Thanks to member Catja for the suggestions about how to improve the tagging approach used on BooksWellRead. I’ve made both changes she suggested. First, when a user submits a tag ending with a comma, that comma is automatically trimmed. Second, users can now enter multi-word tags but connecting words with an underscore. For example, if you want to tag a book with the word pair “funniest ever”, type “funniest_ever” in the tag field.

I just wanted to say hi and welcome to the many new members who have joined over the last couple of weeks. Looks like many of you came from a posting on SumbleUpon. I’d sure welcome your feedback if you have any. Speaking of feedback, I recently fixed the ‘tell us’ link.

I recently was doing some online navel gazing (i.e. searching google for “bookswellread”) and came across an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with a reference to BooksWellRead. Yay for the site! And thanks to those of you who came to the site after having read the article.

Hello again, world! It’s been a while since you’ve seen new stuff on the site. A prospective member got me on the case to find a way for members to back up their own content on BooksWellRead. Well, voila! When you’re logged in, go to your profile and click on ‘export BookShelf’ to download an Excel file containing a list of your books as well as a list of your entries. Although the data on the site is backed up regularly as a whole, it’s not a bad idea for members to do your own back ups too.

I’m not talking about a hair treatment of the nether regions. One of our members, who is Brazilian and works as a Portuguese-English translator, would like a Brazilian-Portuguese version of BooksWellRead. Michel’s request is my promise. Over the next several weeks I have a few minor personal things to juggle - work, applying for jobs, applying to school, and planning my wedding (May 27), to name the biggies - along with managing BooksWellRead, so my promise to create the português versão of BooksWellRead will be a bit slow in its delivery.

I think I’ve managed to fix the bug that seemed to reject the posting of an entry when trying to add a book to your BookShelf.  The script now seems to work for me.  Please let me know if you continue to encounter problems.  Sigh and relief, until the next bug bites.

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about BooksWellRead is learning about members through their websites they include in their profiles. I figured you might too, so the blogroll (Links), for now, is a list of the blogs/websites of users who have recently joined BooksWellRead. I’ll update this from time to time, but I won’t promise a systematic approach. Enjoy!!

…I’d have announced on the blog the exciting news that I’m launching a blog about BooksWellRead! In the future, planned updates and enhancements to BooksWellRead will be announced here.

As always, I look forward to getting your feedback. You can always email me at admin@bookswellread.com with comments and suggestions about BooksWellRead or this blog. Like BooksWellRead, this blog is very much a work in progress. Stay tuned.

Happy reading!