One of the most common questions we’ve been asked since launching is how do I share my shelf with friends and family? It’s quite understandable – you spend a while thinking up your favourites, remember a few you’ve forgotten a few days later and then want to show the world what you’ve done. The answer isn’t quite as smooth as we’d like it to be right now but we’ve a fix coming shortly (see next paragraph). Each person gets their own unique address where their shelf lives and you can use this address to send to friends and family. To find out your address, login and click ‘My Shelf’. The address of this page will be of the format: http://www.5ftshelf.com/users/yourusernamehere (for example my shelf is http://www.5ftshelf.com/users/george). This is your page and you can send this link round to people » read the rest of this entry

A lot of questions have been asked about how we calculate the ultimate shelf and the mini-shelves so I thought it would be worth writing a blog post to explain it all.

The ultimate shelf is the most popular items from all users’ shelves. To calculate this we take all the shelves and combine them to find the most popular items. This process can be quite complicated and often takes a few seconds due to the sheer amount of user shelves we have on the site. As we want to keep the site running quickly, it’s not feasible to perform this process every time a new visitor arrives at our site. Equally, we don’t want to wait too long between generations of the shelf or its contents will be outdated. To combat this delicate balance we use an algorithm that waits until the site is quiet to perform the regeneration. The up shot is the site stays fast but the ultimate shelf may occasionally be a few hours out of date. We think this provides the best user experience given the constraints and we hope you agree. » read the rest of this entry

It has been a very busy first week and a lot has been going on here at 5ft Shelf HQ. In between dealing with the press, fixing a few teething issues and looking at people’s shelves (we find this incredibly addictive!), we’ve managed to improve a few parts of the interface. This was mostly based on visitor feedback and slight frustrations we noted using the site ourselves.

Firstly we’ve improved the search results page. The right hand side area of the screen now enables you to change the search type. We’re aware the first page of results doesn’t always contain the exact item you’re looking for and we wanted to find a quicker way to filter the results down. The area has the additional benefit of making searching by author, artist or actor more logical, something that was pretty well hidden until we introduced this change. Tied to this it is now possible to select what type of search to perform. By default this still uses the All type but once switched to say Books it will remain on that type until you navigate away from the search page. We’ve also added the type of an item (eg Book, Album, Movie) after it’s title in the results. It was a little confusing just looking at the cover to determine whether an item was a book, movie or album and we think this change makes it more obvious what the result is. Whilst we don’t think the search page is perfect by any means we hope the changes will go some way to improving the experience of using the page. » read the rest of this entry