A WordPress Plugin For A Books List?
The Gotham Gal moved to WordPress this week. I mentioned it in a post mid week.
She maintains a book list on her blog. She’s a huge reader, at least a couple books a week, many times more than that.
And she lists her favorite reads for all to see. It used to be a TypePad widget on the sidebar but in the new UI, it’s an entire page linked to off the main header.
On TypePad, she could enter a book name, an ASIN, or an ISBN and the book and link to Amazon would automatically be added to the list (with her Amazon Affiliate ID attached).
I spent about an hour yesterday trying to replicate that functionality on WordPress via a plugin. I tried about five or six plugins without any success.
Has anyone come across a WordPress plugin that does this? If so, we’d love to know about it. Thanks.
Comments (Archived):
How about – “Amazon Product In a Post Plugin”?Desc – “Quickly add a formatted Amazon Product (image, pricing and buy button, etc.) to a post, page, custom post type or text widget by using just the Amazon product ASIN (ISBN-10). Great for writing product reviews or descriptions to help monetize your posts and add content that is relevant to your site. You can also customize the styles for the product data. Remember to add your Amazon Affiliate ID on theoptions page or you will not get credit for product sales. Requires signup for an Amazon Affiliate Account and Product Advertising API Keys which are currently FREE from Amazon.”
Or maybe “Totally Booked”, might be more suitable for a list in one page.
This looks close…https://wordpress.org/plugi…
Did you try this one? http://wordpress.org/plugin…
I’ve never found a WP Plugin for this, though I haven’t looked in 6 months or so.The best I’ve seen are the implementations/widgets by Shelfari http://www.shelfari.com/widget (used by Brad Feld here: http://www.feld.com/wp/book… and GoodReads http://www.goodreads.com/he…. The Shelfari widget goes full page, to my knowledge the GoodReads one does not.Good Reads does have an API, so I’m sure someone could custom code something for the blog in a pinch (shouldn’t be hard to code a bookshelf): http://www.goodreads.com/api. Something similar (and probably easier) could also be done using Amazon’s API http://docs.aws.amazon.com/….Nothing ideal, but those are the best options I know of.
Welcome to the joys of WordPress plugins witch hunting. There is a wide variation in wordpress plugin quality, plus searching for them is not easy. WordPress should improve the directory search for plugins. It’s really bad.But one thing I learned is to look at the # of downloads and ratings, as they are generally indicators of quality (but not always), and to search on Google, not just in the WordPress plugins directory.
That’s the big problem with WordPress. Lots of options but the quality is all over the place. Still they should make the search process easier.
it’s easy, but not accurate.
hah!The trouble of having too many WP plugins vs the absolute zero plug in or support or developer community for a product like Shopify?Easy choice!
I’m not sure that it’s fair to compare WP plugins to Shopify’s. I assume that the Shopify plugin would be curated to higher standards than WordPress’.
Why is that?Platforms success depends on their ability to build solution and grow with them.Shopify is the best pair of water wings for commerce there is but when the company needs to grow, they bolt or sink.I’m all ears if you have different information.
I’m not an expert on e-commerce shopping platforms. Have you tried to send that feedback to Shopify. I’m assuming you’re not the only customer who is experiencing growing pains.
They have shifted gears and are now targeting POS systems. They are following the money downstream.Not understanding commerce is one thing, trying to force a POS system on small business is a bold move that will show either their expertise or their ignorance very quickly.Platforms are a tricky business.
You know your stuff.
Always learning.I do know my way around the POS side of things. Huge disruption and opportunity in this area. Truly a wonderful mess.
This – i’m trying to figure out how to market a wordpress plugin for doing the same AB testing of titles that Upworthy Does. And I haven’t figured it out. Because of this.But I also think that the reviews could be gamed based on the quality signalling.Not awesome but may be important going forward
yep. you still need to market your product.
I’d probably combine two plugins. Use this for the most part: https://wordpress.org/plugi…But then get an amazon plugin for “buy it now”. Or look to have someone add amazon integration to the open source openbook plugin.
thanks. great suggestion
Sounds like a reasonable enough ODesk request to get exactly what you want.
