Friday, July 27, 2007

Who's that blogging about me?


We just added a feature to our JacketFlap profile pages that I like quite a bit. You will notice a new "Recent Blog Posts" box in the right-side of every JacketFlap profile page. It lists the 10 most recent blog posts from the kitlitosphere mentioning the person whose profile you are viewing.

On the right you'll see an example of the Recent Blog Posts box from my JacketFlap profile page. It takes a few seconds to search through the 100,000+ posts archived in our reader, and you'll see a cute little wheel spinning until the box loads. You can then click on the titles of the posts to read any that interest you.

Let me know what you think here in the comments!

Tracy

Friday, July 20, 2007

new JacketFlap Blogs List Page

Hi everyone! We've just released a major change to our Blogs list page that should make it much easier to explore the 475+ blogs in the public JacketFlap blog reader. Previously, the Blogs list page was a single long list of all of our blogs. Given the great response we had to our experimental "New Blogs on JacketFlap" emails, we've updated our Blogs list page to make it easy to sort and filter the list of blogs to find blogs that might interest you.

With this new release, you can check the new Blogs list page a few times a week. There you can now sort and filter the list of blogs on JacketFlap. Each blog listing comes complete with a short descriptions of the blog, a count of the number of JacketFlap members subscribing to that blog in their custom My JacketFlap Blog Reader, a list of the blog's categories, and an Add Link that you can use to Subscribe to the blog. You can choose how many blogs to display on each page of the list using the "# per page" pull-down menu:


Sorting

You can sort the Blogs list using the "Sort by" pull-down menu. The list can be sorted by Blog Name, Date Added, and # of Subscribers. You can use the Date Added sort to find blogs recently added to JacketFlap. Or you can use the # of Subscribers sort to find the blogs most subscribed to by JacketFlap's members.


Filtering

Another nice feature is the ability to filter the Blogs list by Category. For example, you can see just the Illustrator blogs changing the value in the "Category" pull-down menu. You can also combine sorting and filtering. So, for example, you can display the Illustrator blogs sorted by Date Added to find the most recent Illustrator blogs added to JacketFlap. Or, you could sort by # of Subscribers (as in the example to the right) to see the most popular Illustrator blogs.


Newly Added List and Top 10 Blogs Boxes

In the left-hand column of the Blogs list page, you'll see two new boxes that display lists of the Top 10 Blogs based on the # of Subscribers on JacketFlap and a list of Blogs added to JacketFlap in the past 7 Days.

I know, you're wondering, how do I get my blog in the Top 10? Besides having great content, our stats indicate that it doesn't hurt to have a Subscribe to this Blog on JacketFlap button displayed on your blog.


Please try out these new features & let us know any thoughts using the comments feature here on our blog. Following is a link to our Blogs list page:

http://www.jacketflap.com/megablog/myfeeds.asp

Tracy

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

New Publisher Detail page features

Hi everyone! We've just released a major change to our Publisher Detail page that should make it much easier to explore the catalog of titles for each publisher. Previously, the Publisher Detail page listed only the top 50 titles for each publisher. With this new release, you can now page through all of a publisher's titles. Here's an example screen shot from the Bloomsbury Publisher Detail page. As you can see, you can now navigate through pages of titles, and you can choose how many titles to display on each page using the "# per page" pull-down menu:


Sorting

You can also sort the list in new ways using the "Sort by" pull-down menu. Previously, we only displayed the list sorted by Amazon.com's Salesrank (tm). Now, you can sort the list by Publication date, Salesrank, and Alphabetical titles.

Future Titles

It's always interesting to see what titles are soon-to-be-published. JacketFlap now provides this feature for each publisher in our database. To see a publisher's upcoming releases, select "Future Titles" in the Sort by pull-down menu.

Filtering

Another new feature is the ability to filter the list of a publisher's titles by reading level. For example, you can see just the titles for Ages 4 - 8 by changing the value in the "Ages" pull-down menu. You can also combine sorting and filtering. So, for example, you can display the Ages 4 - 8 titles sorted by publication date.

Please try out these new features & let us know any thoughts using the comments feature here on our blog. Following is an example URL for Bloomsbury. Scroll down to the list of titles to try out the new features:

http://www.jacketflap.com/pubdetail.asp?pub=392

Tracy