Media Manager Weblog

Apart from the new release today there is other good news: Media Manager moved to new and fast servers.

So far the application was hosted on a virtual machine at Bytemark. While they provide great services, I think the virtual machines other than the cheapest offer do not make sense financially. And the cheapest offer did not have enough memory for all the applications I needed to run. Because of that Media Manager was quite slow.

I finally uploaded a new release of the Media Manager. The changes are as follows:

• User profiles. See for example my profile
• .
  
• Also for the profile you can now store your location, so other people see if it might be feasible to drop by and get one of your books.
• Friends. It's now possible to add other users to your contact list. In the future this function will be used to make private notes available to people on your contact list.
• "also in the library of" functionality. So if multiple people have a book in their library, you will see so. Example: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This currently only works based on the ISBN (so for example a hardcover and pocketbook edition with different ISBNs won't be detected as the same book)
• A few bugfixes

Have fun!

With the previous release of media manager I forgot to include the covers in the RSS feeds. I now corrected this omission.

The covers are included with the enclosure element as specified in RSS 2.0.

There is a new release of Media Manager online, which adds the following features:

• Book covers are displayed. This uses the images from Amazon. If there is any other major books database which provides a Web service, please tell me. I'd rather not use Amazon exclusively.
• There is now a view which matches all books tagged with a tag in the library of a specific user. For example, to see only hannes's books tagged with "classic", go to /user/hannes/classic and to see all books tagged with "classic" use /tag/classic. There is also an RSS feed for this view again, so now you can integrate the books you are currently reading into your weblog (using for example this feed).
• All data is now encoded with UTF-8. So feel free to enter Japanese book titles.

Additionally this release fixes a bug with the search and adds a few minor improvements.

The second Media Manager release comes with the following new features:

• Better handling of multiple authors of one book.
• Layout tweaked for Konqueror and Safari.

Have fun.

The rise of social bookmark managers such as delicious led me to start the first ever "social media manager".

My primary focus is to make managing your media (books, music records, movies) as simple as it has never been. This is mainly achieved using a typical tag system.

The second focus is to make borrowing and lending your media easy. So you will always know who currently has borrowed your books.

Currently the project's working name is Media Manager, but that name is subject to change. The project is available at media.patrice.ch.

A short list of the currently implemented features:

• Manage books (music records and movies will follow once the book part is reasonably intuitive and complete)
• RSS feeds for all views
• Looks up the ISBN to get title and author when entering a new book
• Save who has borrowed a book

Try it out now. It's free.