There’s another variation on that solution. You can make the collection of books on Amazon using an Associates list building, then plug a standard widget back into the sidebar of the blog (they give you 3 types of widgets).
Exactly! You win the prize for best answer. Self-hosted WordPress dot org allows JavaScript. You choose the Amazon widget style (I prefer carousels :o) configure for color, border, layout. Load your ASIN’s, then insert the resulting code snippet into a blog sidebar, or separate page.
Not a WordPress plugin, but I use this this script (http://code.google.com/p/od… to produce my book list (http://www.odonnellweb.com/…. It’s got RSS baked in so she could then simply drop an RSS widget onto the homepage to maintain a ‘Recently read” list.
Not a WordPress plug-in, but I use this script (http://code.google.com/p/od… ) to produce my book list at http://www.odonnellweb.com/…. It’s got RSS baked in so she could drop an RSS widget on the front page to maintain the recently read list. It is like a 10 year old script though, and not particularly user friendly to set up. But it does work.
Might be a bit more of a hassle, but you could create an Amazon Affiliate account to share, and use the proceeds to support a great cause. I think most of us have bought something off of Amazon after finding out about it here….
When no plugin did what I wanted I wrote a WordPress plugin called DeadTrees, ( http://wordpress.org/plugin… ) that lets you add an ASIN and it’ll generate Amazon links for you, (with your affiliate code, or mine, or none. Your choice). If you’ve got an key for their product advertising API it’ll grab the artwork too.It allows you to enter a few comments about a book if you want, (books are a Custom Post Type), or not. It’s all up to you.At the moment there’s no widget, the output is on a page – see http://johnbeales.com/books/ – but if you really want one it could be arranged within a few days… 😉
> She’s a huge reader, at least a couple books a week, many times more than that.Astounding. Looking at the list, the books seem to be mostly novels, i.e., fiction. In college and graduate school, my brother and I knew girls who were good with such reading; they astounded me. For my brother, such girls totally blew him away: In high school he had done some sports writing, so in college was thinking about such a career, so started as an English major. An English prof put him in an honors freshman English class, and it was nearly all girls. The girls were fantastic readers/writers of fiction and quickly, totally blew away my brother. He changed majors!As a college freshman, it happened that I shared several classes with a girl; she noticed and introduced herself. We dated for a while. Again, she was fantastic beyond belief with fiction. E.g., in the sixth grade she was sick so read all of Shakespeare’s plays. Even as a college sophomore, I could barely make any sense out of those plays. In our English class we had a novel to read, and one evening we had a date. That afternoon she gave her youngest sister a bath, read the novel, and got ready for the date. Later I spent a few evenings on the novel. On the test on the novel, she got an A and I, a C. Beyond belief.My wife, Valedictorian, PBK, ‘Summa Cum Laude’, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Ph.D., for fun and relaxation read the Henry James, ‘The Golden Bowl’: It’s really something to get through! Some single sentences take most of a page. I could barely read the thing at all, even in just a superficial sense. For her, it was fast, fun, easy reading!For those girls, beyond novels, their abilities with language was also astounding: One of my wife’s girlfriends in college got interested in Japanese so in a few weeks learned it. Later she went to Japan to teach English. Amazing.What some women do with fiction and language is astounding beyond belief.Somehow, however, I didn’t see them reading Knuth, ‘The Art of Computer Programming’, Halmos, ‘Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces’, Spivak, ‘Calculus on Manifolds’, Rudin, ‘Real and Complex Analysis’, Neveu, ‘Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability’, John von Neumann, ‘Quantum Mechanics’, Coddington, ‘An Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equations’, Blackman and Tukey, ‘The Measurement of Power Spectra’, Ullman, ‘Principles of Database Systems’, etc.!Or, from E. Fromm, “Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same.”. Yup!
