I've rewritten the recent books feature, so it now works again, and is completely Twitter-free. I've done it in a very visual style, with cover art and a variety of fonts. Hopefully more people will like what I've done with the "look" of "recent books" than those who dislike it!

Take a look at it at:
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent

You can also search inside the recent books, for any text that appears on the page, and only books that match all your conditions will be displayed.

For example, if you search for "romance united states":
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent?search=romance+united+states

you'll only get books that mention "romance" that also mention "united states".

The "search" feature is really useful if you only want to see books that are in your country.

The "recent books" page automatically refreshes every minute. You might have a slight screen blink when the page refreshes: in a later iteration of the feature, I'll fix that.

A few things to note:

1) any book that is added that is on someone's wishlist is not displayed in "recent books" until the wishlist members have received their email notification. This is so that existing members, who have built up their wishlists, have precedence.

2) any book that is not on any wishlist, is displayed right away on "recent books". This could potentially be a problem if someone adds a lot of books and doesn't realize how many mooches they'll get, but I feel that negative is balanced off by the quick mooching of books you've added to your inventory, so that while you're still using the BM web site, the pending mooches start coming in.

3) any books that are mooched, or removed from inventory, are automatically removed from the "recent books" feed. Only moochable books are displayed.

4) the country where the book is located is displayed on "recent books". However, this doesn't necessarily mean that this person will send to you. I *could* change this, and only display moochable-by-you books. It's a bit of work on my part, but it would be useful, so I'm thinking of it.

5) I know that people asked for RSS feeds, and I'll be adding that feature shortly. I also need to update the API for this new feature (the recent books API call is currently not working).

6) The page looks best in a recent web browser that can accept custom fonts. It does work with IE6 and IE8, but it doesn't look as nice.

7) the cover art is "retina display" compatible, so if you use a high resolution tablet, laptop or phone, the cover art will look stunning, even as you zoom in on the page.

8) I'm going to see what I can do to have more books display cover art.

I think that's all I have to report for now... let me know your thoughts!

-john

Warm Regards,

Mike Bemis

I already see several tempting things on it . . .

4) on the "only moochable by you" feature: I would rather not have that, because it would deprive me of the opportunity to see books that I might be interested in and find an angel to mooch for me and send on.
As I am in Germany, and a lot of moochers from the US are set to "only in my country", I and a lot of international moochers would not get to see most of the newly added books then.
IMHO, that would be a pity!

(might be an idea if you could make that feature optional, but I do not know whether that is at all feasible, and I suspect it would take quite a bit of time)

@Gil & mark tennant: /my continent only: for Germans, at least, international postage is the same for all countries, so I do not think that would be a good idea. I will just as gladly send to Australia or Japan as i will to the UK or Israel.