Sunday, December 20, 2009
We’ve completed a little bit of work on the page that lists all your books:
[click image for a larger view]
Previously we just listed all the books with the most recently added at the top. Now though we split them up with what you are currently reading at the top, and then just below that the books you’ve read, and the ones you want to read.
This gives other people a much clearer picture of what you are currently reading, and also shows you at a glance the next book you can choose to read from your ‘Want to Read’ list.
Happy reading!!!
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Connect Via Books is a very social site so it is important for us to make it as easy as possible for you to let your friends know about the site. This has got one step better today with the ‘Invite Your Friends’ functionality:
You can get to this by logging in and clicking the Friends link on the top navigation.
We’ll soon have it implemented so you can easily select your contacts from the web mail providers such as gmail, yahoo mail and hotmail if you so wish!
Keep the feedback and ideas for the site coming!
Sunday, September 27, 2009
We have been busy at work on the site to make some important improvements. The first allows us to take a look at which books you’ve added to your book list, and make recommendations of which books we think you should take a look at next. It has taken us a while to work on an algorithm that we are happy with to ensure the recommendations are as good as they can be. This is a great feature that I love myself as I’ve found some really good books I need to get ASAP! At the moment we place 2 recommendations on your home page you see as soon as you log into the site
If the recommendation isn’t something you fancy then just click on the ‘Hide this Recommendation’ link and we’ll not show it to you again – just as importantly though we’ll bring back a different book that you should love.
If you click on the title of one of the recommendations you’ll be taken to the book profile page. Here you can see we have added some radio buttons to make it much easier to add a book to your book list
Click one of the radio buttons in the highlighted area and you’ll get the pop up to be able to add it to your book list! Nice, quick and simple!
Any feedback or further ideas to improve the site are always welcome at support@connectviabooks.com
Thursday, September 17, 2009
After the usual welcome post, it is time to tell you a little more about Connect Via Books and how we got to where we are.
Back in 2004 Flemming Madsen and I, Nick Swan, decided to launch a site in our spare time that would enable us to include our two passions – books and programming. The idea was to create a social networking site that book lovers could join that would allow them to:
- keep a list of books they’ve read.
- get new recommendations of books to read.
- find people who like the same books that you do and discuss them.
Reading books can be quite a lonely experience – our aim was to give book readers an avenue to make reading a more social experience.
Now you have to remember that the Internet in 2004 was quite a different place to what it is now. Twitter wasn’t around and Facebook was only just founded as a student directory. People were a lot more cautious of the details they published online about themselves than they are today. Web 2.0 was a term that had just been coined, and Ajax was just beginning to take off in a main stream kind of way. So in 2004 we released a site built on ASP.NET 1.1 that was quite clunky and ‘interesting’ to use. It got some early traction with initial registration numbers looking good, but unfortunately both Flemming and I had full time jobs we needed to do to keep the bills being paid. These jobs also developed into our own separate companies and so slowly our spare time to input into CvB ground to a halt. I guess that in 2006 to the end of 2008 no work was done on the site. A few registrations were still being made though which showed that the idea behind the site was good.
To show the idea had legs, a number of other book type social networking sites started – and with Facebook gaining huge traction and everyone happy to publish all kinds of details about themselves we often met down the pub and wondered what could have been!
There’s no point looking back, only forwards – and so in late 2008 we decided to do something about it. We figured a new design and build from the ground up would be a good start as we could implement a lot of things we had learned from the original CvB design that could be done better. Once we had replaced the original features we could get on with improving usability and working on new social features around books that book lovers would enjoy using and tell their friends all about. This was still going to be a part time project, but we figured 6 – 8 weeks (the magical developer estimate) would be all that was needed to get the new site out. A lovely design was completed and we set towards building the new site in ASP.NET MVC (a blog post later will detail information about the technology we are using).
Of course 6 – 8 weeks was a crazy estimation, having been 4 years since we built the original site we obviously forgot how much work went into it! So 5 months later on May 25th 2009 the new site was launched. The initial feature allowed you to add books to your profile, and adding friends who’s reading you’d like to follow. Since then we’ve added a whole subset of features such as adding comments to profiles, adding comments to books – and lots of other smaller improvements.
We’ve finally got round to setting this blog up which is an important step forward as it will allow us to let you know about new features on the site, and also to update you with stats about how the site is doing. Many people have the dream of building the next Facebook/Twitter etc so if you are one of these people you can hopefully learn a lot from us. We are currently doing this in a part time capacity in evenings and weekends which is the ideal way to bootstrap a new idea and site. Eventually we hope to grow the site large enough to warrant full time developers and staff – god knows we have enough features to develop and work to do to already need this :).
Each week we’ll publish information about how many visits we’ve had to the site, user registrations, and any other milestones we hit that you may find useful. Hopefully we’ll be able to get some community feedback on how we are doing and ideas on how to progress – but the main idea behind it is to help others who want to start the next big web site to take over the world!
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Hello and welcome to the new Connect Via Books blog! We are planning to use this platform to let you know about new features and functions on the site - and also to get your feedback about what we are considering developing. The team behind Connect Via Books is a small group of book lovers who want to be able to share their thoughts on the books they read, and get new recommendations of books they will also like. We really hope to make this site as useful as possible, and can only really do this with your involvement!