Valedictorian, PBK, ‘Summa Cum Laude’, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Ph.D….Some single sentences take most of a page. I could barely read the thing at all, even in just a superficial sense. For her, it was fast, fun, easy reading!Back when I used to browse books at the Barnes and Noble and decide what to buy a marker for a non purchase was generally any book written by an academic.I found that the use of less than plain english frustrating and almost always not worth the effort.I prefer things communicated in the NY Times style (from ask.com):The reading level of the New York Times can vary depending on the article. The written articles of the New York Times use basically elementary through high school grammar. It is written with the intention that an average person would be able to understand its articles.I remember hearing that it was an eight grade level actually.While I understand that academics are used to digesting this type of thing, and perhaps there are people who consider it a challenge to try and read that type of thing, (same way some people have to prove to themselves that they can climb everest or run a marathon or triathalon) I don’t. If I’m reading it’s because I either want to be entertained or I want to learn something. (I don’t do crossword puzzles either I’ve got enough things to spend time on where I can derive real value and have a challenge so I don’t do any games or contest things.)Separately, in order of impressiveness:NSFWoodrow WilsonValedictorianPBKSumma Cum LaudePh.D
> I found that the use of less than plain english frustrating and almost always not worth the effort.For me, Shakespeare was challenging because (1) outside of math and physics the teachers dumped on me so much I was afraid of working around ambiguity because I was afraid not having an iron clad (i.e., math or physics) way of defending myself; (2) Old English spelling threw me; (3) there were a lot of contractions, and they threw me; (4) too many of the Old English words I just didn’t know; (5) and the syntax totally threw me, that is, too often I couldn’t even find the subject and verb in whatever the text was that passed for a ‘sentence’.I suspect that mostly people got through the Shakespeare plays first by reading Cliff Notes versions or some such in modern English. Then once know what the lines mean, read out loud and try to get more of the sense just from the sound. Finally, even if don’t much ‘get it’, to fit in with the social and academic prestige of Shakespeare, pretend to understand and like it!At the time, my response was, “If have something important to say about people, duplicity, deception, loyalty, etc., then write an essay, hopefully with some good evidence.”, but that response was not welcome!> I prefer things communicated in the NY Times style (from ask.com):As is clear from the math books I listed, especially Neveu, I don’t mind challenging reading. But I want any challenge to be from the ideas themselves and not just bad syntax and spelling of Old English. Neveu’s writing, with the translation from French to English, is elegant as is the content. For Neveu, I just foundhttp://projecteuclid.org/eu…which is R. Blumenthal’s review of the book. Good review: If have read from some of Blumenthal and Getoor, ‘Markov Processes and Potential Theory’, right, one high end way to ‘price’ wildly exotic derivatives, then can see why Blumenthal could review Neveu!For Henry James and ‘The Golden Bowl’, that is admittedly a strange book. My wife liked reading it. At a university party, hearing that she was reading some James, an English grad student assumed she was reading ‘Daisy Miller’; for ‘The Golden Bowl’, she said that in their department that was for graduate students specializing in James.Actually, PBS did a dramatization, with, thankfully, a narrator, of ‘The Golden Bowl’, in several one hour or so episodes. That I could pay attention to, 100% attention, sitting up, on the front edge of a chair! It was tough to follow, intense, and a lot of fun. Maybe for someone who could read the book easily, it was fun, too. For my wife, it was easy.A Ph.D. can have some value as education and training: The main focus is research, research, and, one more, research. At the better research universities, to modify a line in the movie ‘Lawrence of Arabia”, “the student who does well in research is honored above all other students”. The main challenge, when a student encounters challenge, is usually just the research. There is an explanation buried in D. Knuth, ‘The TeXBook’:”The traditional way is to put off all creative aspects until the last part of graduate school. For seventeen or more years, a student is taught examsmanship, then suddenly after passing enough exams in graduate school he’s told to do something original.”.Do some good research, and essentially everything else is forgiven or ignored. Struggle with research, and everything else, including straight As back to kindergarten, is ignored. Did I mention that a Ph.D. is about research?So, too often too sadly a student has done really well pleasing the teachers in K-12, college, and graduate school coursework but encounters difficulty in the research.One solution is the one I took: In K-8, I was a boy. So, no way did I have the social skills to please the teachers. My handwriting was a train wreck; so was my clerical accuracy — both standard for boys. Finally I just gave up trying to please the teachers.Then in the 9th grade with math and later with physics, I still ignored the teachers, taught myself, and did well. I continued this way in math and physics. Finally I just concentrated on the math. I had a good career in applied math and computing on mostly military