LibraryThing and minor redesign


I've added a currently reading section to my sidebar - thanks to LibraryThing. Here's how to add one yourself

LibraryThing.com is a very cool site that allows you to catalog all of the books you own. Even cooler then that, it also has a social networking aspect to it (a la Flickr, et al.) that allows you to see other people with the same books as you, "clouds" of popular tags or authors, reviews, etc. I learned of it from Joe Carter's wonderful Yak Shaving Razor posts, and promptly told all of my friends about it. Somewhat hypocritically, I had yet to actually add a bunch of books or post about it here. That time has now come to an end, and I've added some books (though still a very small fraction of what I own - I'd really like to get them all put in eventually). You can find my library under Sarcasmagorical.

I must admit that I didn't actually take the time to add a lot of these myself; I simply waited for Nat to get his library all set up and then I went through and added books from his to mine (since Nat and I share many of these and have even read a ton together in book clubs). This ability to add off of other's list is yet another of the cool social networking aspects, and a way to get plenty of books in quickly. I did add a few on my own as well, and they have a search that goes through Amazon, which makes it pretty easy to find just about anything.

One thing they don't currently have, but that I (and Nat, and Van) desperately wanted, was the ability to add a little widget of the books we're currently reading. Today I figured out a way of hacking what they do have available so you can do just that, and you'll see that widget displayed in my right hand sidebar now on the main blog page.

So... how do I create a "currently reading" widget off of LibraryThing, especially since they don't have a widget that does this and they don't have a way of specifying what books I'm reading? Glad you asked. One of the cool features is the ability to "tag" books with certain keywords. For instance, you might tag Bondage of the Will with theology, Reformation, Christianity, etc. One of the widgets will specify a random selection of books from a given tag. So you could show a random selection of your theology books, or a random selection of your books on cooking. We're going to use this as our widget, and hack the tags to work for the currently reading feature.

First off, get your books into your catalog (obvious, but necessary). Then tag the books that you are currently reading with "Currently Reading." You can tag them with whatever else you want, but make sure that Currently Reading is in there somewhere. Then go to the widget page, and select the Random Tagged display widget. Make sure the tag drop down is selected to Currently Reading (the tag you just entered). Choose whatever other features you would like to use (if you want it to look exactly like mine, choose 10 entries, small book covers, no header, and style 2). I'd advise adding your associates id, so you can get some money for people who buy your books, but that part is optional. Now hit See it, and grab the code off the right hand side of the page. Drop that on your blog, with some header that says "books I'm reading" or something and viola! you've got yourself a currently reading widget.

In the future, as you finish books, simply remove the currently reading tag, and add it to whatever book you start reading next. An additional tip, that I thought of while doing this and I think I'll use, is to add a "read in 06" or "2006" tag when you remove the currently reading tag (assuming you actually finished reading). That way, when 2006 is over, you can go back to your library thing, and search for everything with that tag and you'll see what you read in 2006.

Posted: Wed - January 18, 2006 at 10:01 AM | | | | | | |

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