Remember how do you usually find a book from the library book shelves? You write its call number on a small piece of paper, you slip it down in your pocket, sometimes in your wallet. When you are in the library, you search your left pocket, right pocket, take out your wallet, go through each of your wallet compartments, and !*#@$#$%, you left it on the table.

From today onwards, life is going to be different, you find a book in BookJetty, you noticed nine available locations, mouse over its library call number, click on SMS link, and you get an SMS like the one below. Go to the library, whip out your phone, and find that book.

No paper, no pencil, no frantic search, and environmentally friendly. :P

The SMS is made possible through integration with Twitter.com using Twitter API. You need to sign up for a free Twitter account, set your Twitter username in BookJetty, add BookJetty as your Twitter friend, and enable your Twitter SMS notification for direct messages.

Time flies, the last time I worked on BookJetty, it was in February, three months has passed, and I’m glad that I finally am able to work on it again.

The recent features added are meant to make BookJetty more blogger friendly. We all love to show some books on our blog, be it the recommended list, currently reading list, wanted list and etc. So the new feature added, the blog widget, comes to our rescue.

Blog Widget

I have always wanted to link up my book list to my blog site. So the blog widget comes in handy. I created it to be as user friendly and flexible as possible. You can filter by your reading status, tag name and even by ISBNs.

Vertical and horizontal list types are provided with options to hide and show cover, title, and author. You can also show the title below covers; left, right or center align your books, select the book cover size, and linking book directly to Amazon US with your associate ID.

One thing I like about widget, it works like magic, you just have to copy and paste some HTML codes to your page and your books will be linked up automatically.

The widget is so flexible that you can easily create a script that link to a bookmarked book based on ISBN. For those who often review books in their blog, they can use the same script, and just change the ISBN no. The old way just takes too many steps, find the book in Amazon or BookJetty, copy the image url, copy the book link and title, and manually format the html codes in your blog post. Now you just need to change the ISBN no.

Life is now so much easier with widget. I love widget.

Blog This Book Links

The other way to link to a book other than using widget is using the Blog this book links, shown below the book cover. Clicking on that link will show up four types of links, i.e. by book title, small cover, large cover and lastly a huge cover.

The difference with the widget way, is that widget will require you to bookmark a book before linking it up, and widget book covers are pre-formatted with nice borders, while blog this book links are available for all books; they are just plain html codes that link up with book cover images or book title.

Gravatar Integration

Gravatar.com is the site to keep a central copy of your avatar. The idea is so you do not need to upload 10 avatars for 10 different sites that you signed up with.

BookJetty is now integrated with Gravatar.com, it will automatically look for your gravatar if you do not upload any avatar in BookJetty.

Others

There are other small enhancements made, like:

• Shoutbox links are now replaced with some nice icons from famfamfam.com.
• User profile page is reformatted to make it more pleasant.
• User signed up process was streamlined to automatically logged user in after activation.
• When filtering book list, differentiate selected tag name or reading status category, by increasing its font size and taking out its hyperlink.

And that’s about all for now. Hope you would love the new features.

Today, I have just completed my second Ruby On Rails project, after BookJetty, it was a proposal submission, review and project collaboration system, which behaves very much like Basecamp, focussing on simplicity and interface design user-friendliness.

We thought of doing something different initially, a more conservative approach, but since I was using Basecamp to monitor the project progress, my client was exposed to how simplicity can be really helpful at times.

So I studied how 37Signals did it in more details, and there is really a lot we can learn through observation. One thing I learned the most is that little thing in user interface design is the one that make a difference in user experience, saving a click whenever appropriate makes the difference, not letting user to have a second thought of what your instruction or error message makes the difference.

But learning while coding slows me down too, with dateline catching up each day, life has been tough, especially for the past two weeks, but I am glad that I managed to pull it through; today I’m happy that I have the time to blog again.

For the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how I should move forward with Pluit Solutions. System development and consultancy is fun, but to change the client’s mindset, that we developers need more than 3 days to develop an application from scratch is hard, especially in Asia.

A lot of people has been telling me that I need to build a business, a business runs by itself, it generates money even when you are sleeping; freelancing is not a business, it literally means self-employed. It is the easiest to start but yet it is easiest to fail too, depending on which industry that you are in, but you would agree with me, each year the profit margin just gets lower with competition from the flat world, China and India our two big brothers, and it scared the hell out of me, after reading The World is Flat.

Thus, there are two areas I need to work on, first… a lot of people have been telling me, I need to develop a product. Secondly I need to stay focus; since I’m only employing myself, there is only 24 hours a day, taking out the time I need to wee wee, take shower, breakfast, dinner, lunch, sleep, watch prison break, project runway, and CSI, I won’t have much time left in a day.

Talking about building my first product, the trend now is building a service, since I have been working on project collaboration system for the past few months, I am really keen to build a project collaboration system, but again there is already Basecamp who eats up a big pie of the market size, it is going to be really tough to penetrate as a service.

But how about selling it as a product, though not as pretty as a service, which can be customised if needed too, just like what I did for my client right now, they need something else on top of a project collaboration system, and maybe to those who need to host the system on their own server due to security reasons, or any other reasons. I have yet to put more thoughts on this. If you are company, especially if you are based in Singapore, and you need a project collaboration system, please do drop me a note.

Secondly, I will drop my idea to build JobJetty, I have not started working on it, and it has been months since I started collecting emails. Most likely, I won’t have the time to develop it for the next couple of months too. My apologies if you have signed up to be notified for BETA release, I was just too enthusiastic and naive back then.

On the remaining time that I have, I will further develop BookJetty. There has been some progress made with Singapore NLB, I’m working on an official integration with them, if it works, I hope BookJetty is going to stay for long, and the pending features list gets really long now and seriously need some attentions.

That’s about it, it has been a good day today, hope it is going to stay good for some time, wish me luck.

I was just back from my hometown a couple of days ago, and in the midst of catching up with a project dateline after the no-working mood celebrating Chinese New Year (CNY) in Indonesia, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Bernard Leong, from SG Entrepreneurs.

For the rest of the interview please click here. Thanks to SG Entrepreneurs. And I know it’s a bit late, but still, Happy Chinese New Year to all!

You know, once in a while, you do strange thing in your life, like getting up early, buying Chinese newspaper even if you do not understand most of the words, and flipping through the pages eagerly to look for just one page to be immortalised (click image to view the entire article).

Ah…and I did that this morning, I stopped at a page with a word I could finally understand ‘BookJetty‘ and a face I am very familiar with.

My wife was on her way to work, we bought the newspaper together, and I showed her with a little pride that I have to unshamedly carry (We don’t get many chances to be featured in newspaper in our life, do we?) and a smile like this. :D.

Interview like this is invaluable for a small development house like Pluit, it is a sweet encouragement, and this kind of stuff keeps us going.

Wei, if you happen to read this, big thanks for the interview, and please help me to give a pat on your photographer’s back ehm… for such a great shot :).

Now we can talk in BookJetty through Shoutboxes and Send Message features.

Shoutbox, I wanted an easy way where we all can talk, maybe not just talk, but more like chatting about a book.

I was considering between Comment and Shoutbox features. Both are pretty much the same, but since comments can get really long and clutter the page, I turned to shoutbox. With shoutbox, it also feels more intuitive to just shout and it takes only a small section of a page.

A shoutbox displays only the last 25 shouts. For more shouts, you can either click on All on the top right corner or click on More… at the bottom of a shout list. Would love follow up on a shoutbox? No problem, get a RSS reader, and click on RSS link for the feed URL. New shouts will be fed to your reader.

You can shout about anything, whether you love or hate this book, the book inspires you to quit your job, it’s a gift from your boyfriend, or even if you have a copy that you would like to give it for free; if someone finds it, they are lucky. Anyway, be creative and explore the shoutboxes.

Send Message, so someone is giving his book for free in a shoutbox, how do you contact him?

Easy, if you are a lady, just click his cute icon, click on Send Message link. Drop him a thank you note, say something like, ‘Hi, thanks so much for [the book], can I meet you at [MRT station] to collect the book.’ After that, lunch on you. Lovely, isn’t it?

Tip: If you have to much free time at work, click here for all shoutboxes feed URL.

UPDATE:

• Recently BookJetty was mentioned by LibraryStuff.net. The site is maintained by Steven M. Cohen, the author of Keeping Current: Advanced Internet Strategies to Meet Librarian and Patron Needs.
• Isaak Kwok, a librarian, wrote an encouraging review on BookJetty.
• Cobalt Paladin reviewed BookJetty, and suggested Chicklet, a small little icon that you can put in your blog that links to your BookJetty profile, would be nice. Coming soon CP.
• tstar, a bookaholic, wrote a short review on BookJetty.
• BookJetty was also mentioned as a mashup example in Making mashups work in the enterprise, ZDNet Asia Mobile, written by Vivan Yeo.

