BookTour Blog

Features Update 6/30/07

Continuing with yesterday's theme, today brings a bunch of new features that make it easier to sign up.

First up, the author form has been revised to include a "More info" link, which explains our policy on author signups. It's also now possible to enter multiple ISBN numbers when signing up. (If one ISBN is mis-entered but the rest are fine, the form remembers the valid ones.) If there are several things wrong with your signup form, the site now always shows them all at once. Finally, authors don't have to click an activation link in their email before they can start adding events to the site.

Also new today is the fact that a publicist designation actually means something. If you sign up as a publicist (and authors have designated you their contact), you can see a list of all your authors on your Profile page, with links to edit their tour dates. Moreover, if you're a publicist, you can now add authors to the site. Just go to your Profile page and click the link on the bottom. Once you've added the author, just click the edit link to add their tour dates. (All publicists on the site already have been automatically granted this ability.)

A few features have also been re-added after a brief hiatus:
• Clicking on a button to sign up as an author now brings you to the author signup form, rather than the generic signup form.
• When an author signs up and specifies a publicist address, the link in the publicist's email now points to a page with the publicist's email address already filled in.

Features Update 6/29/07

(TypePad was down last night when I wanted to post this, so here it is.)

Today was the start of a major rewrite of the signup form. New feaures include:
• Persistence. In other words, if there's something invalid with your signup form, all the fields (except the ones that were invalid, and the password fields) stay filled in so you don't have to re-enter your information. In addition, the form automatically redirects you to the right type of form, so if you mis-filled out a book group sign-up form, you'll now go back to a book group sign up form.
• Specific feedback for what's wrong. Rather than a generic error message, you now get a human-readable listing of all the parts of your signup form that were invalid. In addition, the fields that need correcting get highlighted in red.
• Spacing issues have been fixed.
• Display incompatibilities with Internet Explorer for Windows have been fixed.
• A bug that wouldn't automatically log in upon signing up has been fixed.
• A bug that would indicate the form was mis-entered but still create an entry for the author in the database has been fixed.
• The publicist email address field can now be left blank. If it is, the author will be assumed to be their own publicist. (Previously, the author had to re-enter their own email address if they wanted this assumption honored.)

Features Update 6/28/07

Today's updates are all behind the scenes. The site now caches author pages, making them load much faster for all but the first person to see them (and the same speed as before for that person). In addition, the site can now handle more simultaneous connections.

Two other things:
• A security flaw that could have allowed any user to delete an author's profile has been fixed. Nobody ever used the exploit.
• A bug that sometimes prevented authors from editing their pages after changing their names has been fixed.

Features Update 6/27/07

New today:
• A bug that prevented a few users from logging in has been fixed.
• Author biographies now wrap around their headshots.
• Spacing issues on the front page have been fixed.
• The front page now has a "featured author" section. Check back every day or two to see who's featured.

Features Update 6/26/07

Daily update:
• A bug that made some events from the Excel spreadsheet incorrectly show up as beginning at midnight has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented the editing of some existing events has been fixed.
• A bug that essentially prevented the creation of virtual events has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented existing virtual events from showing up has been fixed.
• Virtual events can now have names. The name becomes the link to the virtual event URL on the author's page.
• Events are now sorted by date on the author-editing page.

Features Update 6/25/07

Today's updates:
• A bug that prevented about half a dozen readers from logging in has been fixed.
• The "logged in successfully" message has been eliminated.
• Spacing has been fixed on authors' pages.
• A bug that prevented authors from adding events if they used Internet Explorer for Windows has been fixed.
• A bug that created links to new press releases when an author tried to edit an event has been fixed.
• When editing items on an author page, there is no longer a delay in forms appearing. This should make adding new events noticeably snappier for authors.

Features Update 6/24/07

Today's news is that a hugely annoying bug that prevented venue pages from displaying has been fixed.

Features Update 6/23/07

Two new:
• The upload spreadsheet for new events has been updated with new instructions. Your old forms will continue to work.
• The caption on the upload-headshot form for authors has been updated to reflect which types of image files work best.

Features Update 6/22/07

Today's new feature has been a long time coming (well, a few weeks at least), but it's been our #1 request. So by popular demand:
• It is now possible to batch-upload events to BookTour! It doesn't matter whether you're a bookstore, library, club, author, publicist, or publisher. At the bottom of any BookTour page, just click "Add events to BookTour", and follow the directions in the spreadsheet.

Features Update 6/21/07

Lots of news today:
• If a club or organization provides their homepage address, their BookTour page now links to that address.
• If an organization provides their physical address and events are taking place there, those events now show up on the organization's BookTour page. A map is also displayed on the page.
• Spacing issues have been fixed on a number of venue-related pages.
• A bug that prevented authors from adding new virtual events has been fixed.
• When entering URLs into the site, "http://" is automatically prepended. This fixes a bug that prevented some external links on the site from working. The change was applied retroactively.
• When logging in, an option to "remember me" is now available (and on by default).