playing around
tonight i'm messing about with stuff and for once i don't feel guilty. i feel i'm messing with a purpose. i am... relaxing. and i don't have to feel guilty cos this morning i managed to make myself get up early, which meant i was able to compose before i went to work (for a full 4 minutes), made some small but significant progress on my dante piece - and wasn't even late into the office!
so tonight i'm actually relaxing and just messing about. one of the things i'm messing about with is goodreads.com. a friend invited me in, and as she's a rather interesting friend and most of her current reading is for her phd i thought she might have some interesting things to share (which she does), so i joined up and have been wandering about. it's been an interesting experience, especially as i have been intermittently on allconsuming for a while now, liking the concept but never really committing to it, mostly because it bugged me having to list a book or a CD or whatever as worth consuming/wishy-washy/not worth consuming. to my mind that's 1 thumbs-up and 2 thumbs-down and there are just more gradations in the arena of loving and hating literary/musical/culinary/whatever endeavour. so goodreads is catering to that nicely, with 5 star rankings to choose from (i still want half-stars, but i can handle just 5 without toooo much umming and ahhing). i like a few things about it, including:
- i can search for books from the ones that are on the site, from amazon (in an assortment of countries and it defaults to my local amazon and doesn't assume i'm american) and if it's not in a list (say, it's a 1920s novel that's decades out of print) i can add it manually!
- once i pick a book and add it to my shelves, i can still change the edition if i realise i've got the wrong one (and having books listed with the wrong covers really really bugs me)
- i can easily find books in foreign languages
one of the books i've been reading recently is jakob nielsen's prioritizing web accessibility and it's particularly interesting in relation to goodreads because i find i'm using the back button all the time. i mean, of course i use the back button regularly, but i can't remember the last time i actively shunned a site's navigation options because it all seemed like too much thinking. it's just really not clear how to get back to where you were. other grumbles:
- the popup window to add your review to a book is bigger than the height of my screen, so the checkbox (ticked by default) to add to my updates is below the fold. i guess this wouldn't be a problem once one is up and running and only adding/reviewing books one has just read, but it's a pain to always have to scroll and uncheck with every book added.
- once you've added your review, the popup window doesn't just bugger off like a good little window. it lurks there with a search box, which just makes me feel uncomfortable. i don't want to search in a floating window. i want my proper window back. i want the popup to go away and for there to be a clear path back to the list i was looking at before i added something.
- there's no facility to mark a book as something one owns, has borrowed (and if so from where - very necessary information if you're doing research and need to keep track of where you found stuff) or plans to buy. linking in to one's amazon wish lists might be a nice feature too
the job is going well, and the open source experiment is proceeding apace. i think i need to read more about python. but i've managed to get to a point where i've been able to build the app from source (although still struggling to do the same on my laptop at home), and adapt it to achieve a couple of the things i need it to. feeling rather pleased with myself. tons still to do though and the prospect of my adaptations being ultimately distributed all round the university and the future statistics or ethical knowledge of hundreds of eager business students depending on how effective it all is is just a wee bit terrifying!
