Mini-Shelves have been a really popular feature of the site. Essentially they allow you to pick a topic or category that your interested in (eg Golf, DIY, Cooking…) and see what the ultimate shelf would look like if it just contained items within that category. They’re a great idea if you want to check out definitive works in a certain area, find presents for people or just want to find an item of a certain type. » continue reading

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 » continue reading

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 Equally, we don’t want to wait too long between generations of the shelf or its contents will be outdated.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 The up shot is the site stays fast but the ultimate shelf may occasionally be a few hours out of date.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. » continue reading

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. » continue reading

Drum role please…we’re finally ready to launch!  It’s massively exciting to finally get this far and we’re really looking to moving the site forward over the next few months.  Before we get carried away with what we’ve done and where we going we’d first like to give a big thanks to all those who have helped test the site.  Ironing out those last bugs and properly thinking through the user experience wouldn’t have been possible without you.  Some of the enthusiastic comments have been really inspirational in helping us push through the last stages of developments.  At times it felt like we’d never get there, but when we received such positive feedback, it was hard not to feel completely invigorated about the whole project! » continue reading

This is the first 5ft Shelf blog post!!  We’ll be starting to blog on developments properly once we launch.  Until then you can subscribe via the RSS feed or check back in a few weeks for updates.