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by danso 5072 days ago
Very cool. One feature that RT has that you don't have yet is the ability to see all reviews by a reviewer/institution.

Actually, being able to see all books by the author would be especially useful. And it's a view more particularly essential than it is for RT (since an author has a more singularly important role in the quality of a work, compared to the actors/studios/directors/writers/producers/financial backing that go behind a successful movie)...being able to see an average for an author's books, or even a sparkline (to see if he/she is going downhill) would add a lot of value with minimal effort.

Related to that: I know it's kind of important to people to see the blurb, which necessitates a multi-column layout for the listed reviews. But I'd rather see it in a tabular format, with Reviewer Name, Date, Rating, and then a long field for 20-30 word blurb. It's easier to see distribution of reviews in a tabular format.

2 comments

To put a slightly finer point on it: sites like this are incredibly relational. Everything (almost) should be clickable for a collection view.
That's taking it a bit far, eh? Tasteful user interfaces answer relevant questions - not just any question at all.
For sure it's an ideal, but come on, you should be able to click on a reviewer's name to get their other reviews, or an author's name to get their other books, or a date to find other reviews posted at the same time (with its own range functionality), as well as by-publisher, by-review-site, etc.
We will be adding sort/search by author/reviewer as we grow the db.
Good to hear, I was frustrated when searching for a particular author, ie "Robert Jordan" would return results with "Robert" or "Jordan" anywhere in the title or author name.

Also if you search for something like "The X of Y" you'd get results that had nothing but the "the" or "of" in common. :(

We made some changes for the search to work better...just need to deploy.