I just had an epiphany in Site Updates

Epiphany is a great word, isn't it? OK, so I've been struggling with the idea of bookmarking. As I see people breaking out their writing into several different books, it becomes more obvious that hunting around for each book you want to follow isn't a great idea. I've probably already mentioned the idea of bookmarking an author, but I wasn't sure how that would work with the bookmarks on individual books. Would there be some complicated formula to decide what to do if a user is bookmarked but a book the user has isn't?

And then it came to me, what I think is an elegant solution:

You simply bookmark a user. Bam! You've bookmarked all books that user has and any future books he/she creates. No guesswork whether or not the user has created any books since you bookmarked them.

Now that the person is bookmarked, you see entries popping up in your bookmarks devoted entirely to poetry about snakes. In fact, the book they are in is called "Poems about Snakes." And you hate snakes. You don't think snakes are worthy of poetry, and you don't want to read it.

Since you have a user bookmarked, you now have the option to exclude individual books that you don't care for. Sweet! You'll never miss a new book by an author you normally enjoy, but still have that added control.

So that's the future direction I'm taking on bookmarking. I'll also include it on the entry view itself so it's really easy to see what you have bookmarked or to add new things.

Groovy.