BookTour Blog

The Mash...

BookTour.com has been at the center of two Mashes (neither Monster nor Potato but who's counting?) these past weeks and we couldn't be happier.

First up, Mashable featured us on Aug 20th and had a few nice things to say about our Google Earth feature and several of our newer wingdings.

Three days later, we win Mashup of the Day.

Life is sweet. Like mashed candy.

Feature Update 8/26/07

New today:
• During Place searches, pages now indicate how many results there are and how far through the results you are.
• The Stories section has received a new design.
• BookTour stories now automatically show up on author pages.

Feature Update 8/26/07

New recently:
• A bug that briefly prevented the Stories page from appearing has been fixed.
• The Stories page (http://booktour.com/stories) has been changed to add a New Stories section to the right side.
• The size of text on individual story pages has been increased.
• Disambiguation pages have been added to the site. If more than one author has the same name, their URL will now redirect to a page that lets you choose which one you want to examine. You can also report duplicates from the disambiguation page.

Feature Update 8/21/07

New today:
• A bug that allowed some incorrect postal codes to sign up has been fixed.
• The Master feature list now loads faster.
• There's a new section of the site devoted to stories about book tours: http://booktour.com/stories. If you're an author, just go to your author-editing page to add a story. Anyone can vote on stories, too; on a story's page, just click the "liked" or "disliked" link at the bottom of the page.

Feature Update 8/19/07

New recently:
• A bug that prevented some users' Profile pages from appearing has been fixed.
• The search feature has been partially re-written. Author and Book searches should be moderately faster.
• The algorithm that picks the top six authors for the front page (and sub-front pages) has been tweaked to mix authors more.
• The title of venue pages has been adjusted to differentiate more clearly between stores of the same name.

Feature Update 8/15/07

New today:
• It's no longer possible for a non-logged in user to see no events if their IP address can't be matched to a physical location.
• All Prometheus' authors' tour dates have been added.
• A new widget is available that mirrors the list of authors on the front page. Click the
• The Master List page is now much easier to navigate, with a list of features on the left.

Feature Update 8/14/07

New today:
• The ugly borders around widgets have been eliminated. Finally, they look respectable on sites with non-white backgrounds!
• All upcoming Borders events have been added.

Feature Update 8/13/07

The past few days have brought these improvements:
• The nearby events listings on the front page load faster.
• The front page (and sub-front pages) load faster.
• The FAQ has been updated.
• The wording of author request emails has been changed to indicate that it's possible to get in touch with the requester by replying.
• A bug that briefly prevented authors from adding books has been fixed.

Feature Update 8/8/07

New today:
• A bug that caused about 10 minutes worth of downtime (and error pages) related to our genre back-end transition has been fixed.
• The Business subsection now includes a broader cross-section of business authors.
• The front page now loads faster.

Feature Update 8/7/07

Today brings a complete rewrite of the site's book genre back-end (again). As a result, the following features are now faster:
• The homepage (or RSS feed) for subcategories (approx. 10x speed improvement)
• The Library page and pages linked to from it (approx. 3x speed improvement)
• Author pages that include category listings (approx 20% speed improvement)
The rewrite also makes future speed improvements much easier.