Currently Reading

It would be cool if there was a feature on the profile page where I could add a book or books that I am currently reading (with cover pic).

Some people are "currently reading" more than one book at a time.

E.g. me. It's called multitasking :-)

Now I'm trying to figure out why you put "currently reading" in quotes, andyl. Do you have books you're actually reading, and then books that you carry around pretending to read to look cool? ;)

Yeah, I'm reading more than my share right now.

Maybe if there were "want to read", "currently reading", and a "just read" features. Or there were some general features that could be customized for one's own categories.

Why not put the info in the "about me" section of your profile? I don't think you can put the cover art there, but you can link to the Book Information page.

Might there be a way of linking this info with catalogue entries in such a way that LT could harvest it for the zeitgeist? It would be interesting to track what people are actually reading, how reading habits vary with the seasons, or the fate of particular books - how many people are actually reading a HP six months after its publication?

Well, you can put a cover picture on your profile - like this . . . well not quite like this! see Message 13

I'm currently reading:



but so far I've found precious little that I can do to make it look pretty . . . OK getting there

I put currently reading in quotes because it always seems to me to hint at both books being read simultaneously. I would prefer to say more than one book in the process of being read - but then I'm strange that way.

The books I read don't make me look cool at all (and they are all read) just geeky. Actually a girl at work said that one of the books I was reading looked pretentious because it had "A Novel" underneath the title - as if people would be unable to work that out otherwise.

LOL!

I'd love to have two modules below the "Edit your profile box" or above the "Books you share":Whishlist/Watchlist, Currently reading - with the same functionality as the blog widget displaying books tagged "wishlist" and "currently reading" or other tags specified by the user.

Thanks GreyHead!

Thanks: I've discovered that whilst you can show the covers in your profile you can't show the box I have them in here. On the talk page here I can include and tags but they get wiped out on my profile page :-(

I noticed that too. The HTML you can use is pretty limited.

Rikker, I have books that I carry around and am not reading--not to look cool--but because I figure the guilt factor of having to look at them every time I open my bag might make me read them. This worked wonderfully well in college for papers. Currently though, I am carrying around a GRE Math review book. Not only do I have to look at it every time I open up my bag to pull out Arabella (which I am reading for the nth time...), it is also heavy. A punishment for my literary frivolousness!

Ah, I see. Well, we could have an "I am currently carrying in an effort to guilt myself into reading" section, too. :)

That makes sense, though... I need to start lugging *my* GRE Math review book around. I've been ignoring it for months!

Hey, GreyHead -

Very cool. How do you do that?

This is the code I "borrowed" from GreyHead. Just change the work links and image links to fit your current reads.

And remove all the "--"'s.

Psst! xkyzero, to show the code you can replace with > ;)

Thanks Ottox - I knew there had to be a better way to do it.

Thanks, I shall go and play!

xkyzero: I think there's a </a> missing from the end of the code you posted

Ottox wrote: Psst! xkyzero, to show the code you can replace < with &lt; and > with &gt; ;)

Doesn't work well here as LT doesn't preserve the entities when you come back to edit the post all the &lt;s have turned back into <s :-(

I'll explore some more and post over on the FAQ group

LT also resets all touchstones to the default search result if you go back and edit... so if you mean to link to H.G. Wells, it rinds Rebecca Wells as default, and you have to click "Others" and then "Show all 202 possible results" to find ol' H.G. If you go back and edit your post, it will change H.G. back to Rebecca.

So if you're going to post about editing somewhere, might throw that in for good measure.

Oh, wait. I already just posted about it. Oops.

rikker,

Did you mean to post that in the thread about the touchstone bug someone thought they'd found? Hehe.

Yeah, yeah. Off topic. I was piggybacking on GreyHead's complaint about not preserving entities.. time to go find the relevant place to repost, I guess!

GreyHead
> I think there's a missing from the end of the code you posted

They were all missing. Must be because I dashed out the opening tags. This is I why I do middleware and keep away from that front end stuff.

