Fixing Authors in Their Place
I haven't written on this blog for some time, due to the exigencies of other demands, but I wanted to note here (in case I have any readers left) that I just updated isbn.nu a few days ago to provide unique author pages. This means that 100 John Smiths can all be uniquely identified with a permanent and distinct code and URL location for their unique set of books. It also means that I could license and add author biographies, link to author Web sites, and allow reader and author submitted biographies or other details. That's to come.
My colleague Jeff built the outline of this months ago, and I finally had the time to integrate all the pieces. Jeff did all the heavy lifting on isbn.nu for the past few years in terms of refactoring old code, turning into a maintainable and scalable beast, and answering my programming questions. He's helped me become an object-oriented programmer, and to understand how to build code that works.
In the last few weeks, I've built an API for isbn.nu, an interface that will allow an application programmer I'm working with to create an iPhone/iPod touch application that will work as a front-end to isbn.nu. That API sort of necessitated fixing authors into their unique identities and solving a number of other site problems that have been lagging.
I've got a bunch of other features and improvements coming at long last, but this unique author page/identity is one of the ones I've wanted to add for years.