "Date" for that use.

>186 VicRML:

Can you say that more clearly? I don't understand what you're saying happens and where.

>182 NinieB:
>183 MarthaJeanne:

You can sort of do this through Your Books; the "all fields" catalog search in Your Books also searches collection names. So if I search, say, "cookery" and "ephemera" there, I get a list of all books in my catalog that are in both the Cookery collection and the Ephemera collection.

I don't know of any way to limit the search to *just* collection names, though - it doesn't seems to be one of the limits you can use - so it only works if you name your collection distinctive things that are easy to search on; if I try to search "nonfiction" "ephemera", it brings up all the ephemera that are tagged nonfiction too, unless I filter those out using -tag:nonfiction.

It would be very helpful if that was an actual filtering option in the search, like tag: is.

But if you name your collections carefully, to use words that don't come up in title or tags or whatever very often, it can be very useful, and definitely easier than making intersection collections.

>189 melannen: The point is to make it easier to use.

And I deliberately use some of the same words for both tags and collections, because the collections only include the books I own. The tag includes discards, library books, ebooks...

August 13

I have cut into the unsortable fields. The next version of the catalog will have sortable CK fields, and some other ones too. These extra sorts may be slightly slower than other sorts--they require a sort of two-step process--but they won't be too painful, and I'm anticipating an overall speed increase.

I've been working on this. I'll never want to revisit the sorting code again, let me tell you. So I might as well get as many fields working as possible.

Idea: What if you could add fields for all the different types of other authors? Because you can add your own types, I'm thinking this would be accomplished by allowing you to add the other authors field (as now), but also specify it, to show only illustrators, or whatever.

What do you think? What sort of UI should it use? What problems do you foresee?

>191 timspalding: What do you think? What sort of UI should it use? What problems do you foresee?

Are you talking about what in Excel would be called filtering a column?

>192 jjwilson61: what in Excel would be called filtering a column

I regularly encounter novice Excel users become confused if they open a file with a pre-set filter, not realising they're viewing a subset rather than the full dataset. The icon changes, but it's not obvious enough to those novices. So when the filter is set, I suggest it change icons and also colour or perhaps outline, to bring attention to the fact it's active.

>191 timspalding: The only issue that came to mind stems from the page where you choose the fields for your loadout (I use the gaming term loadout because I don't know an alternative). Currently you drag and drop which columns you want, and if there is a separate one of those for each of the author:filter combos then that is unwieldy. Perhaps a drop-down menu instead?

I would like this functionality though, especially if it meant I could search on the main author field only rather than have it be a combined search with all author fields.

>191 timspalding: Ooh, do you mean a separate column in the table for, say, illustrator or cover artist? That would be wonderful, especially if it let me pick the ones I entered as 'other'.

Also, as far as UI for results goes, I'd love to be able to add it more than once, to have a table with both illustrator and cover artist separated out. Not sure if that's on the table, but I'd like it. As for a selection ui, maybe just a drop-down arrow by the 'more authors' button, or ellipses or something of the sort, to show the options would work. I'm not sure it would be too useful for me if I could only have a single other-author column with something like a filter, but I might use that too.

From a pure user's standpoint the biggest problem I foresee (assuming multiple other-author columns in a view) is that I'd end up wanting more than 5 preset options :) Editing might be tricky, if you're planning to allow that, but I'd really like that too for graphic novels, where I have quite a few 'other' other authors.

>190 MarthaJeanne: Agreed! It should definitely be easier.

I just wanted to make sure people knew about that workaround in the meantime, because it's kind of hidden, and it's quicker than going in through the collections stats.

>191 timspalding:

Sortable CK fields! :D *\o/*

macsbrains (#194):

the page where you choose the fields for your loadout (I use the gaming term loadout because I don't know an alternative)

Not being a gamer, I've never heard the term "loadout" before. Do you mean the page where you edit your chosen display styles?

It used to be drop-downs, but they moved to the drag-and-drop because it's far easier to rearrange your existing columns this way rather than needing to dig through a very long menu twice to swap two columns.

August 14
We've pushed the work hover popup out to more pages now. For instance, you'll see it on most of the Zeitgeist pages and on many of the links to works on your Home pages. We'll probably be tweaking the timing of the popup a little bit over the next few days.

