BookTour Blog

Feature Update 6/12/08

Major new in the past few days:
• You can now email any event on the site to a friend using the "Email to a friend" feature under the event on an author's page. The feature works whether you're logged in or not (although if you're logged in there's one less field to fill in).
• A preliminary version of predictive searching is now present in all search boxes. Type in a few letters of most authors' names, and you'll see a list of the authors that match.
• The Advanced Search and Custom RSS features have now been integrated into a single feature at http://booktour.com/events/custom_feed. In addition, after performing a search, it is possible to preserve the parameters of that search as an RSS feed by clicking the RSS icon in your browser's address bar on the search result page. Moreover, Advanced Search URLs are now copyable, so if there's a search you want to return to in the future you can simply bookmark it.
• Genre support now permeates virtually every section of the site. The final major revision to achieve this was making the More button for "Authors currently touring everywhere" link to more results for just that genre. Additionally, whenever you're in a section specific to a genre, the genre's name will appear under the BookTour logo (a feature previously restricted to sub-homepages like http://booktour.com/scifi).

And some minor updates:
• Featured authors now exist in all genres
• It is now possible to open "in your area" author links from the front page in new tabs. Previously the way rollovers were implemented prevented pages from opening in new tabs.
• A bug in the title of some RSS feeds has been fixed.
• A spacing bug on the More results page for "Currently in your area" events has been fixed.

Feature Update 6/9/08

New in the past few days:
• Clicking the More link for the "Currently in your area" section now links to an interactive map page with more events. The page automatically loads the genre you're currently exploring; for example, more nearby Mystery events can be found at http://booktour.com/readers/more_events/Mystery.
• In the "Currently in your area" section on genre pages (and the More Events pages described above), events are now split up by how soon in the future they're happening.
• The More link on genre pages described above now appears even for users who are not logged in.
• Links that were broken in some RSS feeds have now been fixed.
• The Home page now links to a fully functional RSS feed.
• A bug that caused clicking the Profile link in the body of the New Ways to Find Events page to redirect to an error page for non-logged-users has been fixed.
• The New Ways to Find Events page has been entirely redesigned.

Feature Update 6/5/08

New features:
• The "Featured author" now blends in more nicely to the main listing.
• The "Currently in your area" and "Authors touring everywhere" columns have been flipped (stay tuned).
• Mousing over one of the rows in the "Currently in your area" listing displays the next event in your area.
• After signing up, the site now redirects you back to the page you were at before you were asked to sign up. (This now works for both signing up and logging in, so there are no "lazy" redirects to the homepage anymore.)

Feature Update 6/4/08

Lots of new features recently:
• Google Earth View updates more frequently. See all upcoming BookTour events on the globe here!
• A bug that caused some dates to incorrectly show up as "tomorrow" has been fixed.
• New genre pages have been added for food, science, and science fiction.
• The "More" link on the front page for nearby events now lists even more events, and displays how many there are.
• Author page loading is now faster.
• The "currently in your area" section now displays cover images for books.
• On genre pages, the "currently in your area" section now only displays authors in that genre who are in your area.
• After logging in, the site now redirects you back to the last page you visited, rather than the homepage.