http://www.bookdope.com a feed for general site updates http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com en-us feedback@bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com this design is slightly more colorful and compact than the old design. it is similar to the old facebook design, but in a dark red instead of facebook blue. book categories have been moved to the left (an industry standard). search and bread-crumbs have been moved to the right. the center will host the category browse and search results, book pages, google book previews, etc. hope you like it. site-design 2008-11-18 http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com/Browse/Textbooks/c/465600 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com I added the amazon "new and used textbooks" category. It's on the top level; between "teens" and "travel." Amazon throws a lot of crazy stuff in there; stuff you wouldn't think of as "textbooks," but the sub-categories help filter things down. site-addition 2008-12-02 http://www.bookdope.com/Browse/Textbooks/c/465600 http://www.bookdope.com/Book/This-Site-Is-Using-Google-App-Engine/isbn/1430218312 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com Now this site supports search engine and human friendly URLs for categories and products. You'll see the category name in the category links and the title, author, and isbn in the book links. The site map has been updated for Google; so come and crawl it Google! I added a longer meta description. And finally, I updated the robots.txt file and added some hot rel="nofollow" attributes! Awh Snap! site-addition 2008-12-03 1:22 AM http://www.bookdope.com/Book/This-Site-Is-Using-Google-App-Engine/isbn/1430218312 http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Python-Web-Development-with-Django-Developers-Library-by-Jeff-Forcier/isbn/0132356139 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com BookDope.com development took a break from new features and addressed performance. Under a heavy load (e.g. a search engine crawling the site), BookDope.com was pushed over it's CPU quota. I'm happy to report this is fixed now; and due to the improvements in efficiency, the site is faster and I'm a better programmer :-) The site is not completely optimized by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a lot better off. Now, I can get back to working on FEATURES. I also worked more on SEO; adding the actual book descriptions and categories into the meta tags. So, for real this time; please come crawl the site Google! site-performance 2008-12-16 11:03 PM http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Python-Web-Development-with-Django-Developers-Library-by-Jeff-Forcier/isbn/0132356139 http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Smart-Web-2-0-Applications-by-Toby-Segaran-/isbn/0596529325 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com The ability to "tag" books is nearing completion. For starters, this feature will only be available when you login. This feature took a long time to implement due to the struggles of a relational database person trying to relate to Google's "bigtable" data-store (within really tight quota constraints set by app-engine). site-addition 2009-01-14 12:01 AM http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Programming-Collective-Intelligence-Building-Smart-Web-2-0-Applications-by-Toby-Segaran-/isbn/0596529325 http://www.bookdope.com/Browse/NPR-Best-Books-2008/t/2031 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com You can now login and tag books. Tags are probably the most generic way to categorize your books; for example, you can tag something as "best books 2008," or "propaganda!" or "astounding." You have complete chaotic freedom (save you only get 5 tags per book). You'll be able to navigate your tags, and also navigate the most popular tags from everyone. If you're logged in with Facebook, you can post your tagging action to Facebook for all your friends to see. You can also tag things when logged in with your Google Account. More features will be supported in the future, but for right now it's "basic" and operational -- so tag away. site-addition 2009-01-27 05:33 PM http://www.bookdope.com/Browse/NPR-Best-Books-2008/t/2031 http://www.bookdope.com/Book/A-New-Earth-Awakening-to-Your-Lifes-Purpose-Oprahs-Book-Club-Selection-61-by-Eckhart-Tolle/isbn/0452289963 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com BookDope is displaying used prices from the 3 booksellers that offer them in their APIs. These include Better World Books, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. I'm also showing the "member" price from B&N for now. In other news, tags are more public. Your tag links can be shared with other folks who aren't logged in. You can also publish news items to Facebook when tagging a book, or in regards to a particular list of tagged books. site-updates 2009-02-11 12:14 AM http://www.bookdope.com/Book/A-New-Earth-Awakening-to-Your-Lifes-Purpose-Oprahs-Book-Club-Selection-61-by-Eckhart-Tolle/isbn/0452289963 http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Unaccustomed-Earth-by-Jhumpa-Lahiri/isbn/9780307265739 http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com Thanks to our good friends at Barnes and Noble, BookDope is able to display an "Also In:" section on the book pages. This provides a list of other formats available (i.e. paperback, compact disc, etc.). site-updates 2009-02-11 12:14 AM http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Unaccustomed-Earth-by-Jhumpa-Lahiri/isbn/9780307265739 http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com BookDope's use of Amazon Web Services on Google App Engine resulted in a problem for the site. To make a long story short, Amazon's servers deny too many requests from Google's servers, resulting in blank pages on BookDope. We complained to both Amazon and Google about this, but nothing ever came of it. In order to get BookDope back into shape, We will look for alternative ways to get and use book data. We will provide updates here. site-updates 2011-05-24 10:59 AM http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com/Book/Dreams-of-Joy-A-Novel-by-Lisa-See/isbn/140006712X http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com The Walmart prices we're broken. It's fixed. Also, we're filtering out Amazon's Kindle Editions. site-updates 2011-06-02 11:25 AM http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com http://www.bookdope.com/img/logo01.gif http://www.bookdope.com Buy.com's site had changed a bit so I updated the scraper for them. I added Alibris.com to the mix. They have a nice API so it was easy. site-updates 2011-06-08 12:17 PM http://www.bookdope.com