HUGE update! You can now write original writing on the site. This is something that I have been working on for a while. It is a brand new user content category, under /writings. There are 3 visibility categories: - Public (shows up in /writings) - Viewable on shelf (only shows up in your shelf) - Private/URL access (only shows up in your shelf if you are authenticated as yourself / URL access)

You can now embed books in threads. This book is embedding Paglia's Sexual Personae. These will be shown in the book page and have information about the book like quotes. Hopefully this acts as another avenue to discuss books in a more casual manner than reviews or alike.

1700 users 🥳

You can now vote on "default cover". You get one vote per book. You cannot vote on your own uploaded cover. The highest vote cover will be shown across the entire site, unless you uploaded your own cover to be shown across your content.

Now donators can choose a donator badge ❤️. I think I got everyone, but if you got left out please DM me.

Now adding a new book to a list "bumps" a list to the top of the /lists page. So old lists that you maintain constantly won't be neglected in the dust.

Badges can now be picked in the user menu. You will see all badges you are eligible for. I will also add donator badges and more badges in the future ❤️

Lit.salon minecraft server is now live ❤️. Please check discord for more information.

1600 users! 👩‍❤️‍👨 lit salon world domination

I might make some merch soon. Any preferences in garment? Hoodie? Sweatshirt? Zip-up hoodie? Tshirt?

I’m applying for permanent residency in the US this week 🇺🇸. I will slowly try to pick back up the dev pace, thank you for your patience. The end goal for 2025 is to have a mobile native app ❤️

1500 users! Thank you everyone ❤️ Dev efforts are very low right now because I am traversing trenches. Hopefully I get back on track soon...

Oh forgot to post this outside of discord but... we broke 1400 users 🥳 (we're almost at 1500 already)

Hey guys, something unfortunate happened in my personal life. The dev pace on the site will naturally come to a crawl for a bit. Sorry and thank you ❤️

You can now name and rename chats. You can also leave groupchats now. You can only leave if there are 3 or more participants. Also: realized that I was cropping images as I was resizing them. This is now fixed. The aspect ratio of the original image is preserved

Now all (english) editions of a book are displayed in the book page. For now, the only functionality is the Amazon affiliate links (the amazon system actually makes sense now). But in the future I will add options to select specific editions in your shelf/list/review.

Quotes got a UI revamp. Now the book card is shown with the quote. Sorry for clogging up the salon with dev notes, I'll make a separate section.

Now you can search for users on the search page. Other categories coming soon. Trying to centralize all search functions to the search page.

Openlibrary has been unstable and down for a day or so due to them being hacked. Anyways, book data is loading really slowly or not loading at all. Some pages may crash. Apologies.

Hi everyone, if you encountered "Application Error" that crashes the site, I'm really sorry lol. I think I finally figured out why this is happening after like 3 weeks of banging my head against the wall. For now I disabled the feature that causes this issue.

Now every user uploaded image can be up to 5MB in size, to reflect modern society. The images are automatically optimized and resized in the server.

You can now export your data (shelf, reviews, lists, quotes). It will download a .json file. Now if I die or get assassinated, you can have your data.

Posted this on discord but: my macbook broke and I cannot work on the site for a week until repair is complete. I’m going to vermont over the weekend too. 💔

New description system: first try to find one on Google Books using the most frequent ISBNs, then if it doesn't exist, get one from GPT. I think this is a good compromise b/w GPT slop and human slop. Openlibrary is so bad that we shouldn't use it at all for descriptions.

Pretty huge experimental feature: Now we generate GPT descriptions of the book and store it in DB (generated once per book) rather than relying on open library. This is very experimental. Please let me know if you think we could make this better. I will share prompt in comments.

Now book data from Openlibrary is fetched per block basis rather than page basis. This should massively improve performance. ❤️

Now reviews are "autosaved" on your browser local storage. So even if you accidentally refresh, the draft will be persisted.

🕯️ The requested "liked" tab is now available on shelf. You can see a user's liked reviews, threads, lists, quotes. I haven't implemented pagination yet, so if you liked a ton of items, it may be a bit slow. Thank u ❤️

Now quotes you created are displayed on your shelf as well. Sorry it took so long, it's structured a bit differently in DB so took a couple trial and errors.

https://www.are.na/hwan/lit-salon Brand/Site/Vibe design inspo. It's public so you can add anything you want.

Now links are populated with Open Graph data (the little card you see here) https://www.lit.salon/

I just did a huge DB migration to make the explore page and quotes page faster. Now my explore page actually loads in less than 2 seconds. There are even more optimizations to be made, but I will do those as I go. Please let me know if you notice any issues! ❤️

From now on, only reviews with at least 15 words are shown in the global page.

