Hiatus

CodexMap is taking an extended siesta; my work at Goby is pretty all-consuming, and has been for some time now. But I have a raft of good ideas cached up for "someday" 8).

I Score Again....

I got my second book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program - sweet! I'm getting a copy of Escape from Amsterdam, by Barrie Sherwood. And of course I've added it to CodexMap, my Books / Maps mashup, you can find it here.

Some improvements

I've implemented some of the improvements and hopefully query performance is much better; certainly the home page is much faster now. There are some additional optimizations contemplated but those are going to have to wait for awhile.

Good news and bad news...

The good news is, the performance of the harvester/geotagger has been radically improved, which has allowed many more books to be added to the system (up to around 46,000!).

The bad news is, this has led to some slower query times on the site. You may be seeing that it takes quite a long time to load the map with icons, or for the tagcloud of locations to be painted in. I understand what's going on - some of the queries I wrote were a bit naive and unscalable. I have corrections in mind - will try to get them in soon.....

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.

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....

Site update

A new version of Codexmap went live this afternoon. You can now create an account, and create your own library of books, so you can easily come back to them later. If you are looking at a book on the book page, you'll see the "Add to My Books" link (unless it's already in your library, in which case you'll see "Delete from My Books". If you are on the main map page, the "My Books" link will switch CodexMap to only show your books (and only the Locations associated with your books, and the map icons for your books, etc.). You can now add books manually by Title/Author - previously ISBNs were required, and those ISBNs had to be in Amazon's catalog or you could not add them (Thanks for the comments Hillie!). In the future I hope to make the process of adding books more functional and less cumbersome.

Some number of bugs/glitches/browser incompatibilities have been fixed, and the view selection for locations has been improved, in particular a better automatic selection of view scale.

And, the site now links to this blog - feel free to leave messages, comments and the like here.