In my day, we worked for tuppence down t'pit

My 9-year old son finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince inside 5 days (the speed-reading little so-and-so).

This afternoon the book was his first entry on Storycode. I goaded him into it mainly because we need the help here, but also because no-one is hiring chimney sweeps these days.

I gave him his own profile (just in case he wanted to do more), found the right entry and left him to it. The only problem he really had was with the question: "How erotic is the story?" (He's well-read, but not *that* well-read.)

His impression of the system was as follows:

"It's rather easy, but there should be a kid-friendly version. There were some questions I only just understood."

And what did he make of the recommendations after four codings of the story? (His was the fourth.)

Well, it included all of the other Harry Potter books and His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, which he has already read and enjoyed, but it also coughed up Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, which also happened to pop up last week when I first showed him the site and we poked around some of his favourite titles.

Ender's Game is now on the shopping list.

Tim Ireland

Coding Bug Fixed

You will be pleased to know that the bug identified below has been fixed. We have tested the coding process again and it is working fine for us. If you have any problems, please Email Feedback so that we can look into it further.

Thank you for your patience. And please come back and code some more.

Steve Johnston

We've just become aware that a bug has been intefering with the coding process on both the UK and US sites. The experience is particularly frustrating because you lovely people are getting all the way to the fifth and last stage of a creating a StoryCode, only to have the code rejected. This is then compounded by the fact that we don't allow you to revist the previous pages of a particular code, so that two entries for one question cannot be accidentaly entered.

Please don't be discouraged, we will fix the problem and will let you know when it is fixed, here, on the blog.

Animal Farm meets A Christmas Carol

Welcome to the StoryCode Blog.

Hopefully you've had a chance to look through the site and explore some of the recommendations. Despite the testing we did on the site before it went live, nothing could prepare us for the reality of hundreds of readers populating the StoryCodes and seeing this thing we have created come alive.

This blog will hopefully add a little context to our journey with you as the usefulness of StoryCode unfolds. We suspect there are many surprises in store.

One of the early surprises has been the consistency of the matching between two classics of English literature; A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and Animal Farm by George Orwell. So surprising in fact that we did wonder at first whether something was broken. It had been a while since any of the StoryCode team had read either book, so I set off to read them both in quick succession. This proved not to be too onerous as they are very short novels and the outcome was most gratifying from the point of view of StoryCode doing its job.

What I found was two dark, intense, against-the-odds (one good - one bad) fantasies with fully resolved endings, highly moral messages and featuring highly believable characters - okay some were animals - in everyday settings (these are the kinds of questions our coding process asks readers about the stories they have read).

Reading the two in quick succession over about four hours, I was not at all struck by any superficial similarities, and therein lies our previous disquiet about these two maintaining their 85% match, but the underlying fantastic morality tale in each become pretty clear.

What StoryCode has managed to extract and hightlight is that both are moral fables and this is their fundamental essence as stories.

Should someone looking for a similar experience be satisfied by this? The key is in the word 'experience'. The endings are profoundly different, Animal Farm tragic; A Christmas Carol hopeful - hope that didn't spoil things for you. So on a superficial level, no the reader won't get a similar ending. So don't expect simplistic recommendations from StoryCode. The crux of this particular match is that based on the StoryCode these stories are fundamentally similar, which makes the recommendation robust. Will you 'love' Animal Farm after reading A Christmas Carol? Now that is hard to say :-)

On a personal level, I delighted in A Christmas Carol, all my preconceptions dispelled whilst Animal Farm's political morality is simply too obvious - for a mature audience - with the benefit of historical hindsight, but its ingenuity and the unfolding resolution was truly troubling. Both experiences were stimulating and both prompt me to read more by each author. StoryCode has definitely worked for me on this occasion.

Steve Johnston