Thursday, February 14, 2008

Adding books is now possible for normal humans....

The previous "enter the magic ISBN" form has been replaced with something a bit more human-friendly. Now you can enter keywords (which might include author, title, ISBNs, or other actual keywords) and as you type, a search against Amazon will be performed, with potential results shown in a drop-down list, with cover art if available. Select one, hit "Add this Book", and presto, your book is added. You can try it out here. As before, you can also enter an ISBN/Title/Author combination if the book you are after isn't in Amazon's catalog.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Editing Locations

Sometimes CodexMap may get confused about a location. It may tag a book with Athens, GA, when you are pretty sure the book is about Athens, Greece. If you are tagging the book yourself, this disambiguation process is aided by the drop-down list you see as you type, so you can see which location you are selecting. If our harvester is adding the location, it won't have that human eye to help it. And so over time a collection of books may be tagged with a location where the name is correct, but the location is not what's expected. Rather than having to go fix each book individually, you can now edit the location itself. When you go to a book page, you'll see a green "?" icon after each tag. Just click that tag and you'll go to a page where you can relocate that tag to it's proper home.

Over time more will be added to this locations page, perhaps including links to things like the Flickr page for that location....