This is a small extension I made to combine my love of Hacker News book recommendation threads and hate of Goodreads community reviews.
It uses the Algolia search API to find comments that match the title and author of a book page on Goodreads. Initially I wanted to use ISBN numbers but there are too many comments mentioning books on HN that don't use the ISBN number and for some reason Amazon links are rarely indexed without truncation by Algolia, which means the end bit of a long Amazon url that contains the ISBN isn't searchable.
The hardest part of this extension was figuring out how people write book titles. For instance, most people don't seem to write out full book titles rather they write out the title minus any subtitles. Because of this, if you search for the exact Goodreads title on Hacker news you won't find that many comments, and what turns out to work much better is searching for books without any subtitles.
Also worth mentioning that this is similar to https://hackernewsbooks.com/ (which I enjoy a lot) except instead of seeing HN's favorite books you see all opinions good and bad, and you can also see them directly in Goodreads.
You can download it for Chrome [1] or Firefox [2] or see the source code on Github [3].
I actually hadn't planned on releasing the extension for Safari but I'll definitely look into it. If Safari supports the Browser Extension API it should be trivial to port.
3 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] threadIt uses the Algolia search API to find comments that match the title and author of a book page on Goodreads. Initially I wanted to use ISBN numbers but there are too many comments mentioning books on HN that don't use the ISBN number and for some reason Amazon links are rarely indexed without truncation by Algolia, which means the end bit of a long Amazon url that contains the ISBN isn't searchable.
The hardest part of this extension was figuring out how people write book titles. For instance, most people don't seem to write out full book titles rather they write out the title minus any subtitles. Because of this, if you search for the exact Goodreads title on Hacker news you won't find that many comments, and what turns out to work much better is searching for books without any subtitles.
Also worth mentioning that this is similar to https://hackernewsbooks.com/ (which I enjoy a lot) except instead of seeing HN's favorite books you see all opinions good and bad, and you can also see them directly in Goodreads.
You can download it for Chrome [1] or Firefox [2] or see the source code on Github [3].
Hope you like it :)
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ohkekgnmihdgcfflhe...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-reads-...
[3] https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads