The plan for the new BookJetty was to bring social elements to BookJetty and to build a platform for more book-related applications to be implemented in the future.

It was a daunting task from the beginning, considering there were so many things to do with very limited resources. The bad news also the existing codebase did not look too good, it was a pet-project codebase, patches were applied without proper product plan, it was on Rails 1.x, there were no unit testings, and stylesheets were not very organised either. It meant basically lots of re-works.

After much persistence and lots of hard work, today I am grateful and glad to announce that the new BookJetty is finally up!

For a quick tour of what’s new, here are some of the highlights:

Connect with Your Friends’ Bookshelves

You don’t have to physically be at your friend’s home to check out what they have in their bookshelves. BookJetty now has a news feed that updates you of the new additions to your friends’ bookshelf, new reviews, new discussions and other activites.

Discussion Boards

It would be nice to be able to create a discussion topics about the books you are currently reading or have read. And you can now create a discussion topic.

Import Books

The problem with cataloging your books is when you get started. If you are bookaholic, there may be just too many books to add. Fear not if you have maintained your book list some where. You can easily import them to BookJetty. The import feature is smart enough to detect ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 from source data, irregardless of the text format. You can query from a webpage, an uploaded file or copy and paste text with ISBNs.

Invitation

To help you to start building your network of friends the invite feature is handy to invite your friends from your Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. It can also import from your Plaxo address book.

Inbox and Sent Messages

Now you do not have to depend on email notifications to communicate with BookJetty members, the thread-based inbox message helps to keep you in conversation with your friends.

Notifications

Built-in notifications to keep you informed of the activities related to you, such as replies to your reviews, discussion posts, or comments on your profile page.

Smart Bookshelf

Inline “Add to shelf” link can be found anywhere when you browse for books. Mouse over for more options as to which shelf to add to. On top of inline-rating feature, now you can also edit your bookshelf date with a simple date picker.

User Wall Posts

Previously there is a shout box on your user profile page. I thought it was too small and restricted. Now a bigger commenting box is available on your profile page. You can also reply to your friend’s post in a thread to keep the conversation going.

Explore

Based on the statistical data from members’ activities, various explore categories have been created, which include most popular, top rated, top favorites, and most discussed. You can also browse the different periods of time, i.e. this week, this month, this year or all time.

RSS Feed

If you are an RSS junkie, you can follow your friend’s bookshelf through RSS feed.

Privacy Control

I understand that it is important for you to control who can see your data and bookshelf, there is now a finer control of who can see your data.

Time Zone Support

With time adjusted according to your time zone, you won’t be confused about when exactly a post has been made. The best part is you do not have to configure your time zone, as it is automatically calculated with the help of Javascript.

Unicode Support

BookJetty now supports UTF-8 encoding, no problem if you have to comment in Chinese, Japanese and other non-latin characters.

More Bookstores

With the Unicode support, more book stores have been added, i.e. Amazon France, German, and Japan. More will be introduced in the future, the next one will be Barnes and Nobles.

Third Party Advertising

I have also introduced third-party advertising from Google Adsense. The advertising revenue I hope will be able to help to reduce the increasing cost needed the develop and support BookJetty.

Overall the new BookJetty has a better and more consistent layout. And from now on, there will be more regular updates, as the base is now ready. Coming out soon is the group/community feature.

I hope that you like the new BookJetty. For screenshots quick tour, click here.