problems around DC and, there, was learning on my own like drinking from a fire hose. On my own I carefully went through some good books, e.g., Spivak, ‘Calculus on Manifolds’, that is, a start on the high end approach to the math of general relativity. Sure, I read Blackman and Tukey, ‘The Measurement of Power Spectra’ because I was working on passive sonar and ocean waves, etc. for the Navy. I did a lot of ‘projects’ where I was relatively independent.So, when I went for my Ph.D., I was long out of Knuth’s ‘examsmanship’ (although did well on the SAT and GRE exams — not based on pleasing a teacher!) and long into doing relatively independent work. Then the research was the easy part, fast, fun, and easy. I did two projects, one of which was my Ph.D. research and the other, which got published, might have been. The research for the first took six weeks, in my first summer, independently in the library, that is, before any faculty advisors. The second took two weeks of fun evenings while my wife and I watched TV. These two projects, especially the second, polished my halo enough to ensure I’d get a Ph.D. Did I mention that a Ph.D. is mostly about research?Some of the potential value of a Ph.D. is that it is really the only actual ‘training’ in how to do research. Even in graduate school, too many people find the challenge of research to be really severe. Without such training, the challenge is more severe. Somehow, mostly for people, research is not easy. As bad as the Ph.D. system is, it’s by far the best ‘training’ for such work.Maybe one way to make research pay is to (1) pick a big problem, (2) do some research to find the first good or a much better solution (if fail at (2), then return to (1) and try again!), (3) program the solution in practical software (if fail at (3), return to (2)), (4) put a Web site in front of the software from the research and let people who want the solution to the big problem come, (5) monetize by running ads the people see. So far actual research is so rare in information technology entrepreneurship that the research (2) can provide a high technological barrier to entry and a much better solution than available otherwise.That’s what I’m doing, at least when not writing about Art 101 on AVC! Ah, the software would be done today except I got some Chinese food and relaxed!
were fantastic readers/writers of fictionWhile I guess, for some people, it can be difficult to write fiction I suspect writing fiction is similar to the flexibility one has when creating art. It’s hard to be wrong with art. That fact alone gives you the lattitude to create something which will never be scrutinized on the same level that, for example, something written by Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis will be. It’s fiction.The other great thing about fiction or art is that you can say or depict something that would never fly IRL. You can talk about anything or say anything you want hidden behind a character. Even comedy, which comes close, has restrictions. (Although “The Aristocrats” was a nice try).http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
It took me a while to see some value in ‘fiction’: My first reaction was, ‘Junk it because it’s not true.’.As an insecure geek, nerd, I wanted to get some security from things that were ‘true’, e.g., math and physics. Also, in K-8 the teachers dumped on me so that in 9-12 and beyond I liked math and physics because I could do them and no teacher on the planet, no matter what they thought of me personally, could refuse me credit. And I did those subjects well enough that some external sources of authority, e.g., the SAT, said I did quite well.But I did like some of both music and movies; so, no sense in saying I didn’t like anything in art or fiction.So, what could be going on? Eventually I took seriously the standard definition that ‘art’ is the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion. Yup, So, for one case where art or fiction can easily be ‘true’ in a narrow sense although maybe not in a sense as general as physics is when it just reports the emotional experience of someone. Why be interested? If looking for ‘truth’, then maybe can learn something about such people. Or, might get entertainment or insight from the vicarious experience.Eventually might want to take some fiction seriously if can believe that it is reporting things about “experience, emotion” that believe are true, accurate, insightful, etc. for some people and, thus, learn about such people.Yes, if just for learning if not for a vicarious experience, a good essay with a lot of solid data could be much better, but for much of “experience, emotion” such essays are not so easy to write. Or, a writer of fiction can be advised to write what they know, and if they do, then maybe what they write is ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ in the example of their life, experience — yes, then have a sample size of only n = 1, but that can be better than n = 0. Or just take what is being said as just a conjecture of what might be true more generally and a research project in one of the social sciences.What can be proven solidly via science can be terrific stuff, but many aspects of life, love, experience, emotion, people, personality, etc. are not so easy to reduce to science yet. So, instead, some fiction, maybe with entertaining story telling, or even ‘formula fiction’, might be the most effective way at present to report the experience, emotions, insights, conjectures, etc.An extreme example is, say, classical music. What the heck could that stuff ‘mean’? Well, maybe: (1) Composer has some insight into some emotional experience. Maybe the experience is common, say, ‘universal’, maybe