I've recently started working on rebuilding the bookcase generator (which is now online, mostly). It still has some minor bugs, but before I start addressing those I'd like some feedback on the general interface and design. Does the interface make sense, what do you think is good, and what needs to be improved (and how would you do it)?
Note that you need to register/login first, the new bookcase (and other related features) are only accessible to users.

Link

The first mayor improvement so far, is that the user lists are now cached locally. This gives me more freedom in sorting and doing nifty things "on-demand" with next to no delays... That is, when you are logged in on the site. I also read and store user progress from 'reading' lists, but since most users will probably only use the chapter counter (I'm one of them) I'm not sure if I'll be able to actually use it (volumes and chapters are two seperate counters). Maybe something to put on the ToDo list, MangaUpdates?

I still depend on users having set their lists to "public", not really a way around that (aside from export/import, which has its own set of challenges).
Adding an "identity" to your account still takes a few seconds, I should probably do something with javascript to indicate what it's doing... but for now please wait until it's completed.

For now, the bookcase supports the three most popular manga databases (MangaUpdates, MyAnimeList, and AnimeNewsNetwork)... But current design allows me to easily add more sources if required (and if they are viable: public access and scrapable).

Current "bugs":

• Displays all known spine covers for requested volume, should only display one.
  How to determine which one to show by default, and/or where and how to change this?
  If there is both a tanko and a bunko for a specific series, and tanko (default) misses vol 2 cover, should a placeholder be displayed, or the bunko cover?

• Placeholders are currently not generated, doing this slows down bookcase generation immensely (could be improved with caching, but this would require quite a bit of work).
  Do I need to try and bring this feature back?

• Volume height is static, meaning all volumes have the same height.
  Anyone know of a way to fix this to be more dynamic and "realistic". I have volume dimensions from amazon for a large part of the database, and the rest can pretty much be guessed from image ratio/other covers in the same series... This would likely require some knowledge of PHP and some CSS ingenuity. Note that I've already divided the list of volumes into shelves at code level so that I can generate a shelf as a single image if necessary (also allowing me to know exactly how many shelves and therefore pages there are).

• Since I don't store any covers for Doujinshi and Oneshots, numbers on the user page can be misleading.
  A list can contain i.e. 4000 entries, but if half of those are oneshots, I'd prefer displaying 2000 instead (makes more sense when calculating how much of that list is in the database)... Aside from scraping every single item on the list (which I'm not going to do), not solvable for now.

I prefer to not make use of javascript for "critical" parts of the website, everything should work with javascript disabled.

How do you add to one's bookcase?

http://eofusion.googlepages.com
http://360.yahoo.com/axisofoddity
http://axisofoddity.googlepages.com/

Quote from Axis

How do you add to one's bookcase?

At the moment, just click on refresh at your user page, it will reload all public lists for the given profile.

Sadly, it's not yet possible to add/remove directly on MCD (It's planned, but lacking a solid design it could take awhile).