We’re having a little bit of a problem with the site, nothing to be alarmed about, except that it will keep everyone out for a few minutes. Naturally it happened at the worst possible time. Monday morning at 3 AM would have been so much more convenient.
Any minute we’ll be back up and running, so stay tuned.
We’ve added an RSS feed for the Catalog so you can keep track of new work we drop in. Not familiar with feeds? Just click the RSS icon pictured here (at the top of most BG pages), and the browser will let you add it to your feeds.
If you’re waiting for a particular book, or if you’re watching to see what other users upload (we should have the upload tool back in business soon), you’ll see it in your feeds. Rock on.
BookGlutton has opened up the Beta. Now anyone can come on in and check it out (please do, and feel free to invite 5000 of your closest friends). We’re ready to get this thing going!
This savvy little highlight box is here to give you a snapshot of your account and a peek at what’s been going on since you last logged in. It’s going live on the homepage later today.
We’re about to begin importing a whole slew of books with images, folks! Keep an eye out for flashier-looking titles like the fine example above.
One caveat – the Upload Tool is going to take some time catching up, so for a while user uploads will remain text-only.
At any rate, these tasty little visuals should make it into the catalog in the next week.
It’s always exciting to hear what people think about BookGlutton, so imagine how completely stoked we were to see the video from BookGlutton User Barb Forsberg. She put this presentation on BookGlutton together for a group of teachers and was kind enough to send us a copy to post on the blog.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvGyhDpzYUA%5DBarb gives a good overview of the site and the Reader, talks about how to address any “book glutton” cravings, and talks about how its 2.0 community features can engage reluctant readers. It’s also funny. What a great way to start out the year.
Some of you using the “Remember Me” button on login may have had some problems with the Reader’s Talk feature. Come back and chat – we’ve happily resolved this one (and believe me, it was a real bugger to figure out where that was coming from)! While we were at it we did a little Reader optimization, so it should pages load faster, as well.
We’ve added some additional information to the BookGlutton homepage to help people connect. Under a new section called RECENT ACTIVITY you can see what people have been reading, what groups have been recently formed, and what books have just had annotations added. As people log in these lists are updated on the fly, so you have the latest info at your fingertips.
Today we pushed our new Support Forums live – you can find them under the “Support” link in the top nav on bookglutton.com. Support Forums let other users participate in your questions and offer their own advice. Forums are also another way to tell us what you think (particularly in the “Features and Book Requests” section).
We’ve been spicing up the Talk Panel over the last two weeks. Today we pushed profile information into the Reader. What this means: now your image and user name will show up whenever you find yourself chatting in the Talk Panel. Now you have another reason to fill in your profile information! A posting will announce your presence when you show up, to boot.
Also – a quick note to those intrepid readers that have been using the Talk Panel in a group setting but seen some problems: we’ve tweaked the code considerably and have hopefully fixed any problems you might have been having in the past. Keep us updated if you see more problems (of course, we’re hoping you don’t have any!).
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