something about compassion from a beautiful, very feminine woman, e.g., early in the Wagner opera ‘Die Walküre’. (2) The composer writes music that he (generic!) feels, it ‘feels’ that way to him, ‘communicate, interpret’ the ‘experience’ of the woman. (3) I listen to the music and maybe get much the same emotion. In the case of Wagner, it really can remind me of the compassion of a beautiful, very feminine woman, which can be super nice stuff to hear. Just listen. Heck, just listen to the first 10 minutes of ‘Die Walküre’ as athttp://www.youtube.com/watc…Yes, the correspondence between the music and the emotion can be one to many: That is, one piece of music can correspond to many emotions. Indeed, the striking music by Korngold for ‘King’s Row’ was intended for a different story. For the musicians, that their music could communicate more than one emotion could help more of a large audience ‘get it’! But often with the music is a specific ‘story’ that can remove the ambiguity; of course this is the situation in opera and movies; it is also the situation in ‘programmatic’ music.For just what the heck was meant by a Bach toccata and fugue for organ, a Mozart violin concerto, most of the Beethoven symphonies (yes, there is clearly a dance in the 7th and a poem in the 9th and for the 5th maybe it was about Napoleon), and the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, especially the Beethoven violin concerto, big guess. Some say that the best piece of music ever written, more likely the best piece of violin music ever written, was the Bach ‘Chaconne’, but what it ‘means’ is a bit vague! I have my view, but that is likely only one of many possible ones! Still, when I was trying to play it on violin, it was so much fun I couldn’t stop working on it!More in the second meeting of this class in Art 101!
I just read this, thought of you and your brother:But although I detest/ Learning poems and the rest/ Of the things one must know to have ‘culture,’/ While each of my teachers/ Makes speeches like preachers/ And preys on my faults like a vulture,/ I will leave movie thrillers/ And watch caterpillars/ Get born and pupated and larva’ed,/ And I’ll work like a slave/ And always behave/ And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…”
Henry James, and even James Fenimore Cooper, are lethally boring for me. Henry James = verbose, rambling sentences, a prolific author of 400+ page period novels. Shakespeare only made sense to me when teacher had us act it. The stilted, archaic English suddenly became meaningful. We did that in my 6th grade public school, with Julius Caesar.Your wife was probably a lovely, feminine humanities scholar who could write prose with the same brilliance that she read and synthesized it. It isn’t a female trait per se. Rather, your wife was exceptionally intelligent and accomplished.I like shorter works by John Donne, Hawthorne, de Maupassant, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann. You might too! Goes well with Thomas’s Calculus, Sheldon Ross’s probability books, ODE’s…
> It isn’t a female trait per se.Try to tell that to my poor brother, mostly a quite good student, Ph.D. in political science, where the girls in honors freshman English totally blew him out of the water, the class, the building, etc.In one level more detail, you might be correct about writing literature — it appears that there the men did okay. But for reading that stuff, from all I can see nearly no men can compete at all.My wife was just brilliant; I never could figure out what the heck she was good in because she seemed good at everything, including things far from the humanities. She dug into experimental design and did quite well — I wish I knew that subject as well as she did. Her Ph.D. was in essentially mathematical sociology in likely at the time the best department in the world — e.g., she learned from two Presidents of the American Sociological Association, both of whom were trying to make sociology into a mathematical science.For Ross’s level of probability, really I just skipped it. That and Feller volume I (Feller volume II has some value, e.g., the renewal theorem). I skipped to Neveu and comparable texts by L. Breiman, M, Loeve, and K. Chung. Mostly I learned from lecture notes from a star student of E. Cinlar, now long at Princeton.Maybe at one time I looked at one of Ross’s books but really wanted something good on second order stationary stochastic processes, power spectral estimation, Wiener filtering, etc. Got too busy so that topic is still on the back burner. That topic has long been important in parts of electronic engineering, and more recently it played a big role in the analysis of the spacial power spectrum of the 3 degree K microwave background radiation.Yes, Thomas is good for calculus, and long was especially popular in engineering schools. I learned from a somewhat more severe text, Johnson and Kiokemeister, and taught calculus from the really easy to take Protter and Morrey. I learned advanced calculus from ‘baby Rudin, W. Fleming, ‘Functions of Several Variables’, and M. Spivak, ‘Calculus on Manifolds’. Then I took more in analysis in graduate school.My undergraduate course in differential equations was junk, but later I went through Coddington’s book and got more from Athans and Falb, ‘Optimal Control’. Just as mathematics, ordinary differential equations is a nicely interesting subject with a huge literature, but so far as I can see in practice it remains a fairly narrow subject. Of course, partial differential equations is much different — really important applications that too often remain a bit beyond what we can do either with just the mathematics or with numerical methods.
