All Consuming reborn!

Thank you everyone that has been so encouraging during the stressful times of my many server woes. Truthfully, I've sort of been being lazy about maintaining these sites and therefore feel like I sort of deserved it when the back burner grew claws and mean teeth and bit my head off.

So, I took the weekend and got tried to rebuild the core of what I originally intended the site to be, and threw in a few other ingredients that I picked up along the way. The result is here:

http://new.allconsuming.net

I'll move it over to the default domain after another couple days... I haven't really done that much in the way of performance improvements, but now at least I have much better tools with which to figure things out.

A few notes on changes:

I focused on people with accounts. My original dream behind All Consuming was that nobody would actually need an account... that it would crawl weblogs and get enough information from that to be useful. I'm still very interested in that angle, but I've found that most people are more interested in the creation of book lists on the site itself, so I built that first.

Tags. I used to have a defined set of categories you could add items to: currently reading, favorite, never finished, re-reading, etc. I had a million requests to add to the category options, but it was a bit too much work for me to do very often. Now, instead of having categories, you can now add tags to things on your list, much the same way that you can on every other new website on the block: del.icio.us, flickr, 43things.com (my company's site), upcoming.org, and many more. Love tags? So do I... even more than the hype makes me. One thing I've done that I haven't seen much of yet is a way to assign a single tag to many of your items at once. Log in and go to a tag page to see what I mean.

More than just books. This has been the number 1 request since day one. I've always hesitated simply because I find books to be the most exciting thing in the world and music and movies and the such only less so. But I thought I'd throw it in as long as I was messing around with it. Now you can add albums, movies, and anything else you can possibly dream of to your consuming list. Woo!

Improved javascript include. You can now specify which subsection of your list gets added to your javascript include by specifying a comma-delimited set of tags to pull from. This is an experiment and may change in the future, but it seemed like an interesting thing to try out.

Backfilling the data. I'm slowly backfilling the data from the old site to the new. It's taking a while because I changed a lot about the way the data is stored. So some pages will be slow until the backfill is complete because it'll try to backfill data on the fly if you visit a page that hasn't been updated yet. Let me know if anyone experiences problems with the backfill of data.

Many more things coming soon. Most likely, after I get back from Brazil though. I want to add the web crawl back in, and hopefully improve it so that it can actually go through all of the blogs that are now being created. As it is, I've had to cut back on some blogs simply because it took too long to check them all.

Comments

[Muness Alrubaie]

When I try to login I get:
Application error
Rails application failed to start properly"

[Wade Roush]

Hey Erik, sorry about your server woes. Bu it's great to see you updating AllConsuming. Will you eventually restore the blog crawling aspect? I thought that was cool.

[Erik Benson]

Hey Wade, yeah I'll be re-adding the crawling aspect in the next month or so (must go on vacation first). And I'll be improving it so that it's fast enough to actually take less than an hour to check an hour's worth of blog updates.

[Georganna Hancock]

This is great news for all us "bookies" as I like to call us readers/writers/reviewers. Thank you for all your efforts.

[Baggas]

Hey Erik, great job on getting the site back up and running.

I just have a few queries :
1. Can you make it so that the book covers, and authors show up on the search results again, to make it easier to ensure that we are picking the right book?
2. The new javascript doesn't seem to be working, either copied exactly from your site, or changed to reflect my tags - nothing at all shows up. Although the old javscript from my pre-existing list is still showing up.
3. Are the style tags the same for the new javascript?

Anyway that's enough for now. Thanks again for the great effort you put in. Much appreciated.

paul

[Erik Benson]

Hey paul, yeah, I was torn on the covers thing. I'll find a way to put them back in, but I sort of like the lost feeling of having to read titles and figure things out. Probably my minimalist aesthetic crying out a little too loudly.

Can you send me a link to your javascript thing? It may be because DNS is still propagating for some of the subdomains... but if you're getting any javascript errors then that's another problem.

The styles aren't the same actually. The styles I used before were not valid CSS so I took the opportunity to update that. The new styles to use are:

.ac-javascript (contains the whole block)
.ac-javascript h4 (the heading of the include)
.ac-item (contains each individual item)
.ac-title (the name of the item)

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to have added to the template... being brand new it is still easy to change.

Here's what the output looks like:

<div id='ac-javascript'>
<h4><a href='http://new.allconsuming.net/person/erik'>
erik</a> is consuming 57 things including…</h4>

<p class='ac-item'>
<a href='http://new.allconsuming.net/item/view/6544'>

<img src='http://new.allconsuming.net/images/ac-default.jpg' border='0' /></a><br />

<span class='ac-title'><a href='http://new.allconsuming.net/item/view/6544'>
Pizza from Pagliacci's
</a></p>

<p class='ac-item'>
<a href='http://new.allconsuming.net/item/view/6522'>

<img src='http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0007TKOAA.01.THUMBZZZ.jpg' border='0' /></a><br />

<span class='ac-title'>"
Sideways (Widescreen Edition)
</a></p>

</div>

[Baggas]

OK in part answer to my own question, I managed to get the script working by changing it to :
language="javascript" type="text/javascript"
instead of just type="javascript"

But is there anyway we can customise it to show something other than :
This doesn't fit in well with the look of my site and I'd much rather a simple "Powered by allconsuming" link at the bottom of my reading list like before.

