BookTour Blog

Feature Update 7/23/08

Over the past few weeks we've migrated our entire server setup to new web services (Amazon S3 and EC2). In general, you'll find the site to be much faster, although you shouldn't notice too much difference. That is, except for the new features and bug fixes we've made, including:
• You can now find authors who are based in your area right on the front page.
• The front page now loads all at once; sub-front pages are now entirely customized for their genre. Additionally, short descriptions accompany each feature on the front page.
• Venue search has been sped up, and now only shows venues with upcoming events.
• It's now possible to access venue pages without the "/show" section. For instance, http://booktour.com/places/show/13709-Sawyer-Free-Library and http://booktour.com/places/13709-Sawyer-Free-Library are identical.
• The boxes that float on top of faded-out BookTour pages (e.g. from clicking the More Stores link on an author's page) have been redone from scratch. Not only do they now work properly in Internet Explorer (finally!), but because there's no fade-out animation, they appear instantly.
• A bug that caused new author widgets to not display in Internet Explorer 6 has been fixed.
• A bug that caused a few authors' RSS feeds to return error pages has been fixed.
• A bug that caused custom widget pages to update incorrectly has been fixed.
• A bug that didn't redirect correctly to the custom search page has been fixed.
• A bug that broke iCalendar feeds has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented about 1% of users from seeing the front page has been fixed.
• A bug that made pins' shadows appear without the pins themselves on place search result pages has been fixed.
• A bug that briefly caused search results to fail has been fixed.
• A broken link on the master feature list page has been fixed.

Feature Update 7/5/08

The past few days have brought the following improvements:
• There have been substantial speedups to author and venue pages.
• A bug that caused some users to see an error page when they clicked the "More" link in the lower-right of the front page has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented about 0.5% of event pages from loading correctly has been fixed.
• A bug that caused a few disambiguation pages to be formatted incorrectly has been fixed.
• A bug that caused new-style author widgets to have a small gap between the last event and the bottom of the widget (when loaded in certain browsers and when there was only a small number of events in the widget) has been fixed.

Feature Update 7/2/08

New today:
• You no longer have to know HTML color codes to customize author widgets. On any author widget page, select Custom from the pop-up menu, and then click a text box to change the corresponding color.
• A bug that caused some people's browsers to crash (!) when loading the event-adding page has been fixed.

Feature Update 7/1/08

The major feature news is a totally revised version of author widgets. Here are the improvements we've made:
• Author widgets now expand vertically to fit the number of events they're showing, so they're never too tall (wasting space) or too short (cutting off important events)
• You can customize the number of events your widget shows
• You can customize the width of author widgets so they fit properly on your webpage
• The unseemly white border and the lines between events are now gone on author widgets
• Your widget's color scheme is now totally customizable; you can choose from classic and modern styles, or change the colors entirely to make the widget blend in even better with your webpage (a much-requested feature)
• You can preview the appearance of your widget right on our new widget-design page, and see how tweaks you make affect the widget's appearance in real time
• Author widget data is now totally synchronized with author RSS feed data, so it doesn't matter which format you use to get your BookTour events on your own website
• Widgets load faster than ever

To take advantage of these new features, just visit the page for the authors whose widget you want and click "Follow this author on my website."

Old widgets will continue to work, but won't have any of these new features. Give the new widget a try today!

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.

Adding Events for Anyone

By popular request, it's now popular to add events for any author you know about. No need to rely on spreadsheets, authors, or their publicists—add the event yourself and it'll show up on the site instantly!

The place to go is http://booktour.com/events/add.

Poetry Section Now Online

For all poetry fans: now there's a section of BookTour just for you! Be sure to bookmark http://booktour.com/poetry.