New Home/Landing Page

LibraryThing's "home" page has been given an update.

To be clear, this is the home page you see when you are not signed in to LibraryThing. Your personal Home page is unchanged.

The landing page has been given the LT2 treatment to bring it up to speed with everything else we're doing around here and provide continuity with the rest of the site.

The sign in page now works better on mobile devices so you don't have to pinch to zoom into a tiny sign in box. And it includes all of the normal LT2 accessibility features (font selector, jump to content, better alt tags, etc.).

Also changed: much of the text on the page. And that needs help from some talented translators to get the new text into various languages. So if you're up for that, we'd appreciate any help you can give us.

And please let us (me) know if we've fumbled something.

A reminder about how to get to the text on the front page to translate it would be good. Is it only on the All untranslated page or is there a link to it somewhere? i feel like I've done it before but forgotten how.

ETA: There is a "Translate Home Page" button on the Translation page, but it's taking me to my logged in home page.

>2 Aquila: Yes. Unfortunately I think that is the only way to get to it: the All Untranslated page.
But I'll dig a little more and see if we can get a better way to get to those.

Deleting my try at a direct link. Ugh.

I couldn't resist logging out to see for myself. It looks fantastic! Very fresh and current, and although I viewed it on an iMac I can see that it will be so much more useful on a phone or tablet. Well done, Chris and everyone who lent a hand.

>1 conceptDawg: The link to the iPhone app doesn't work - it just redirects back to the home page

>6 norabelle414: Thanks. Fixed.

There's an huge amount of blank space between

"LibraryThing
A Home for Your Books"

on the left, and the "sign in or join now" fields on the right.

Mac Ventura 13.5.2, using either Firefox 118.0.2 or Safari 16.6.

>8 lilithcat: There are many factors at play here. What size screen/window, your zoom level, your LT font style, and whether you have the input boxes to sign in/join or if you're just seeing buttons.
The page scales and moves elements around depending on all of these things. So it's hard to tell you if what you are seeing is "normal" or not.

And if you have a really wide screen it just lets that space be blank. We don't have any content to put there at the moment (just like it was before).
Can you upload a screenshot into your gallery or junk drawer?

Looks really good. However, on my iPhone the space between “LibraryThing” and “A home for your books” is too small. The bottom of the y in LibraryThing is almost touching the top of the y in Your.

And I’d be happy to help ensure the Swedish wording is good but don’t know exactly where to go/what to do.

What >11 PawsforThought: said, but for Dutch. :)

>11 PawsforThought: I've already translated the Swedish strings, but the new translation doesn't show. This seems to be a new problem the last few months. Do they need to propagate somehow?

>11 PawsforThought: If you want to, I can give you a crash course in translating the interface. I have kept this up more or less on my own the last few years. (No complaints, I'm a professional software GUI translator and terminologist who no longer works in the field, and I think it's fun.) But I'd be happy to share methodology, terminology etc if you are interested.

conceptDawg (#9):

This is the logged-out page, right? How could our LT font style affect this?

I tried to upload a screenshot, but it's coming through blank. There's a lot of whitespace but it's not quite that dramatic!

If I move the window back and forth between my laptop screen and my external monitor it doesn't move anything or show more, it just gets cartoonishly huge on the external monitor. Is that the intended behavior?

I've already translated the Swedish strings, but the new translation doesn't show. This seems to be a new problem the last few months. Do they need to propagate somehow?

Sorry. When you're signed out, you're using a second database which is currently behind. It should catch up soon.

>14 anglemark: I'd love to have some insight into what to do. I do a lot of translating between Swedish and English in my current job and have a background as a translator.

>9 conceptDawg:

Done. Here's the link to it: https://www.librarything.com/pic/10291285

Just a quick note to say "thank you" to @ConceptDawg! I had never tried to sign into LT on my phone for the very reasons identified - a real pain to have to expand, enter user name and password, and then pinch. I was thrilled to log in yesterday on a somewhat older Pixel phone. Everything worked PERFECTLY. You're wonderful.

liithcat (#18):

Wow, that's a lot more than I see on my screen! I don't get anything below the bullet-point section, either on my laptop or on my external monitor.

>20 lorax:

I'm looking at it on my desktop.

>17 PawsforThought: In that case I'll just tell you where to find the strings and how they work. For terminology, it's not more sophisticated than looking at previous translations. I'll write a private message.

Lots and lots and lots of whitespace, which is LibraryThing 2.0 I guess.

"The sign in page now works better on mobile devices"

Yeah. I don't use LT on my mobile because the app is ridiculously limited, I'd like the web version to at least remain usable on my desktop.

>22 anglemark: Thanks!

>23 the_red_shoes: But this isn't about the app, this is about using the web site (and all the functionality of the web site that is missing from the app) on a mobile, and makes using the web site on a mobile easier.

>25 Foretopman: But at the expense of losing functionality on a desktop/laptop, which is where database management really should be happening, anyway.

>26 JacobHolt: I'm using it on a laptop. What functionality is lost?

>27 Foretopman: Nothing with this particular update (sorry, I should have specified that). But I'm worried more white space in future updates will make things like the "Your books" page less usable.

JacobHolt (#26):

Unfortunately, "losing functionality on a desktop/laptop" appears to be the general trend for LT 2.0. They've taken a laudable goal (increased functionality on mobile) and turned it into something awful - responsive design ought to mean something that looks good and functions well on both mobile and desktop, rather than deciding to pivot from something that looks good and functions on desktop and looks terrible on mobile to something that looks good on mobile and looks terrible on desktop.

Foretopman (#27):

On this particular page, very little, but the overall trend is discouraging, and when extrapolated to the catalog the trend toward whitespace and reduced information is troubling.

I'll add, since I've been down on LT2 in general, that it does look much nicer on my phone.

>29 lorax: I must stop you here and mention that for EVERY LT2 update to a section of the site we've added features and not removed them. Most updates have been major rebuilding of tools/features for the respective page or topic (like the recent Awards, or Series, or Groups, or Talk, especially Charts and Graphs (Stats) etc.). LT2 has most certainly been a large move forward for everything related to the desktop version of LT2. Remember, we use LT on desktops 10 hours a day. We aren't ignoring it.

You have a tightly spaced Lorax view style that is actually TIGHTER than LT1 pages (I know, I compare them before each release to make sure that the Lorax view style has the same, or better, data density and above-the-fold data as the original LT1 view).

I try to make every LT member happy with all changes but I can't win them all.

New Charts and Graphs is 100% an improvement, definitely!

As for the data density I'll have to defer to you, since once launched I no longer have the old one to compare to - I can only say it LOOKS like a lot more whitespace to me. But if you're actually doing the comparisons, thank you, and I'll scratch my head about perception being weird.

I had to login today for the first time in a couple weeks after an update on my desktop. "Updates" should not add extra steps on the user end. Now instead of the home page displaying the login fields I have to click the 'Sign In' button first. The fonts are ginormous as well, looks like the target audience is kindergartners. For context, the home page went from this:



to this:



I have a 30 inch monitor. LT2=so much whitespace you'd think you are in a blizzard. Definite 👎 on this update.

>33 Taliesien: You will normally not have to do the extra step of hitting the button unless you have removed all cookies from your browser. We detect whether you've signed in before and present you with the sign in box.
But if you delete cookies then we can't tell that you've been here before so we give you the choice. (previously you would have gotten the Join Now option in this case).