Temporary Engine Work

Smashwords have tweaked their website, as you might have noticed. It looks good, and is more lightweight and faster.

However the engine feeds for the widgets rely on the site format, so they promptly broke. We're fixing them now. The author feed has already been corrected. We're working on the single book feed today, and all the widgets should be back up soon.

It's also a chance to consolidate the widget sources and make a few improvements to the RSS feeds while we recode them, so it isn't all bad.

(In technical terms, I'm so glad I switched from arrays to brute force string hacking last time this happened. It's slightly slower, but makes updating much easier).

Update at 08:34 - all widgets are now running on the new feed. If you find problems with it, please let me know here or through the feedback form.

There's also a new addition to the RSS feeds page: the single book feed, which puts a book's data into XML format for use on third party sites is now available.

Two major widget updates

The Store widget just went into beta. This is a revised version designed to improve speed, and also to combine the publishers' and authors' versions. It has gained the ability to launch into a stand alone window, along with some dedicated buttons, so it should work for OpenDiary, Wordpress and Squidoo users.

We will continue supporting the alpha versions (particularly the custom builds) until we have migrated these across so don't worry, the old stores won't suddenly break. All future stores should be created using the new store engine.

The other change is the Reader. After initial tests and feedback that just went from prototype into alpha and is now available from the website.

Not bad for a Saturday.

Into Production

It seems the open beta has been successful. We've gained a lot of feedback and the tools, despite being in beta, appear to be becoming rather popular. This means they will be sticking around for the long term, and going into Production status.

In practice this means improving the website to better organise the widgets, fix the bug list where we can, and add tutorials, help etc. We may also end up migrating this blog into the widget site, so everything is in one place. It isn't a small job.

We're still working on the java reader at the same time, so please be patient. Until better organisation is in place, new widgets may be slow in appearing since it is harder for users to find them on the site.

The other issue is that the redone store flies by comparison with the previous versions, but works on a different principle. Transitioning the alpha store users to the new beta is also something we are discussing for next week.

Search Box Widget

Status: In Beta
Method: Javascript
Type: Search box
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/widget_searchbox.php
Designed as a small widget for blogs or websites, to allow searches through an author's books, or general smashwords searches. Available in a basic Unskinned version, and a Skinned version.

Constraints: Only works where javascript is enabled. Special characters are stripped to prevent aggresive code reaching Smashwords, so search strings with hyphens or quotes in them may produce less accurate results.

Concerns: Future-proofing as Smashwords are updating their search in 2012.

Known issues:
Unskinned version: none.
Skinned version only - cosmetic issues: In areas where styles already exist the Javascript can appear odd as the styles are overwritten (See an example in this blog's sidebar). In the Blogger sidebar on firefox and opera, a 2px extra bit of background appears below the widget. This is cosmetic only and does not affect function.

Possible development: Add user's choice of referral link so that readers and reviewers as well as authors find it useful. Create iframe embeddable version.

Unskinned