So after that, my main suggestions would be to have a more customisable javascript so that we can edit things like what is displayed (title, author, comments etc), the actual display style of the results (font, color etc) and also the target frame (such as _blank)

I do love the ability to make our own tags and chose which ones we want to display - as you can see on my page (right side) I've set my site up now to display 3 lists (current, future, recent) and could also add others for music, dvds etc - I love this facility, I just think the Baggas is consuming 41 things including bit makes it look a bit messy.

Keep up the good work,

Paul

[Erik Benson]

Thanks for the tip on the javascript problems, Paul. I've updated the site to use the right syntax for the language and type of the script. Also, I added a way to suppress the "Baggas is consuming 41 things" line by adding a "?suppress_header=1" to the end of the link in the src of the script. I'm not going to publicize it at the moment, but hopefully that'll work for you. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

I do plan on allowing ways to customize more about the include (like specifying author and comments information)... but as for the stylesheets let me know if my previous comment doesn't give you enough flexibility. I believe that everything can be manipulated by nesting classes like: .ac-item img { display:none;} or something like that.

[Baggas]

Thanks very much Erik. All that sounds ideal. I'll have a play with the stylesheets this morning between patients (nothing worse than work getting in the way of blogging) and let you know if there's any other issues, but I really appreciate all this.

Cheers,

Paul

[sam]

Would it be possible to make it so that you can order order what the top three or four or whatever specified number of items that one is currently consuming (like in 43 things).

[Erica Olsen]

Rah rah rah!

[Kevin Smokler]

Fantastic!

[David Bigwood]

Erik,

Thanks.

The old links links from my site had my Amazon number included. I got a couple of dollars every quarter from that. Any way to get those back in?

Consider a tip jar. I'd toss in a few dollars every holiday season. I suspect others would as well. You have created a valuable service. I mentioned it in a talk to librarians just the other day.

[Erik Benson]

Hey david, yeah, I'm planning to add that functionality back in.

[Lauren]

Such an awesome service! Especially with all the new functions!!! But is there any way to include your own comments about the books along with the titles? Like before?

[Ryan]

Welcome back! I was thinking a few weeks back how I hoped All Consuming would somehow find its way into the flickr/del.icio.us/43things fold with a big update.

So, hey -- I'm having some issues with the Javascript include... it's printing duplicates of each book -- here's my JS call:

http://www.allconsuming.net/person/laze/js/reading/10?suppress_header=1

I'm trying to show all books that are currently tagged "reading."

[Howard]

I like the new tags idea. Is there any way we can use the js to get all but exclude the items we mark as consumed? I would like to show what I am currently reading/listening to/etc but I would prefer to not keep messing around with the tags to get that happen when we have a very simple solution.

[E.J.]

I'm having trouble with the javascript include too. My site is displaying the titles in the normal post font (Georgia) instead of the links font (Verdana). The old XML code didn't have this problem. Is there anything I can do to fix it?

My name links to the site, if you want to see what I mean.

[Prashanth]

Sir,

YOU ROCK!

prashanth

[Livre_dor]

I'm really sorry to hear about the problems you've had; it's particularly distressing when that kind of thing happens to a great site.

I appreciate that the site's still half-built at the moment, but is there any chance of setting it up so it doesn't break old links? I've been in the habit of linking to AllConsuming rather than Amazon when I mention books in my blog, and I don't want to have to go back and fix over a year's worth of links. I'd really like the item.cgi?id=12345 address to redirect to the /asin/12345, but maybe that's unreasonable.

Also, is it now restricted to US published books? There used to be an option to search amazon.co.uk for UK editions. And now even the imported data from my account on the old system is just pointing to error pages whenever I have 'consumed' a UK published book.

Thanks again for all the work you've put into this site. I really like the tags idea!

[Erik Benson]

Hey Livre, I am forwarding any of the links that used the item.cgi?isbn=1234567890, but forgot about the item.cgi?id=1234567890... I'll fix that soon.

And yeah, unfortunately it's only working with US items now... I'll be adding the other countries back at some point, probably after I get back from vacation.

[jacob]

Very impressive -- I can't believe that you managed to rewrite this from the ground up so quickly. A couple questions:

1) I miss the old categories, but I can certainly see the advantages of moving to a tagging system (and the mass tagging feature is well done). In the absence of the old categories, would it at least be possible to use the old book status data to tag books as completed/never finished/favorite/etc?
2) Will the REST API return?

Thanks again, and enjoy your vacation.

[mcd]

Very, very impressive. Al consuming rocks.

[that girl]

Love the new all consuming! just a quick question - Can I change my username? and how do I get the movie and other categories to show up on my blog...

[Mark]

Hey Erik,

Love the new site design - especially the ability to do tagging. I think it will make for a much more interesting service.

I've just run into one hiccup so far with some of my older entries (those older than about 2 weeks). When I try to view items such as "The Corrections" (http://allconsuming.net/item/view/5423) I get an "Application Error (Rails)" and that's it.

Any idea what's going on with this?