Feedback, as always, is welcome and interesting to us. See the specific Talk post for this feature to comment.



I continue work/iterate on the design as many debates have been raging amongst staff.

See https://www.librarything.com/topic/310208

Love the work pop-ups. I've come to say that before seeing them announced in >198 conceptDawg: . They appear on author pages when you hover over work titles

>198 conceptDawg: I love this feature! It's really helpful in talk posts when someone is talking about a book and you just need a quick reminder exactly what that book was (and the title itself isn't enough). Love it.
And as >200 SandraArdnas: said, having them on the author pages is superb.

I don't suppose there's a way to turn off these work-hover pop-ups?

I'm a bit late on this reply, but oh well.

I find it counter-intuitive that when sorting by date "up" is most recent at the top and "down" is oldest at the top.

>203 eromsted: Same. I'm always confused by the up and down sorts. It's not intuitive.

>188 timspalding: Sorry, Tim. I checked things out and can't reproduce the problem. When/if it happens again I'll note it.

timspalding (#191):

I have cut into the unsortable fields. The next version of the catalog will have sortable CK fields, and some other ones too. These extra sorts may be slightly slower than other sorts--they require a sort of two-step process--but they won't be too painful, and I'm anticipating an overall speed increase.


You appear to have broken catalog display entirely when a CK field is included. Did something get pushed to prod by mistake?

>197 lorax: - Yes, that is what I mean. 'Loadout' itself would be analogous to the set of chosen fields (and order) within catalog view. Catalog views A, B, C, D, and E are 5 different loadouts, presumably used for different purposes. Many modern games have more functions than there are buttons on the controller, so the player dictates which functions they want access to and assign them to their preferred buttons. Sometimes, like with the LT views, you can assign a button to quickly switch between entirely different sets of pre-assigned functions.

There must be another word for this, but I can't seem to think of it.

>207 macsbrains: There must be another word for this, but I can't seem to think of it.
How about "Style"?

>208 r.orrison:

I'd say Style describes the result. The process of generating a Style, and defining it for future use, is the load out. More precisely: the interface supporting that process is the load out.

Huh. It's a term I've never heard. On the catalog header you can choose a Style (A B C D or E) and in the settins on the "Display styles" page you can "Drag and drop to customize the styles".

I'd probably call it the layout. Style is just too vague.

I'm not sure where to give praise for this, because I don't have time to read through all the redesign threads, but I just noticed the pop-up for touchstones in conversation threads and I love not having to go to a different page to see details of a book! Thank you!

>212 MrsLee: Your feedback is appreciated! You can find the thread for the work info pop-up here, by the way: https://www.librarything.com/topic/310208.

(ETA: Never mind, I see that you already found it. :))

I have some wishlist items that are probably asking too much. Or I don't really know how to use what you have. I would like to have the physical description field carry over from LoC. Sounds simple, but a programmer who has worked with those records said that's a lot harder than it sounds.

So on my wish for the moon list, I'd like to have a way of entering individual pieces of the book, say short story titles in an anthology, that's searchable so I can find the individual story, or individual title of a book in an omnibus. For books, I often simply add the individual record for the book with a note that it's in an anthology. I know that you don't like us to do that for short stories. I used to but I've stopped.

I'd like to be able to get information about different editions of a book, without adding a copy to my collection, not that that's terribly hard.

Easy stuff, right?

I already thought of something else -- how about links for people/characters? I add links myself, which some people don't like, but I don't think it has caused a problem.

I sometimes add a now Added Author label. Perhaps you could add the most popular ones to the list, standardizing them in the process. I'd also like to be able to access the custom labels I've added, so I can be consistent, and edit them to follow LoC practice.

>215 juglicerr: Between your posting of your comment, and now, you seem to have changed your profile name (to @PuddinTame, not that it matters, since your library is private). Just noting this for anyone who might try to leave you a reply on your profile.

Let me clarify, I mean the people/character fields where all the books using that name are collected, and there's a box for a description. It would also be useful to collect variant names into "see" or "see also." I sometimes standardize them through the various works, if there aren't too many, using the variant that is preferred.

