We’ve made some updates today to the Top Shelf feature of the site.

We’ve added a link to your Top Shelf in the sidebar so its easy to checkout and update your list of top items.

We’ve also added a link to every user’s profile page. This makes it easier to view another user’s top ...

Shelfworthy members and friends!

I know things have been very quiet around here recently. I wanted to take a quick moment to update you all before we get back to another busy week at Shelfworthy HQ.

One of the things we learned with the soft launch of Shelfworthy is that the site is a bit more complicated than we would ...

One of the reasons we started Shelfworthy was because we had a lot of love for Delicious Library, a catalog application for the Mac. However, we really wanted a social version that would not only keep track of the things that we own, but also let us see and interact with our friend’s libraries.

Today we’re adding the ...

We just pushed an update to shelfworthy that adds support for Internet Explorer 8, so if you are an IE user try it out and let us know if you find any bugs. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are not supported and never will be, so if you are using one of those browsers and want to use shelfworthy you ...

We’ve just made a pretty big change to how your Library is organized in Shelfworthy. You can see this right away in the sidebar if you are currently logged in.

Library Counts

Before, we displayed your Library based on all the item types you have ever had a relationship to (books, movies, games) and then a count. This count ...

As part of the Shelfworthy Beta we gave all of our testers a 3-month membership to Shelfworthy to try out and give us feedback. A good portion of these complimentary memberships are ending in the next month or two. Because of this, and for potential new members, we’d like to take a minute and go over how memberships work ...

Now that we’ve launched, anyone can sign up for an account and try out the site! We will always have a free trial that will give you a taste of Shelfworthy, and a membership that will give you additional features.

Information about our free trial and paid membership—along with what their features are—can be found here

During ...

This blog is not only the best place to find Shelfworthy news and announcements, it’s also where you can find a list of the features we’re currently working on for the site.

If you look at the main blog page, you’ll notice a list on the left of Upcoming Features. These are the things we’re currently ...

If you saw the last post about recommendations you may have noticed that we also added the ability to review items.

We have a lot planned for reviews, but currently you can write a review and then rate an item thumbs up, thumbs down or neutral.

We’ve also added the ability to mark a review or note as containing ...

We’ve just added the ability to recommend items on shelfworthy to friends. You’ll find this feature on the item detail page, which you can get to by clicking on an item title or cover.

If you click on an item and get a popup that looks like this:

just click on the cover again or click on the ...

We’ve had a bit of bad luck the last couple weeks at shelfworthy central. We lost one of our developers (or 50% of our work force) and had to quickly hire a replacement.

Well, it seems today that our replacement has also fallen through. So we’re stuck—literally days before we wanted to launch the site—with very ...

Today the SXSW annual web award finalists were announced, and shelfworthy made it into the top 5 for the CSS category! (you can see all the finalists here and be sure to vote for us in the peoples choice awards!)

I found out monday and decided to spend the weekend replacing the beta shelfworthy design with our final 1.0 ...

It’s been a while since we’ve had a new feature on the site; mostly because we’re rushing to polish everything up and add the big remaining features (recommendations and reviews) before a public launch. I decided today I would spend the morning doing something new for everyone to play with, so I added a rough version of ...

Hopefully everyone is having a good holiday break—if indeed you have holiday break. I’m home with my wife’s family and its been great so far.

This morning I got a book, and while adding it to shelfworthy after the festivities I found myself wanting to take note that it was a Christmas gift from my in-laws. I ...

Facebook support was suppose to be done at the same time as twitter, but we ran into a couple issues that held it back. I’m hopeful that we will have facebook support very soon, and just wanted to post this to let everyone know its coming.

I had a brainstorm with friends over the weekend to talk about shelfworthy and try and decide what features are important to have before launching the site to the world. One of the big features that we all thought was important to add soon is a way to recommend an item to someone.

Here is how I see this feature ...

One of the features that we had in the alpha that will be coming back is the idea of a Top Shelf. This would be a place where you can show off your favorite items to the world. This will probably work as a button in the options menu that lets you add or remove an item. We will also ...

We’ve been thinking of the idea of custom shelves for a while. The idea is that you could create and name a new shelf and then put whatever items you want on it. For example, I could have a “Time Travel” shelf where I put all the items I’ve read about time travel. Or someone could create a ...

Reviews is a feature that we’ve wanted to get on the site for a really long time. However, we don’t just want to do a “5 star” or “1 to 10” review system like you see on other websites. We think that a system like that isn’t very helpful, especially without a frame of reference—my 4-star ...

This feature has taken longer than planned, but I think the results are also better than expected.

The old options menu—as seen below for posterity—had a couple of large issues.

First, it was not discoverable by users. Generally people would click on the item itself before noticing the “gear” icon was even in the lower right corner. Sometimes ...

Twitter support is here! Find it on the new “My Social” page:

It’s still young, so don’t be too judgmental. We have a lot planned for twitter coming up soon, but for now we support the following:

Find friends on shelfworthy who are also on twitter.

This won’t work so well right now as nobody has connected ...

I’ve just finished adding an initial go at status overlays for items on the site. These look a little something—or really, a lot something—like this:

This should give you a better idea, at a glance, what another member’s current status with an item is. In the top example, pixelmatrix added three items at the same time ...

The event system has been redone and comments have been added to the site!

Its now possible to comment on events and on any item on the site (just go to its detail page.) There may be a couple tweaks that we’re missing, but try it out and let us know what you think!

Alright folks, here is my current thinking about how to redesign setting item status:

This design is still a work in progress, but it fixes a lot of problems with the way this works now. I decided to take setting status out of the options menu and create a separate widget. There are a couple reasons I did this:

1. It ...

I decided to get comments working as our first feature of the beta mostly so people could actually start to interact with each other on the site. Sadly I ran into an issue that has delayed the full comment feature from being launched just yet.

The idea with comments is that you should be able to comment on just about ...

We have a discussion site as part of shelfworthy, talk.shelfworthy.com, however I’m not sure how many of you know about it. There aren’t any links to this page (yet) on shelfworthy so I though I would mention it here in the blog. The idea for talk is a place where anyone (even non-shelfworhty members) can go ...

I’ve setup a live chatroom here and will be in there throughout the day to answer questions and take comments about the ongoing beta.

Don’t be shy!

One thing that I’m guessing you’ll notice as you use the beta is that it’s hard to tell what your current relation to an item is.

“I own this, but have I set that on Shelfworthy yet?”

“Have I marked this as seen yet?”

In the alpha we had overlays on items that let you know the ...

I think it’s common in interface design that the most used feature of your interface is generally the hardest to design. This element needs to be clear, fast, and easy to use.

On Shelfworthy, I think this feature—at the moment—is the options menu that users use to add items to their library. My current design for this ...

3 years later: Shelfworthy finally enters beta

It’s been a long 3 years, but I’ve finally decided to declare Shelfworthy in beta! I started this post as a history of Shelfworthy from it’s humble beginnings as a video game blog, but as there is a lot of history and I want to add things like embarrassing old ...

This is a pretty important feature that we’ll be adding very soon. The idea is to let you post comments on just about any “item” on Shelfworthy—a book, a comment by another member, an event, one of these blog posts, etc.

Here is a little teaser of our quick comment box:

Initial Twitter support is the first feature we’ll be rolling out. You’ll be able to link to your Twitter account and be able to:

• List your friends that are on Shelfworthy and Twitter, so you can add anyone you may have missed.
• Follow other Shelfworthy users on Twitter without leaving Shelfworthy (we will also let you know if ...