A well-read pony June 2, 2013 1:49 PM   Subscribe

In this thread, there was discussion of creating a Goodreads widget, but nothing ever came of it. Is it still possible?

There seems to be lots of options on their widgets page, and many are pretty customizable.
posted by mokin to Feature Requests at 1:49 PM (7 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

Ha, looks like someone else posted a MetaTalk thread about widgets/socialapps at almost the same time. If I had seen it, I would've just asked in there.
posted by mokin at 2:49 PM on June 2, 2013


Maybe! I'll take a look and see if I can get something that works with our profile page design.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:41 PM on June 2, 2013


Might make it useful (Goodreads) again, since I know I've stayed away since Amazon bought it.
posted by tilde at 5:39 PM on June 2, 2013


I use GR daily and haven't seen any changes since the purchase that have made it unusable or even less useful. Am I missing something or is this purely due to a dislike/mistrust of Amazon? I'm not saying that is wrong, just wondering.
posted by soelo at 7:15 PM on June 2, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've seen a lot of mistrust about Amazon among my friends. Some are worried they will change the site, but most just dislike the idea of being data-mined by a huge retailer. I think most of the wariness stems from that.

I think it's too soon for them to implement big changes on the site. I've noticed little things though: some new spammy emails, and after I write a review, Goodreads now asks me if I want to recommend it to any friends via pop-up. Now, of course, these changes could've been in the works before the Amazon purchase. That doesn't really stop me from saying, "goddamn Amazon," and blaming them anyway.
posted by mokin at 7:52 PM on June 2, 2013


I worked on this today but unfortunately the GoodReads JavaScript widget is not working. The JavaScript that they give people to include in their site is not JavaScript—it's HTML. Here's the example I was working with.

If you bring that up in a browser you can see there's no document.write there or other method of printing out to the page. It's working more like a server-side include. Anyway, there's no JavaScript there, so there's no way to use it to include books on our profile pages.

Their Flash widget isn't customizable enough. That would probably work, but its design and dimensions would make it stand out more than we'd like for the widgets section.

Sorry about this. There isn't much I can do from this end of things.
posted by pb (staff) at 3:00 PM on June 3, 2013


Oh well. Thanks for trying, pb!
posted by mokin at 8:55 PM on June 3, 2013


« Older Archive of Our Own profile widget?   |   You beat the high score? Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments