The Digital Movement guys are back in action with PopOut 07. Thanks to them for inviting me to share a bit about BookJetty, and I also look forward to learn from the sharing of other startups which have already made the cut, like Bezurk.com, Recruit.net and the others.

It’s a short meet-up, two and a half hours, this coming Thursday night, at Suntec City, do pop by if you have nothing else better do. To register, click here.

UPDATED (07 Oct):

Definitely a night to remember, for those who were there, thank you all for your warm response, for the whole TDM Team, thank you for the hard work put in, for the slot given, and for another great event.

For those who missed it, here are some reviews by fellow bloggers:

• Live Blog From Popout 07, by The Digital Movement (TDM)
• Popout Fizzles Out, by Ian
• Honestly, PopOut was good except for one thing, by Aen
• Live blogging from PopOut 07, by Singapore Entrepreneurs
• Post from PopOut, by ThoughtMonkeys
• A decent event @ Popout! 2007, by Priscilla
• PopOut! Singapore: The book nerd who wowed the crowd, by MediaSlut
• POPOUT ‘07′ - Emerging Web Startups, by
  Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF)
• PopOut! Singapore - Preview of Firefox 3.0, by Claudia

When I built BookJetty, I knew that I am not going to stop at just one library, our good home library, Singapore National Library Board. I dreamt for BookJetty to integrate with a lot more libraries worldwide, and to benefit more book lovers around the world.

Three weeks ago, I started the quest to fulfill that dream, and I digged through documents, websites, guidelines related to Z3950 protocol and MARC standards, visiting hundreds of online library catalogues worldwide, and rewriting BookJetty library module to create a facade that can easly link up with more libraries.

And today, I am glad to announce that BookJetty finally goes
international, integrating with 300 libraries from 10 countries, covering United States, United Kingdom, Canda, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Ireland, South Africa, and probably more in the future.

For a start, when you sign up for a BookJetty account, your library preference will be empty. When you try to list books with library search, you will be redirected to your library preferences page.

Select on one or more libraries in your area, you can also filter the list of libraries by country. Click once to add the library to your list, or click again to remove.

On your library list you should see all the libraries you have added earlier. You can also click on del to remove a library from the list.

To sort, click on Reorder, then drag and drop to re-order your libraries sequence. Click Done Reordering when you are done.

When you go back to your book list, it will search the first library in your list. To check other libraries, mouse over to the library name, and select another library name, and it will perform the search without a page refresh, thanks to AJAX for that.

Click on library call number, to view the book holding information or to reserve. Or if you mouse over, you can also click on SMS call no to your phone on a small yellow tooltip, if you need to visit the library to pickup the book. For special integration with Singapore National Library Board (NLB), you are able to view holding information directly from BookJetty.

The library search on the book list is very convenient to check multiple books availability in a library. But if you go to a book details page, you will be able to check if the book is found in all your local libraries.

If you no longer need the library service, you can click on the collapse button on top right corner.

Collapsed state of library search panel, it will stay collapsed when you browse other books until you expand it again.

Now try BookJetty with your local libraries. Click here for the list of libraries supported in BookJetty. If you can’t find your local library, suggest it here, or find out more about library integration with BookJetty.

If you encounter any problem, drop me a note, and I hope that you will find BookJetty useful. There are still tonnes of todo lists to work on BookJetty, your suggestions, comments, and bug reports will be definitely priceless to me.

Thank you.

Yes, you get it right, it is a web service and it is with Singapore National Library Board (NLB), and it has been successfully integrated nicely with BookJetty for slightly over a week in stealth mode, and today after it is more or less stable, I can finally announce it.

This is probably one of first integration using web service with a public sector in Singapore. In anyway, it’s a new beginning, which I hope this will lead to more of amazing stuff that will benefit many when more organisations be it public or private starts to open up their non-sensitive data through an Application Programming Interface (API).

I am glad that today has finally come, before, BookJetty has been slogging through the hard way, using screen scrapping and session pooling, with worries that the service can easily break with a small change in the library online catalog, scalability issue due to sessions maintenance, and worse, blocked.

Today, those worries should not no longer be there, it definitely makes day, and the day for all the BookJetty users in Singapore.

Many thanks to Singapore NLB for taking this initiative, special thanks to Jamieson Teo who helped to advocate and facilitate this integration, and to Ling Xia, for her fast and excellent support during the integration phase, and finally to the management for giving the green light.

