Monday 9 January 2012

New multibook widget up and running

The new rotator (multibook widget) engine has been up and running for half an hour now. We've checked it everywhere we know it is live, and it seems to be running properly. If you have any problems please let us know. While there is one remaining piece of additional functionality to add, the new engine provides enough improvements that we thought it would be useful to roll it out now.

This contains fixes for
- The "two books or less" bug
- Special characters, which were removing spaces from some titles resulting in one long, single, word.
- Control characters in descriptions.

Two very specific bugs reported by a user whose custom-built site was entirely javascript generated:
- The flicker bug, where the system would occassionally load on the second book and then jump to the first when a button was pressed.
- An overwrite bug where javascript on some pages made the iframe reload the Smashwords page instead of it appearing in a new window.

System Improvements
- Uses the new RSS feed
- A slight performance boost
- More robust

The additional functionality we want to add is to do with Ratings, which should display stars instead of a number. This is being worked on today, together with a few cosmetic tweaks.

My apologies if anyone who viewed widgets during the switch saw the default feed (for less than a second according to the server). This is a failsafe feature if the engine breaks or the feed goes down to make sure the widget still loads without breaking or causing security issues on the site displaying it. It would have shown while the engine switched over and re-cached.

And thanks to the users who gave feedback. We can't fix these issues if we don't know about them.

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