I was going to give you an example of series where one character was given five different names, but searching my books doesn't see to be working. When I click on "Your Books," it goes to "Home", and then it won't search.

I guess this means that Fate wants me to do the laundry.

I switched to another browser and now it's working. Funny, everything else worked. Oh, well.

Sorry I haven't been posting here. But I HAVE been posting in the Work Popup thread for the last week, which is where much of my LT2 time has been going (when not dealing with all the other facets of LT).

I'll try and give you a bigger update soon. More about general LT2 stuff.

Tim continues to work on the catalog and has made impressive progress there. He's to the point of pushing me to get the UI ready so that he can start plugging stuff into it.

LT was down for a bit and now there is a robot check on the login page. Is there a way to log in without having to help train the "self-driving car AI" :P ?

No. This wasn't part of the redesign. It's part of an ongoing attempt to thwart a massive attack on the site.
The captcha is probably here to stay, at least for the short to medium term.

Thank you!

>222 conceptDawg:

"Captcha is probably here to stay, at least for the short to medium term" ...

What a shame.

I hope it's "worth it"--i.e. effective because "Captcha" is a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS. I enjoyed trying FIVE times to find all the fucking traffic lights.

Your attackers "win" just by imposing that sort of assinine bullshit on the site.

Like London's growing bollards, they'e not a sign of safety, they're a sign of being resigned to defeatist measures.

I'm not crazy with captchas either, but I've already re-signed-in twice today (the first time on a tablet, in bed before I got up) and haven't found any problems. I'll have to re-sign one more device in today. Granted captchas are an imperfect solution, and it's kind of a win for the dark side, but after the onslaught yesterday we don't really have much choice in the short term. I'm more than happy with how Tim & Co are looking after us, and LibraryThing is still the best place on the internet.

Right now the alternative to captchas is to not have them and let LT be vulnerable to hacking attacks. I'm fairly certain no one wants that, and the solution right now is captchas. This doom and gloom "captchas will be the end" attitude is pretty strange to me. What do you want LT to do instead?

As to the inconvenience: You have to log on again once, for chrissake. Just in passing, there was a certain amount of comment about passwords, and the use of a password keeper. I've been using Keepass for some years now, and I choose to continue doing so partly because it's somewhat inconvenient to use, in that it stores passwords locally rather than somewhere in the cloud. That means that I have to keep my password files (on 2 computers, an iPhone and an iPad) synchronised for myself, but that in itself limits the range of possible attacks. I'm all for inconveniencing the hackers.

ETA: when I said "twice" in #225, I meant once each on 2 devices.

>224 proximity1: That might be the case, but if I had to pick between the captcha and the site coming down because of DDoS and cleaning up data from "hackers" then I'll stick with the captcha for the short term.

We don't WANT the captcha but it solves a problem right now. We're actively looking for alternatives. I'd LOVE to be doing ANYTHING other than bullshit captcha stuff, that's for sure.

>228 conceptDawg:
I'm hoping the captcha is temporary: seabear's offline LT app is unable to access my catalogue because of it. (The app is no longer being supported due to a hard drive failure, IIRC).

I'm on dial-up at home. I can't even get a Captcha to load, much less pick all the right pictures and get logged in. I doing this post from my work computer, which I'm not always able to use. I wish the Captcha people would design one that works with dial-up. Not everyone can afford or has access to high-speed internet.

>229 Petroglyph: Yes, temporary in its current form, certainly.

Alternative ideas that will also be usable on dial-up:
- Create an SVG image with a few random numbers or letters in it. You draw the numbers using a constant amount of line segments, but you off-set the x and y coordinates of every point by some random amount, so the numbers look jiggled, but a human should still be capable of recognizing the numbers and typing them in a form. Probably simple enough to create yourself, so you don't have to load in a captcha library?
- Some form of second-factor authentication with email (every user has an email address, but not every user has a phone and sending SMS messages costs money).

>232 mene: We aren't going to create our own numerical captcha here. We might repurpose our existing book-cover captcha that we've had for a few years.
We've thought about some form of 2-factor authentication scheme, either by email codes, or similar. We'll see.

The current form of the captcha isn't the final form. It was just what we could throw on the site quickly to stop the onslaught of what was a DDoS login attack.

