Sunday, March 23, 2008

Edit the FictionDB Database Yourself!

We've been going through the responses to our survey and are happy to report that 87% of you think our data is Very Good or Excellent. So in looking at the 13% who thought the data was just Good we found one common theme. More data! Yeah, um, we knew that. People want information for absolutely every book on the site. Well, so do we, but we don't HAVE all the books in the database. We enter data as the books come through.

However, YOU have books that are missing information in the database. So now we're going to put you to work. You'll notice a new link on the Book Detail page right above the tags -- Add missing details to this book. You can now add or change just about everything to do with a book. Add a subgenre, change the time period, add a synopsis.

The only downside is that your changes won't be seen on the site until the first of the month. In order to provide live updates, we'd have to completely redesign the database and we're not quite ready to do that yet.

So the next time you see we're missing information on a book, enter the information for the next person who comes along. They may have already entered some information for you :)

Saturday, March 22, 2008

The FictionDB Book Club

Three or four years ago (I can't remember now) we got rid of the discussion forums in our site redesign. There are just so many places to talk about books on the internet that we weren't sure there was a need for another one. While I still pretty much agree with that, there has been some interest from our survey responses for a place for FictionDB subscribers to congregate.

Last year, I looked into a site called ning that hosts social networks (what they seem to be calling forums these days). It's a free site so I set up a FictionDB page. I set it up with a Book Club theme since I'm much more interested in finding a great book to read than I am in reading the latest snarky comments on some of the other book blogs.

You can visit the new area at http://fictiondb.ning.com/ We haven't completely customized everything yet, but let us know if you like the area or not. And yes, you do have to sign up with them if you want to post :(

Friday, March 21, 2008

Export Your Bookshelf

We are in the process of designing a nifty new interface for printing and exporting your books -- uniquely created by each person.

In the meantime, I've thrown up an export page with your basic information on it. You can find the link on your My Account page.

http://fictiondb.com/Accounts/BookShelfExport.asp

You can copy and paste this page into Excel or just save the page itself to your computer. Either way, you will now have a copy of your bookshelf to use as you like.