Comment by mig4ng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mig4ng | Hacker News Reader

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Hi Adam,

Thanks for creating and sharing this. I was using my notes to keep track of it since GoodReads was not a viable option anymore.

I have a couple suggestions/questions:

1. Is there a way to bulk edit a list? I want to most of my Want to Read books and going one by one is slow.

2. Related to the first one, when I click the "Want to Read" big yellow button, it takes about 100-200ms for something to show or be clickable. This is very annoying and probably worth optmizing.

3. When in Airlist (not sure what it means, but appears to be a more advanced view of regular list) when I click manage, nothing appears. This appears to be a bug (and maybe the bulk actions are here).

4. This is a suggestion, make it possible in the settings to configure what the home page is. E.g. I do not like feeds in any application. I would prefer it to be the blog page of hardcover.app or my library, instead of the feed, and have the feed reachable elsewhere.

5. Do you think it will ever be open source? It appears to be an amazing Ruby app, would love to see it's source. Of course the book data could be private (or public even better), but the application source code open source (or even public source with a private license, but ideally open source).

That's basically it. Very grateful for the alternatives that have been popping. Hardcover looks amazing overall.

Hey hey! We've talked with a bunch of people using notes and sheets to manage their libraries. Seems to be a common trend from people who want a little more control than Goodreads offers. Here's my take on each of these:

> 1. Is there a way to bulk edit a list?

Not today, but I love the idea. What were you hoping to do in bulk? Change a status? Add to list? etc?

> 2. Related to the first one, when I click the "Want to Read" big yellow button, it takes about 100-200ms for something to show or be clickable.

Yeah, good point. We do like 4 queries there to get all the data for the button, but we could do that in one query and get everything. That would speed it up. We've also talked about splitting the button into a "mark as want to read" button and a "dropdown" button. That way if you just want to mark as a book as "want to read" it's only 1 click.

> 3. When in Airlist when I click manage, nothing appears

Hmm, I see what you mean. That's supposed to be a dropdown with options for edit list, reorder list, save list ordering (in localstorage). But we're in the process of rebuilding that feature, which means sometimes there are no options there. Adding this to our issue tracker.

> 4. This is a suggestion, make it possible in the settings to configure what the home page

That's an interesting one! We've talked about two things that could help there. One is making the feed filterable. If we added feed items for blog post and you could set your filter to only show those that would work. The other thing was creating widgets to show in the left/right columns on the feed page. Do you feel like either/both of those would work?

> 5. Do you think it will ever be open source?

Yes! We have a path to open sourcing that we're starting down this year. It's a difficult one to run locally due to the 8 docker containers needed as well as a lot of local data for books. Right now a big advantage of the team is our agility, and at the moment open sourcing (and getting to the point people can actually run the app) would take some time.

We are thinking about open sourcing the front-end first though. In that case people would work on the Next.js app but use a staging API/database. Any thoughts on that kind of approach to start? Or are you much more curious about the Rails side?

> What were you hoping to do in bulk? Change a status? Add to list? etc?

For now, remove from list, maybe move/add to list.

> One is making the feed filterable. If we added feed items for blog post and you could set your filter to only show those that would work. The other thing was creating widgets to show in the left/right columns on the feed page. Do you feel like either/both of those would work?

I am already pretty happy with the suggestion I did in Discord and has been already deployed, of having the div id in the feed.

  ! Hide hardcover.app Feed
  hardcover.app###feed

I already use this rule in uBlock Origin. I wish other apps had those, it would make my filters[0] a lot simpler.

Having a setting to disable feed in the settings, or making it show some stats, books read this year, progress bar on goals it more fitting for me as I don't want a feed.

> Any thoughts on that kind of approach to start? Or are you much more curious about the Rails side?

I never had a big open source project of my own, my suggestion is: It does not have to be perfect, nor having an amazing contribute guide. Not even a readme or a license. You can start adding those slowly.

Ideally some time after open source it, from my point of view, I like having a one liner or couple of commands to run the project. That way I can pull, make some changes and test those changes. Then when I open a PR I can get extra insights from the maintainers. Be it a Nix flakes file, a shell.nix file, a docker-compose, or docker container, even a shell script.

[0] https://github.com/mig4ng/ublock-origin-filters

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