booktribes.com - drupal site offering social networking to book lovers

mdixoncm@drupal.org - December 18, 2006 - 16:39

We have just launched another Drupal site - booktribes.com.

The is aimed at people who love books, and allows you to rate, discuss, recommend and review books - while at the same time socially networking with other users with similar tastes - kind of like an online book group.

The site has been built in Drupal 4.7 with a healthy injection of custom modules - some of which will be released as soon as I can get round to it. I am particularly pleased with the avatar resizer - create a profile and then upload a photo, and a nifty piece of javascript allows you to crop and resize your image to fit our desired size and aspect ratio (looks just like digg and is based on some heavily modified 3rd party javascript squeezed into a nifty little drupal module).

The site relies heavily on jquery for which we had to hack the standard drupal js (to rename the $ function).

Oh and we have over 2.8 million nodes, so be patient if the searching is taking a while :)

You can use your drupal.org username & password (let me know if you are running a drupal site and would like us to allow your users to use booktribes).

Any feedback would be great - and please let us know if there is anything from the site you (the drupal community) would like to see released as a stand alone module ...

Cheers,

Mike

booktribes.com another Drupal site from computerminds

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RE: booktribes.com

Theo - December 18, 2006 - 18:14

Nice website! I really like the idea since I read tons of books. Are there similar websites out there or are you unique? Where did you get the book data from?

Some feedback:

Performance: The site is really slow for me. You need to find a way to optimize it otherwise users might be discouraged to add content or browse around. This should be top priority.
Logo: These days I'm so used to clicking on logos to go to the home page, but your logo does not have a link on it.
Ajax: The use of ajax when rating books and adding reviews was nice. I liked not leaving the page when performing those functions.
Homepage: I get overwhelmed when trying to read your home page. There is a lot of good information, but I think there needs to be more whitespace. Or the content needs to be layed out in easily identifiable chunks.
Snippets: Do you provide code snippets for bloggers to add their list of books/reviews on their own websites? That would also drive traffic your way. I know on StokBlogs our users would like something like that.

All in all, very well done!

-theo

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Cheers theo

mdixoncm@drupal.org - December 19, 2006 - 22:08

Cheers for the feedback theo,

your spot on about the logo, completely forgot to put a link around it!

And the homepage needs something to tighten it up a bit.

We will hopefully be adding some little snippets for "what i am reading" and possibly "my favourites" - will keep you posted ...

performance wise, at what point was this affecting the site? was it the images? or just serverside being slow? We have been having issues with some of the javascript hover stuff taking ages to attach itself :(

thanks again for the feedback,

mike

The avatar resizing should be working now ...

mdixoncm@drupal.org - December 19, 2006 - 22:04

Ooops! The avatar resizer thing decided to stop working at quite an embarrasing time - it should be working again now, have a play and see what you think ...

Nice website

deathgod - December 23, 2006 - 08:03

Nice website, but how did you get 2 million book listed? I think lots of content = lots more people joining.....you should spend a week focusing on registering you site with directories websites, promotion, promotion, etc...

Is your business model only those two adwords boxes? i'll take a deeper look at your site soon, anyway, clicked an ad

Overall, very nice site you have there....well done

We had to purchase the book

mdixoncm@drupal.org - December 28, 2006 - 11:36

We had to purchase the book data from a third party data supplier - a company called Neilson ...

Yeah, site creation is the easy bit - the promotion takes the time (and the $$$)!

Thanks for the feedback

like books? check out booktribes.com

great looking site!

jbhan - January 3, 2007 - 00:14

What do you use for your tooltip? it has a really nice functionality...and works in both IE and FF!

jason