I would like to strongly suggest that LT place an official “currently reading” section under “my profile”. I would like it to be able to show multiple titles, cover images, and room for text so that we may write down notes on what we think of the particular title so far. I think this would be interesting and would help out those of us who are not very proficient with HTML.

Please TIMSPALDING, make this happen!

Abby is so keen for this one, that I might be in physical danger if I don't do it.

Assuming that "currently reading" means start date is not null and read date is null, the same API that drives the timeline mashup could drive this. (For use in people's blogs or whatever outside LT. For the LT profile page, obviously the code can do whatever it needs directly.)

I don't think we should use the start and end dates. They're too fiddly. I'd rather use the new "collections" structure instead. We'll think it though.

I'd like to be able to organise things like this List of Bests List so that I can remind myself that I have a mountain and note that I've read them and keep them in a slightly chronological order of purchase so I can decide if I want to keep them or get rid of them (or guilt myself into at least starting them!) And also to reduce the websites I go to.

I've got my current books tagged with "reading", and have then used the blog widget to create a feed of it - including the covers - on my blog. This has the advantage that changing it just entails removing the tag of a finished book and adding it to a newly started book.

Isn't it possible to use the blog widget in the profile?

Wyvernfriend - tags are the way to go.
Tag anything you've not read with "to be read" and fill out the "date acquired" field in each book's properties.
Then click on 'Tags' and select 'to be read'. The view of your library will switch to showing you only books tagged with 'to be read'.
Customise one of the views (the A B C D E buttons) so that you can see the following: Title ; Author; Date Acquired; Date Started; Date Finished; Comments; Rating. Order it by the Date Acquired field.
Once you've done that, you can quickly view all your to be reads, sorted in date order by clicking on Tags, then select to be read, then select the customised view.
Each time you get a new book, include the to be read tag and enter the date acquired. It will automatically be included when you view the list.

(ETA: example of tbr pile by date acquired - minus the dates)

moosiferjones, nope you can't use the widget on your profile - the javascript gets stripped out when you save changes.

Moosiferjones I have boxes of books at the moment TBR which I've flagged all of with tbr, however I moved last november and I've restriced myself to only opening a few of the boxes and reading them systematically so I use the listofbests list to keep track of that particular stack of books, ticking them off as I go.

The system has serious flaws, among which is the fact I work in a library and keep finding more books to read as well as going to bookcrossing meetups and bookshops and getting more and more additions to the pile.

I have 639 books listed as TBR in my account, a fairly unwieldy number. There are around 69 books tbr on my current list and the visual list helps remind me which books to look for next.

What I don't like about it is the fact that it's unwieldy, it's difficult to move the read books around without completely distorting the order I've put them in, particularly as I've tried to keep the order a bit logical and FIFO.

wyvernfriend - perhaps add a hierachy of tbr tags? so as well as tagging the 639 tbr books, you tag the 69 you want to read this year with "tbr 2006". You can do that using the power edit by:
Selecting your tbr tag.
Clicking on the little power edit button (P/E) on the toolbar.
Ticking the 69 current tbrs.
Adding the tag "tbr 2006".

Then you can have the 69 as a sub set of the 639: view either the lot or just the "tbr 2006" tag and order by Date Acquired. When you want to tick a read book off, you remove the tags "tbr" and "tbr 2006" and the books vanish from the view. Maybe replace "tbr 2006" with "read 2006" so you can view the "read 2006" tag in "date read" order?

example of tbr pile by date acquired
example of read pile by date read

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire is excellent, btw!

How about the start/end dates for a "just finished reading" blog widget? I dislike the "random books from my library" widget, and the "just added" often ends up being things I read a long, long time ago.

The HTML you can use is pretty limited. (#14)

Unless you wanted it to update automatically or something, you can do quite a bit with limited HTML. The "About my library" section on my profile is essentially one really big "currently reading" section, complete with a last-ten-books list and a recent-acquisitions list.

The HTML I used breaks down as:
* bold (<b>bold</b>)
* italics (<i>italics</i>)
* links (<a href='http://www.librarything.com'>links</a>)
* a meter, copied and pasted from zokutou.co.uk, which spits out the code for you based on the numbers you give it.

So, nothing too special.

I agree