Dynamically Sorting Your Comic Collection

[sendingsignal]

I figure that since this is a webcomic inspired community, a lot of you read other comics as well. I thought I'd introduce you guys to a feature of the site I'm working on that you might find helpful for your own collections. I just finally got this working in the past couple days and I'm looking for testing and feedback.

Basically, if you are logged in at http://www.tradereadingorder.com you'll be able to go to any reading order or individual book page and add books to "My Collection."

Here's an example of a Reading Order page: DC Universe Recommended Reading Order
Here's a character Reading Order: Batman (not every book is tagged with every character yet, but that's the goal!)
Here's a series list: DC Archive Editions

An individual book page: Superman: The Action Comics Archives Vol. 1

And finally, the page where you can view your collection: My Collection

You then have an option of sorting your collection by Recommended Reading Order or Alphabetically. I am also working on letting it be sorted Chronologically by Release Date Of Collected Contents, but that's been a bit tricky so far.

I'm not sure yet how it works if you have DC books and say, Wildstorm or Ultimate Marvel books in there as well, but it works great for just DC books - which is the main reading order I've gotten working so far.

The next thing I want to add is a second list/adding option that works exactly the same way but is called "My Wishlist" - so you can have one list that you own and another that you are hoping to purchase. Of course, you could put any kind of book on any kind of list, so you could use both to maintain a list of say.. recommended books. Or titles you believe are "essential" to own for any collector. And so on.

Right after I get the wishlist one working (I'm not sure how to duplicate the code without messing up the database yet, haha, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out) I'm gonna figure out a way that we can share our lists with each other. I'm already super curious about everyone else's collections.

Obviously, this isn't gonna work for self bound editions or individual issues, but eventually I hope to at least have a complete database of DC and Marvel titles, as well as whatever others I manage to add.

Let me know what you think!

I started the whole site because I was sick of typing out recommendations to everyone on the comic forums I'm on, and this way I could just send them a link.... but then it's evolved from an excel document html export to an insane time-suck. But I'm kinda proud of it. I'm getting a lot of help with it now

[Jesse]

It's a good idea, but like all the other thigns of this type I've seen for books, I'm not interested because damn it would take forever to list everything I own.

[sendingsignal]

You don't actually have to type out anything, though, just click the + icon next to the book. I've got about 1300 in my collection on the site right now and it only took a couple hours to do it. I did it while watching the Batman Animated Series. haha

Basically, you don't need to search book by book (which is what I thought was a pain with those other sites) since you just select the publisher or series you've collected and then click down the list.

Course, it's most useful for DC right now, since the Marvel and Image lists aren't up yet.

Notice this got moved to the Comic section! Thanks! I didn't notice that one under the book section.

[Jesse]

Oh, I'm just clicking an icon? I'm way more up for that. I am now all for your site.

[sendingsignal]

Yeah, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible.

Right now I think it's still kind of a pain because clicking the button refreshes the page. I want to make it AJAX, so it saves the information without reloading the whole page - that way you could go down the list and click them all real quick and not have to wait a couple seconds after each one.

The temporary solution is to click them with the middle mouse button so they open in a new tab, and just go down the list that way - then close all the tabs when you go to the next page.

[sendingsignal]

Jus' a little update - I'm almost done with the offline list for Marvel, so that will be coming soon, and based on request now have several choices for shopping in addition to Amazon.

Also Uncle Gorby's Corner of Free Stuff now has its own section.