My warmest gratitude to all.

BookJetty gets another new feature, last night, I applied the Add to Favorites feature replacing the loveit tag. All books tagged with loveit are now marked as your favorite books, and that tag has been removed.

The Add to favorites icon is a nice looking small flower-pattern icon on your book list, when not selected, it is shown in light gray to reduce the amout of noise in the book list. Following its close cousin, the AJAX-based star rating feature, adding to favorites is a breeze; just click on the icon without a page refresh.

On your book details page, we now have an indicator showing home many people have favorited this book, and you can also add/remove from favorites through a shortcut found under your shelf panel.

On your book list page, there is an additional favorites shelf to filter out your favorite books.

Favorites can be a great indicator for a good book supporting the book rating and review information. So start adding your favorite books now, and more to come for BookJetty.

I have long yearned for BookJetty to support the rating and review features, and finally last night, I managed to roll it out, and here are some highlights of BookJetty new features:

AJAX-based 5-star rating

I was considering between digg-style rating, 4-star rating and 5-star rating. But after weighing the pros and cons; for book reviews, I think the best is still the 5-star rating.

AJAX star rating system was used to speed up the rating process, and to allow users to rate with minimum effort. Mouse over to show the selected star, and click to rate. And I’m quite happy with the result, I rated 71 books in my shelves in no time.

Book Review

To review a book , you need to first add a book to your bookshelf, the book review form will appear below the book description. Latest reviews from everyone will be shown in the homepage.

Comment on Review

A review is like a blog post, other users will be able to comment on it If someone comments on your review, depending on your email notification settings, you can be notified through email.

Bookshelves Side Panel

User profile page has also gotten a face lift, other than some reorganisation of the account maintenance menus, we can now view a user’s tags cloud, with a summary of wanted, reading and read books.

Email Notification

An additional section under you account maintenance, to configure your email notification preferences.

Recent Shouts Layout Re-design

Recent shouts layout was quite cluttered previously, they are now organised and grouped by each category, with each category showing a maximum of 4 recent shouts. It is definitely much easier to view and trace now.

What’s Next for BookJetty?

I will be looking into ways to integrate with other libraries around the world using Z39.50 protocols, which should allow retrieval of library call no, but without the holding information.

If you are a library representative, and would love to explore a closer integration with BookJetty similar with what I did for Singapore National Library Board, do drop me an email.

Other than that, some users have suggested me to look into building BookJetty-Facebook application. I’ll start reading Facebook Platform when I am freed up. And other features like the importing feature, add friends and groups, create discussion threads, and others will also be coming.

Hope you will love this batch of new features, so start rating and reviewing your books! Your feedbacks and comments will be much appreciated. :)

BookJetty now supports four different views, i.e. library view, default view, cover view, and simple view.

I have also re-designed the display of the book attributes, less important attributes like ISBN is now moved to the tooltip area, while pricing information has also been removed from the listing area, since they are not referred often.

The labels have also been removed, since we all know what they are by just looking at the values, and the screen now looks much cleaner and less cluttered. Yay!

A quick look at the old design:

And here is the new design:

Library View

Bookmarks will also be shown for Amazon search result, so that you will know immediately if that book is a popular book in BookJetty. They are shown as a total sum, instead of split into read, reading, read in previous design. It’s easier to look at one value as compared to three different values.

The bookmark status, i.e. Read, Reading and Wanted are now tagged with colours, blue, magenta and green respectively, with the colours, they are easier to be identified with.

Default View

Default view does not query the library information, because some of BookJetty users are not library users, and we to refer to the library call numbers when we need to borrow books from the library. Other than that, it’s nice to be able to turn it off.

Cover View

Sometimes it’s just nicer to look at the book covers, you know what I mean, just like this cover. :) The rest of the attributes are moved to the tooltip area.

Simple View

For those who are busy, a quick reference to your book list without bothering the rest of of the details, book attributes are moved to the tooltip area as well. If you are viewing your book list, it will list 15 books per page instead of 10.

Change of the view type will be stored in the cookie, so the subsquent search results will follow your last selected listing type.

Coming next to BookJetty will be the long missing feature, the book reviews and ratings feature. And I can’t wait for that, probably will stick to the 5-star ratings, after considering the good points and bad points of 4-star and digg-style ratings.

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!