James, ‘The Golden Bowl’ was fun and intricate and a real puzzle to follow as PBS did the video.Henry James had a brother, psychologist William James. So, as my brother explained to me, Henry wrote fiction like psychology, and William wrote psychology like fiction.
With all that reading, where do you find time for the requisite weekly 16 hours of TV?
You and sigmaalgebra are kind and sweet. Thank you.
Not a plugin, but I use Goodreads a lot. She could add a link to a Goodreads account. FWIW.
That would be my suggestion too! She could use the free Goodreads for WordPress plug-in. Even unemployed widows such as myself, who use free WordPress hosted .com blogs, can do that. An additional benefit is that Amazon acquired Goodreads last year, so there’s good ASIN look-up with Goodreads.
Hi Fred,You can do this via a custom post plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugin…. Once the custom post is set up, you will need to tweak the theme code to display the content exactly how you want it to be displayed.My team would be happy to do this for you if you would like.Nelly
Fixed link without the extra ): http://wordpress.org/plugin…:)
Hi Fred – Been enjoying the blog for years! It’s not WordPress, but I co-created a very simple version of this for Tumblr. It’s free and called Otlet’s Shelf after Belgian librarian Paul Otlet. More info here: http://otletsshelf.tumblr.com/
what’s an ASIN?
It’s Amazon’s superset of the book ISBN. It’s basically a globally unique product code assigned by Amazon.
thanks. good to know.
One of the reasons I like these posts where you ask a question is that it draws out people from the AVC community who don’t usually comment. Love that.Of course the regulars will find a way to chime in whether or not we have an opinion or are even interested in the topic. (case in point)Regardless of whether it’s relevant to me, this is a good way to freshen my tech knowledge base.Although many times when a question is not relevant to me in the moment, I will end up looking in the archives later because the topic does become personally relevant.
Hi Fred,You might want to take a look at the “Gotham Gal Books” plugin. I think it might be exactly what’s she’s looking for…https://github.com/newclari…-Mike
Some screenshots.
Screenshots that I prepared for the plugin using some of GG’s book comments.
Ugh. There goes Discuss having UX issues again. Even though I “deleted” the duplicated image Discuss still posted it, and Discuss won’t let me edit images either.
Disqus, not Discuss! Latter reminds me of CodingHorror’s Discourse ;o) Nicely done, whipping up a plug-in and demo’ing it here! You are a real go-getter!Are you Newclarity on Github? I’m Demeter there.
@Ellie_K:disqus – Yes, NewClarity is my company, I also have one under my name too. Irony? I had edited that several times because of UX issues with Disqus I was just so Disgust-ed that I must have mistyped!As for being a go-getter; thanks; I just had the free time that day. 🙂
I’m following you on Github. You used php for the plug-in (no surprise ;o) I saw your backbone.js standards repository cum tutorial. That is nice, civic-minded and welcoming. Forking is intimidating to novices; more inclusive to explicitly solicit comments too, as you did.Sorry, I’m chatty. I’ll go bother SigmaAlgebra now!
