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.

The startup wave is getting warm here. Thanks to Entrepreneur 27 Singapore for helping to foster entrepreneurship among the young, especialy for those under 27.

I was invited by Justin Lee to say a few words about BookJetty.com on their upcoming event, E27 3.0: Startup Republic (hm… I know that I’m slightly overage, but rest assured I am still 18 at heart, we all are, aren’t we?). Anyway thank you Justin. There will be other speakers from ping.sg, blurbme.com and Woolert as well.

If you are free, do drop by for this rare event. I bet it will be fun. Say hi ya, shake some hands ar, ask questions, get to know some new friends there.

Seats are limited, so reserve fast, click here or image for more information on reservation details. For those who are coming, will c ya there.

It seems nowadays everyone is upgrading their service to 2.0 following the trend of Web 2.0. And it is not exceptional for library.

Krafty Librarian, a librarian/blogger, wrote about Library 2.0 Theory: Web 2.0 and Its Implications for Libraries. She said some people are turned off by the just the term Library 2.0, but whether or not you like the term, you have to agree that libraries must evolve with technology to provide user-centered and innovative services to stay relevant to the users.

She covered how Instant Messaging, Streaming Media, Blogs and Wikis, Social Networks, Tagging, RSS Feeds, and Mashups are going to work around the library services. And BookJetty is as one of the examples for the Mashups. I’m glad that BookJetty is taking a part in reshaping the library services.

ProgrammableWeb.com is ‘the website’ that showcases mashups around the world.

Today, BookJetty is featured as the mashup of the day. It gets an average rating of 4 stars. Thanks guys for your votes.

Bookjetty gets a fresh coat of paint and 3 new sections on the main page:

• Latest Discussions, latest posts in the forum.
• BookJetty Picks, some recommended books to read.
• News and Updates, latest happenings.