bkkeepr blog

Housekeeping - and an 'Out of Office' Alert

Oops - been a while since I updated. Well, not too much to say.

Really chuffed how it’s all going. You all seem like lovely, bookish people. That is good. Look at all those people reading books! Isn’t that great? Thank you.

First thing: there have been a couple of days of downtime, for which I apologise. These were caused by a php upgrade (by my host, who didn’t forewarn me) that broke pretty much everything running on my server. It was fixed pretty quickly, but records for the 4th, 5th and 6th of December 2008 may have gone missing. There was also a glitch on the 9th of Jan 2009, caused by a Twitter hiccough, so, likewise, you may want to check your records.

I want to particularly thank everyone who’s been contributing over at Get Satisfaction. It’s been great to see your suggestions, and very good to receive bug reports before I’ve noticed them. Please do avail yourselves of the Feedback tab on the site - as you can see, it’s all noted and responded to. I’ve written a bit more about how I use Get Satisfaction over here.

There have been lots of great requests and suggestions for features, and I’m sorry I haven’t been able to implement… well, any of them. This is because I’ve got a huge amount of other projects running, and also because I’ve got a fairly ‘if it ain’t broke’ approach to the site. That said, I do hope to roll out a few neat things over the next few months. I hope the service remains pretty useful as it is, but if you do have a good idea, do say.

More excitingly, I’ve been informed that there are a number of projects under way using the bkkeepr API. Can’t say too much at this stage, but I can promise you that exciting things are happening.

I’ve also demo’d and talked about bkkeepr at a few events and conferences (and less formally in a number of conversations and sessions). Particularly fun was Creative Review’s Click conference, where I gave a brief overview of what the service offers both to readers and, potentially, companies. A number of people were highly complementary, and it was good to see that people in the commercial world ‘get’ it. bkkeepr is a decidedly un-commercial venture, but if it results in similar services with more resources behind them, that is A Good Thing.

Speaking of people who ‘get’ it, I’d also like to thank Little, Brown for their ongoing sponsorship of the site, without which it would not have progressed beyond an initial experiment. I hope to keep this partnership going, rather than having to resort to anonymous Google or irrelevant ads and, and urge you to read their books! (Both the books featured on the site so far - Charlie Stross’ Halting State and, yes, even Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight - are genuine personal favourites of mine.)

That’s pretty much it (not much to say, he said) - except to let you know I’m off to India from 22nd Jan to 4th Feb - for work - and if anything terrible happens to the site, there’s a good chance it may be a while before it gets fixed. Sorry about that, but do file a GS request if it does and I’ll try to get on it.

Do tell your friends about bkkeepr (I know when you do ;) because the more people who use it, the more interesting it gets. Thanks for all the amazing support, and here’s to a very bookish 2009!

The bkkeepr API

I’ve added an API for bkkeepr. Yay!

More info here and here.

Bookmooch Support

In response to a Get Satisfaction request, I’ve just added Bookmooch support to book pages, so you can swap your finished books to your hearts content.

To keep clutter to a minimum, I’ve removed Bookrabbit support, as Bookrabbit is currently in severe financial difficulty, and it’s future looks bleak. If the situation changes - or people complain - I’ll bring it back.

Twittercounter

This is nice, isn’t it?

Will integrate at the next update…

Twitter backlink and Microformats

After another Get Satisfaction request, people pages now have a link back to the user’s Twitter stream, marked with a rel=”me” microformat, for added XFN goodness.

Adding bookish social networks

In response to requests over at Get Satisfaction, I’ve added links to Goodreads and BookRabbit books pages (e.g.).

Unlike LibraryThing, neither service currently offers a direct ‘add this book’ link if you’re logged in. I’ve talked to BookRabbit about this, and they have no plans to add such a service, I’m also waiting to hear back from Goodreads on the same query.

I’ve started my own thread over at GS about book social network / library applications. If you’d like to see more, come over and help out.

UPDATE 11/6/08: The lovely folks at Goodreads did get back to me, and suggested a direct link to a book review page would be more appropriate for logged-in users, so I’ve added this.

ISBN X's

Just caught a little problem I hadn’t noticed before - books pages with ISBNs ending in X (e.g.) were 404’ing, and CodeIgniter was only looking for number ISBNs after bkkeepr.com/books/… when of course, as in this case, ISBNs are strings, containing the digits 0-9 and the letter X. Fixed.

Some issues

So, as soon as we launch bkkeepr, Twitter starts stumbling hard. One thing they’ve done is reduce the number of permissible API calls per hour from 70 to 30, so I’ve reduced bkkeepr’s request rate accordingly. Not a problem while we’ve still got relatively few users.

However, something is also up with @replies, so these have been suspended until further notice, and the site updated accordingly.

GO GO GADGET

Bkkeepr is officially open. The beta has not exactly been “closed”, but it has been quiet. Am bracing myself for traffic, and hoping nothing falls over.

Worldcat, xISBN, and preg_match_all

Some books are still cropping up as the dreaded “Unknown Work by Somebody”. This is because someone has supplied a valid ISBN that doesn’t appear anywhere at Amazon UK or US (in either format, see posts passim).

Now, so far these have all been actual books - the problem is, they’re not in English, so they don’t appear on the English-language Amazon. It is possible to query other Amazons (very easily - you just change the .co.X endpoint of AWS queries) but this is getting a bit much.

So I’ve implemened WorldCat’s xISBN if all else fails (specifically, the API getmetadata call) - it’s a lot more comprehensive than Amazon, and covers all languages. However, it’s free version is very limited in terms of the number of calls you’re allowed to make, so it only gets called if Amazon has failed to come up with anything.

xISBN data doesn’t turn up in nice XML either - a metadata request returns something like this:

<rsp stat=”ok”>isbn oclcnum=”66720726” form=”BA” year=”2005” lang=”dut” title=”Droomvader” author=”Matthew Sharpe ; vert. [uit het Engels] Paul van der Lecq.” publisher=”Cossee” city=”Amsterdam”>9059360621</isbn></rsp>

So instead of a standard XML parse, I had to use PHP’s preg_match_all and spend an hour struggling with regular expressions to get some code that looks like this:

preg_match_all(“/(title\="(.*?)")/”, $book_data, $matches);
$title = $matches[2][0];
preg_match_all(“/(author\="(.*?)")/”, $book_data, $matches);
$author = $matches[2][0];

Which seems to do the job. I’m going to manually change the ‘Unknown Work’s that have appeared so far, and hope this prevents a lot more.