Another site update on Sharing Books has gone out, and some users may have had a minor interruption of service around 9:30am PST. This update brings the following things to the Sharing Books website:

• Cleaner, quicker, and in theory more accurate search using quick search and advanced searching features on the site.
• Some improvements to some backend processes.
• For our Volunteer Librarians your navigation should now cease it's magical disappearing act.
• New and improved buttons for us administrators of the site to download your book and text versions of your book without having to download from the frontend of the site or the DB directly!

Not the most exciting of updates I know, but these changes do let us get into a cleaner, quicker workflow on administration of the site. That means our book creators should be getting faster turnaround times for ISBNs and the like. It also means we can start moving faster with anyone we strategically partner with, getting them content in a much more timely manner.

Labels: new features, news, site outages, site upgrades

Just a heads up to everyone, there has been an update to the site this morning. You may have noticed that there was a brief interruption of the site around 9:00am PST. The following things were fixed/addressed:

• at some point in the past users were able to upload books without the nessesary text version of their books. This has been corrected and all future books will require a .txt or .doc or .docx version of the book in addition to the pdf.
• some administrative tools on the back end were updated, letting us track things a bit easier.
• ISBNs will now carry forward when you edit your book, meaning if you make an update or a change there will no longer be a lag time between approval and ISBNs being applied. The donation page at the back of your books will still have a lag period, unfortunately.
• Advanced Search was cleaned up a bit and should be giving better search results. Quick Search still is having issues for the moment, and may not return 100% accurate results.
  

As usual if you find any bugs or problems please report them so we can track down issues and clean them up.

Labels: development, site outages, site upgrades

Just a notice to everyone on the site we have made some physical location changes to our database that runs the back end for most of the site. There was a brief interruption of site service this morning while that happened. You should not see any major change in site performance, but if you do, or if you find something broken, please send a bug report or email.

Labels: site outages, site upgrades

Some of our users may have noticed two brief times where the site was down for maintenance today. Hopefully it did not freak anyone out too much! While the site was shut down for maintenance we did some upgrades to our database, our administrative back end, and added one new feature to the website.

On the book details page for each book you can now see how many times your book has been downloaded, giving you an idea of how popular your book is, and giving you some numbers and goals to shoot for! For those looking to get ahead of the pack in the current contests, you can poke about and get an idea of who is leading the pack. This number shows the total downloads over the lifetime of the book.

I'll gloss over the database stuff, since it is really just changes to let the download totals work on the site. The back end features let us track downloads over a period of time, so we can get an idea of book popularity over a given time frame, not just the lifetime of the book.

Labels: features, news, site upgrades