Thanks guys!

This morning, I found out that NLB online catalogue (Vistaweb) has enhanced its site to limit the number of connections per IP address or you can also say per PC if have no idea what IP address is.

Basically, if you create more than 5 sessions from the same IP, you will get this message below, and you are asked to reuse your last session. Note that a new session is created when you click on Easy Search or Advanced Search button from the main page.

Obviously this is a good step, it helps to reduce redundant sessions which could be easily created and not used while waiting to be timed-out.

A good step by NLB, but a bad news for BookJetty. BookJetty needs at least 10 sessions in a pool to operate smoothly. Couldn’t bear to see this baby dies, I managed to work out an interim solution. I can still create at least 10 sessions, but I’m not sure how long this will last.

Screen scraping is obviously not the way to go for a mash-up application. I know this day will come, I just don’t expect it to be so soon.

My hope is that one day NLB will be able to provide a simple plug to access library catalogue through REST service (XML over HTTP) just like xISBN, Amazon, eBay, and Flickr services, this will help more creative applications like BookJetty to tap on library information. And I wouldn’t mind to help out in anyway.

We can’t blame the additional security layer put in place, it will come soon or later, it helps to protect Vistaweb from denial of service attack. But, it is really a pity to see an application like BookJetty gone in waste. Anyway, just hope that the interim solution is going to work for a while.

If the marriage of Amazon and NLB really comes to an end, I will have to figure out what to turn BookJetty into. A book exchange site? Hm…maybe. Though I’m sad, I just have to keep a positive mindset, that there is always something that we all can learn from things that happen in life, be it good or bad.

The new BookJetty is finally out. It is now on Ruby On Rails with some new interesting features. Well, indeed a hard work finally pays off when you see something out. Anyway here are some highlights on the new features.

I love the book scroller. You can scroll left and right the featured books and recently added books. Was inspired by Moo.com.

You can now bookmark your books as Wanted, Reading and Read. So gone are those days when you need to jot them down on papers. The next time you need to go to the library, just view your wanted list.

Well, you are the king, so you tag what you want. Group your books with any names.

Tag ‘loveit‘ to recommend a book and to show it in the featured list hall-of-fame scroller.

With your bookmarks, now you are able to see, who else wanted, is reading, or has read the same book. And finding popular books in town will just get easier.

So if need a book that is wanted by lots of ppl, you should know what do.

Top searches are now in CLOUD format, due to peer pressure. Neah..from usability perspective, they are just better. You can select top searches for today, this week and this month.

NLB catalogue and xISBN book editions are now cached for 30 minutes. So first request maybe slower, but subsequent requests are much faster, no round-trip to NLB and xISBN servers.

There will be more features added along the way, meanwhile I’ll be tidying up those bugs spotted so far. For you, why not just try it out. Suggestions and feedback are most welcome.

After downloaded the latest version of Hibernate, Spring and Acegi Security, configuring the long list of XML configurations, just about to start working on the next enhancement for BookJetty; I decided to make a U-turn to re-code BookJetty from scratch again using Ruby On Rails (RoR).

I know it is crazy, and it sounds like a lot more work at first thought, but my developer instinct assured me, with RoR, I’ll be able to save a lot more time in the future. Besides, I’ll be able to learn more about RoR, so what the heck.

Strange, somehow, I get more excited.

I usually have a long list of books that I want to read, although I know I won’t have the time to read all of them. Trying to be smart, I categorise them into different categories, such as technical, photography, design, fiction, and etc. And to avoid the tendency to read only certain type of books, I also logged the books I have read. You know, it is important to be well-rounded (kiasu). =)

Currently I am maintaining the list in an excel sheet, and I find it pretty cumbersome to maintain. Whenever I plan to read a new book, I need to refer to the list and re-search BookJetty to check the loan status in the library. I thought if BookJetty can be enhanced to support this feature, it is going to be useful.

Basically users should be able to add books to their account as either ‘Wanted’, ‘Reading’, or ‘Read’, and they also should be able to tag books based on whatever names that they like.

From there, we can derive some interesting lists such as most wanted books, what are the popular books currently read or had been read. And we should be able to link a book to other users who had bookmark this book.

With the membership feature, in the future, BookJetty can be extended to support other features, such as book reviews, groups, and group dicussion threads similar to what Flickr has. Meanwhile for the upcoming enhancement, I will be focussing on just the membership and bookmarking features.

I have just completed the design for these enhancements, and this is how the new BookJetty will look like.