Not exactly a direct plugin per se in the sense you are asking but by using Zemanta with your WordPress blog – as we do – you then have the facility to automatically have your Amazon Affiliate ID attached to any Amazon related resource image you enter using Zemanta as the tool to add that image.See attached image for setup guidance. We have used this feature in our own blog. For a practical example of how this works, just look about halfway down through this blog post to the item labeled “The Halo Effect…”: http://tbbhd.me/1ifWdZ9 Hope this helps?ps: Here, in retrospect, is a perfect example as a reminder to me of “please check what you are offering before committing” 🙂 While the picture of “The Halo Effect..” book is as it should be, the link needs fixing. Must have broken when we recently moved hosting from Network Solutions to GoDaddy but you can still get the idea even with this link not working.
Hi @PeterBeddows:disqus – Off topic, but how to you add images to your comments?
No worries: Thank you for asking @mikeschinkel:disqus We use Zemanta. I believe Fred may actually be an investor in Zemanta but I could be mistaken. We love it as a tool to support making any blog post more relevant and interesting with easily added related information.BTW: Please forgive the fact that our own blog has not been updated in a while. We are contemplating new directions – otherwise referred to in the current jargon as “pivoting” 🙂
Hi @PeterBeddows:disqus – Are you saying Zemanta is how you are able to display images in Discus comments?
Ooops! Sorry Mike. No; I meant Zemanta is how we display images in our blog.Displaying images in DISQUS Comments is possible when you are logged in to your DISQUS account and commenting in someones blog that uses DISQUS. Then you will see an image in the lower left corner of the comment block – to the left of your “Post as <name>” block that you click and pick your image to post.
@PeterBeddows:disqus Ah, never noticed that. Thanks! 🙂
@mikeschinkel:disqus You are most welcome. Glad to be able to help.
. @MikeSchinkel The “include image” is an option that the blog owner, or whomsoever installs Disqus, can choose to enable globally. You’ll see that little icon in the lower left corner if enabled and can only upload images. Pasting a URL with a MIME type of IMG into the body of the comment won’t work. If Fred’s webmaster, or webmistress has chosen to enable videos in comments, you can just paste a youtube URL and it will work.As Peter B, mentioned, Zemanta is great. I don’t see it on WordPress dot com lately.
Hi @Ellie_K:disqus – Thanks. Peter Beddows helped me out with it earlier so I’ve already posted images. Unfortunately Disqus has bugs in it’s implementation; if you add them in the wrong order and click the (x) to delete then re-upload it uploads two copies. And then in “Edi”t Disqus doesn’t allow you to delete them either. Given that and other usability issues I frequently wonder how Disqus has managed to pervade so much of the blogosphere. But I digress.*I didn’t mention it earlier but my company has build WordPress plugins for clients in the past and one of our prior clients is a Zemanta competitor so we’ve avoided Zemanta out of loyalty to our client base.
With a quick search, this plugin looks like good fit for GGs needs http://wordpress.org/plugin…Always shop around – I ended up using custom javascript back in the day when the need arose (but WordPress has some direct editor issues with inline javascript, so adding client side widgets can be problematic).
If you don’t like any of the solutions:http://wp-types.com/ will handle it with aplomb.
You can always move to http://BookLikes.com 😉 It’s like Tumblr+Goodreads
I am upvoting that you upvoted your own comment. Big brother sister is watching. 🙂
Somebody had to be first 😉 Now I can remove my upvote 😛
I had a similar requirement as well. To cater to it I hacked together a custom theme and used the open library plugin for wordpress. You can see the results here : http://enygmatic.com/libraryThe open library plugin works well, only drawback is that you often need to know the open library ID to be able to add a book. On the plus side, if a book isn’t listed (maybe some obscure out of print book) you can edit Open library and add it yourself.I’m also working on some kind of goodreads integration, kind of like use the API to pull your book list and show. I like good reads a lot better, since it gives considerable flexibility in how I can add a book. Should be able to get this out soon I hope.
Any chance you’d share what you’re reading as well Fred? Its always great to follow what influences the leaders in a space.