>229 Petroglyph: I don't know the seabear's app, but some of the cookie values that I use to access the export page from a script has changed for the first time in years, so it might be that you just have to update a value somewhere in the setup of the app?

>234 bnielsen:
It's a bare-bones app: it logs on to LT with my credentials and fetches a list of titles, book data and reviews. Settings include whether or not to make searches case sensitive, which column to sort on, and whether or not to turn on error logs (and send them to the app's creator or not). It is not the kind of app that is designed for much customisation. (I wouldn't know how to go about changing behind-the-scenes values, though, if that's what you mean.)

I have noticed that if I load a title into the iPhone app, the author's name loads as "First, Last," when it should be "Last, First", if that could be part of the upgrade.

My only problem with Captcha is that with my excessively literal mind, I was flummoxed by "click on the squares with traffic lights." Is the entire structure, including the poles, part of the "light?" (no) Are crossing signs a traffic light? (no). They also use some very blurry pictures.

I have to say that I would class the pole holding the actual lights as a 'traffic light' but I wouldn't take the same line with the supporting structure of a suspended light hanging over the middle of a junction.

But then I am not a robot ;-)

How does the captcha prevent a login DDoS?
Everyone could bombard https://www.librarything.com/enter/start, /enter/process/signinform, /enter/checkcookies or any of the other pages, without really trying to log in, I'd think? How can that be faster than a simple database lookup? Or does it serve some other purpose?
Thanks for explaining :)

>235 Petroglyph: Thanks for clarifying. It sounds as if it just uses username and password, so my guess about cookies is probably wrong.

>238 mene: I think >233 conceptDawg: was using DDoS in a broader sense; not a real DDoS where the goal is to bring down a system, but in the sense of using automation to flood a website with a lot of queries until it's overwhelmed enough that you get what you want - in this case, control of some abandoned accounts.

The proper term is bruteforcing, not DDoS (there’s no intent to “deny the service”). After they disclosed this issue I noticed most of the queries to the LibraryThing website do not have CSRF tokens (if they do, apologies since failed to notice them), so at least I guess the Recaptcha is a way to have a token validation in the login form. Nevertheless, without CSRF protections, attackers may still automate sending messages and spam if a valid login is attained by a human and stolen. Now, no one wants captchas in every single form of the website, so using one time tokens in every form is the way to go.
Also from a security perspective I’m worried when some users reported having had their login session for a long time (some even forgot the password) and having to relogin for the first time just because of the captcha. This suggests the session identifiers are way too lenient, possibly tolerating the existence of sessions across several different locations and networks (such as on laptops moving around).
Now to any security researcher these reports are a highly suspicious indication that sessions might be able to be stolen.

I have decided not to look into it further since I really don’t want to get involved. These are public comments made by users and I think they are suggestive enough but just in case they aren’t, someone should look into it. Hope this is helpful.

May I ask why we have to have changes?

All of us spend lots of time learning new software at work. We get "upgrades" all the time there too.

I come to LibraryThing to relax and have fun. So why do you want to make learn new stuff here too? I know where the things I like are and am happy with them. Must we always be constantly changing? Sigh.

Hey Kathleen828
I cannot speak for LibraryThing, but I'm sympathetic that they want this to be a relaxing and fun place, but that it takes courage to try new things and new ways of doing stuff. The old ways aren't always the best, even if we got used to them, and the newer generations may see right through it.
As an IT professional, I ask you to consider that this happens everywhere: any other place for your enjoyment, say a library, takes a lot of skill and work from librarians to maintain and to reach new people. I like that they are sharing their progress, and interested people can learn about it and give their early input while they work to make sure any changes are well thought-out so as to not just be pointless.

>243 Kathleen828: You might see them as changes you dislike or need to get used to, others see them as improvements. Improvements are made all the time, everywhere, because they make things better. Some of there improvements are to made LT a safer place to be for us users so we aren't attacked by bots and other nasties, and some are to make our time here easier or more enjoyable.

>242 ricmacas: Consider also the demographic. I think you'll find this site is relatively heavy on users who use only one device regularly and don't move around much. That might also account for the reports you picked up on. But better for the tech staff to comment if comment is to be made.

I love the new captcha with the book covers! Super nice :)