[bksvol-discuss] Re: Changes to the Browse New Books Web Page

  • From: "Gerald Hovas" <GeraldHovas@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:33:50 -0600

Sue,

Gustavo's title probably doesn't adequately describe what he does.  Yes, he
does make changes to the website, but he only makes simple changes, and this
is one which had to be handled by Engineering.  Jennifer probably has a
better idea of what changes were made during the upgrade since she's been
helping to track what changes have been requested and what bugs need fixing.
Gustavo may have not even known that Engineering was installing an upgrade
when he informed us that the website was off-line since he referred to it as
"routine maintenance" instead of an upgrade.  Gustavo would have been the
one that Engineering would have coordinated with to take the site off-line,
though, since he handles a lot of the day-to-day operations which members
and volunteers associate with Bookshare.

HTH

Gerald
-----Original Message-----
From: bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:bksvol-discuss-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of siss52
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 1:06 AM
To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Changes to the Browse New Books Web Page


I really get confused.  I thought Gustavo was in charge of the website, so 
would he not get the credit for making any changes?  Why is it always 
Jennifer, Jennifer?????

Sue S.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gerald Hovas" <GeraldHovas@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2007 10:28 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Changes to the Browse New Books Web Page


It appears that the Browse New Books page under Browse Books on Bookshare's
website was changed last Wednesday when the site was down for what Gustavo
referred to as routine maintenance.

The links to determine which 50 of the results will be displayed are now 1
and 51, and if you are displaying 10 results per page, then the links for
determining which 10 results are displayed is 1, 11, 21, etc.  You may also
need to click on Move Towards Start or Move Towards End to find the link you
want if more than 5 links are needed for displaying other pages of results,
which is the case for displaying 10 results per page.

They also changed the page so that the results are now formatted like the
Advanced Search results, and it appears they also changed the query so that
only English books will be shown on the English site and only Spanish on the
Spanish site.  It also appears as if it might be being updated in real-time
now instead of being updated overnight or whenever Gustavo gets around to
updating it.

Looks like the code has a bug, though, because some of the books are being
listed twice.  It's also not quite what we asked for because they are still
limiting you to the last 100 new books.  I've notified Jennifer about the
bug and reminded her that we had asked for it to work like the link for
browsing new books In English on Jake's website, which is nothing more than
a call to the Advanced Search page with a parameter which tells it to sort
the results so that the most recent additions to the collection are
displayed first.  If they fix the bug and remove the 100 book limit, then it
appears that it will function the same.

In any case, it's a positive sign that they are attempting to make an
upgrade which several of us in the Volunteer Tech Advisor Group have not
only requested, but listed as the highest priority of the changes we
requested due to it benefiting everyone, and because it was the simplest
upgrade of all the requests we made, since all they had to do to provide the
functionality was to add the link from Jake's site to the Browse Books web
page.  They are attempting to go one better by giving us the functionality
but keeping the text at the top of the page the same as, or similar to, the
previous Browse New Books page to prevent confusion about whether or not you
were directed to the page which you requested when you clicked on Browse New
Books.

I've also noticed that they fixed the bug in Advanced Search that was
introduced when they attempted to have the web page display "These are books
1 through 50" instead of "These are books 0 through 50".  The bug prevented
you from moving to another page of results if there happened to be more than
50 when a name was entered in the Author field.  Jake also said that a
similar bug was introduced in the code for the Browse By Author web page at
the same time, and that bug also appears to have been fixed when they took
the site down last Wednesday.  The Browse By Author page and the User
Information page now display "These are books 1 through 50" instead of "0
through 50" now as well.

Fixing the bugs on the Advanced Search and Browse By Author pages was also
something several of us in the Volunteer Tech Advisor Group had requested,
and I know I personally had them at the top of my priority list of needed
fixes since the pages worked in the past, and all they had to do to fix them
was back out the change they made when they attempted to prevent the pages
from displaying "These are books 0 through 50"..  Instead of backing the
change out, they've fixed the bugs and appear to have done a proper job of
fixing the bug in the indexing.

I'm hoping they also added support for 13 digit ISBNs last Wednesday as
well, but I haven't had a chance to test that yet, nor have I had a chance
to talk to Jennifer to ask her if they did.

These observations are a bit sketchy since I've had to stumble across them
and didn't have much time to test before people started asking questions
related to the changes.

I'll try to speak with Jennifer next week to find out more about what was
done.

HTH

Gerald

-----Original Message-----
From: Amber [mailto:amberanddottie@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2007 8:54 PM
To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [bookshare-discuss] having trouble

can someone help me,  when I go to the new books link on bookshare,  I have
it set to where it gives me 50 titles and use to there was a link that said
next fifty but after I read the first fifty it doesn't say that anymore can
someone tell me why.   amber

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