No more beta badges will be given after today midnight. Thank you everyone for joining!!! We're at 1039 users precisely. Hopefully one day we look back on these days of the site with nostalgia and the site is 100x bigger and looks & feels 500x better.

Explore page: how could i make this better? Infinite scroll is an obvious one, but I find myself not really interacting with it as much. Do you? Why or Why not?

Now you can add letterboxd to your profile ❤️

Hi folks, we are a couple users away from 1000 users 🎉. It's about time I start building a iOS/android native client. This will take a while, since I have to rebuild the entire UI. Web will never be neglected. Tell your friends with good taste about the site <3

You can now add substack, IG, and twitter links to your shelf ❤️

Now below any shelf, it displays similar shelves automatically. Hopefully this allows even further user discovery <3 Also now uses a minhash algo rather than jaccard to make it slightly faster ☝️🤓

You can now search lists by title <3. Coming up for salon, quotes, and reviews. Gonna be a little more difficult for quotes, since I have to do some surgery on the DB. You can also see users' salon threads in shelves <3

Feature requests thread. I think I knocked down a lot of the big ones. These are the current ones on my board, but as you can see it's mostly optimizations. Any big ideas?

Explore page (beta) is out! It shows similar shelves (it's a bit slow right now, but I will optimize algo to make it faster) and following + trending content. It's a little rough in the edges, but it will improve over time. ❤️

Now you can add photos to salon threads. You could IRL bookshelf post or etc. Max 1.5MB. ❤️

The site is now lit.salon. Any references or visits to literary.salon will be redirected to lit.salon <3

THE LONG AWAITED FEATURE: You can now DM ppl and make group chats!!!! Yes, it's real-time. EDIT: now you also see indicators if you have unread or new chats

Hi, brainstorming some site taglines for Google SEO. Currently it's "Goodreads with a point of view". I think this is a bit too vague. I do like having the word Goodreads in there to communicate the category instantly. Any good ideas?

Improved pagination on all pages (except shelf + review, coming next). Site should be a lot faster now. Doing shelf + review pagination soon later today <3 EDIT: ^ is done now

You can now add songs to lists too to further dictate the vibes <3 EDIT: I realized that there's an issue where a published review isn't directly reflected in /reviews. Working on a fix. <- this is fixed now.

HUGE feature! Now supporting author pages. A little rough around the edges but will iterate upon. Hopefully can support custom author images and descriptions soon too. <3 Btw now you can have linebreaks in threads too. Gonna allow adding pictures soon too.

Quotes page sorting (hot/recent/popular) was broken, showing trending for all. Now fixed <3

Now supporting ranked lists. Simply check the ranked box in the list edit mode <3

The big one: now you can re-order books in lists and your bookshelf ❤️

Now you can pick from existing, user-uploaded book cover photos rather than uploading your own. Voting system for picking the default one coming soon!

Huge feature; now you can add custom book covers to books. Your custom covers will be visible to everyone else too. <3

Now the site defaults to a "hot" view using the reddit hot algo. You can also now see the top 40 books referenced in the site throughout shelves, reviews, and lists in the salon removing the editor's pick for now.

Now focusing on: reordering books in list. Anything else you'd like prioritized? (except DM feature, I am already working on it). A neat feature would be able to "bump" a review or a list (X times a month, etc), so it goes to the most recent.

Added pagination ❤️ site is probably going to be a lot faster now with growing content

Quotes feature is launched! You go to a book page, then you can submit a quote. Users can like and comment on it. Cheers <3

Hi, the quotes features is almost done, but realistically I don't think I can push this out today. Way too burnt out. Apologies. Will likely launch this tomorrow <3

Going to start allowing users to edit book metadata (covers, description, etc). What about a book would you like to be able to edit?

Huge update: Now you can reply to comments in nested fashion!

Now you can have 4 "favorite books" like letterboxd <3. You can also dislike books now.

Now threads are clickable + have links. Thread notifications will also take you to the actual thread <3

You can now create “private” lists that can only be accessed by URL. Like youtube unlisted vids ❤️. You can also edit salon threads now.

The site now fetches books from Open Library on the client, rather than the server. This should be a massive performance boost.

You can now add a spotify song to your shelf ❤️

Check out the new landing page! No more shoddy screenshots, acts as a pseudo-explore page now.

A humble plea: if you love the app, please do tell your friends or post about it (if you don’t find it cringe). Thank you so much ❤️

Site is finally fast. Fixed Next JS data caching. Please let me know if you notice stale data issues. ❤️

Writers thread: how could we introduce original writing features into the site? Any good ideas? Any pitfalls?

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What are some of your favorite TLP (the last psychiatrist) posts?