The Minisite books page now has working lookup links to Diesel and Amazon.
There are also links for print and audiobook, which currently go back to the Smashwords page (as print and audio books can belinked from the book page there). These are still in early stages but it does expand visitors' purchase options slightly.
The author search for Diesel is harder to implement due to the way they format author names, so Diesel links on the author and all books pages will take longer to be added.
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Javascript Widget and a general update
The first reminders to migrate widgets went out last week. This is a quick reminder that the old widgets will be turned off at the end of March, so please make sure you have switched by then.
In other news, we may have a way around the problem of the speed of the Java plugin, which is currently being worked on by the Java coder. The reader may be possible after all, but it's in early stages yet.
The Single Book Javascript Widget is also back. We were going to discontinue this, as confusion between Javascript and iframes by some users caused problems. However several more technical users were integrating it with their sites effectively and producing fully tailored versions. Hopefully with the labels "Advanced" and "HTML knowledge required", this will prevent the issues.
Finally, we are running out of ideas now. Animation is still not possible given the technical restrictions, but other than that if you have any ideas or widgets you'd like please let us know.
In other news, we may have a way around the problem of the speed of the Java plugin, which is currently being worked on by the Java coder. The reader may be possible after all, but it's in early stages yet.
The Single Book Javascript Widget is also back. We were going to discontinue this, as confusion between Javascript and iframes by some users caused problems. However several more technical users were integrating it with their sites effectively and producing fully tailored versions. Hopefully with the labels "Advanced" and "HTML knowledge required", this will prevent the issues.
Finally, we are running out of ideas now. Animation is still not possible given the technical restrictions, but other than that if you have any ideas or widgets you'd like please let us know.
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Maintenance work, and a deadline.
Most of the work this week has been under the hood.
After discovering that some search engines were linking directly to widgets, we have added a holding page that automatically embeds a widget when a widget is hit directly and not through the site it was embedded in.
Robots.txt has also been improved on the new site, to improve search results.
Finally there are now 301 redirects (effectively permanent redirects to the equivalent new page) on many of the old site's pages. We can't redirect the whole site yet since it would break all the old widgets.
And as a deadline, at the end of March the old widgets will be turned off, so please make sure you have switched to the new ones before then. Any widget with http://www.raggedangel.net/smashwords-tools in it is an old version, the new ones all have http://www.smashingreads.com.
After discovering that some search engines were linking directly to widgets, we have added a holding page that automatically embeds a widget when a widget is hit directly and not through the site it was embedded in.
Robots.txt has also been improved on the new site, to improve search results.
Finally there are now 301 redirects (effectively permanent redirects to the equivalent new page) on many of the old site's pages. We can't redirect the whole site yet since it would break all the old widgets.
And as a deadline, at the end of March the old widgets will be turned off, so please make sure you have switched to the new ones before then. Any widget with http://www.raggedangel.net/smashwords-tools in it is an old version, the new ones all have http://www.smashingreads.com.
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