authoradvance

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." Sometimes, during the course of building a website, you look back a particular piece of functionality, and that's all you can say. Keeping the listing filters hidden in an expandable area was just such an idea. The plan was to keep them accessible, but out of the way, but after listening to a lot of user feedback, it became clear that all it did was make them difficult to find.

AuthorAdvance has just finished its open beta test phase. This phase lasted a little longer than we intended, but since we launched several months ago, we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs, cleaned up formatting, added new features like the Dashboard and user Activity, and generally made the site more stable and easier to use. The result is a state-of-the-art networking and research tool that is, at long last, officially open for business!

The next time you log in to AuthorAdvance, you’ll notice a new way to access key areas of the site. It’s called the Dashboard, and it’s just one of the many new features we’ve been hard at work on over the past few weeks.

The Dashboard provides at-a-glance displays of your most critical information, all in one place. It gives you quick access to your pending Submissions and recent Hotlist entries, along with abbreviated statistics for all your Titles. It also features an Activity stream to keep you up to date on what your friends have been up to.

This week saw the launch of a new Activity system on AuthorAdvance. Activity records the public actions that users take on the site (such as updating a listing or posting a blog) and collects them into one easy-to-read stream. That stream then appears on your user profile to let people know what you’ve been up to, and on your Dashboard to help you keep up with your friends.

With a new website, not every feature that's planned for the initial launch is able to make it in time. Some are delayed in favor of other features, some just take a little extra time to perfect. This week saw the inclusion of two such features, the first of many enhancements that are currently being planned and developed for AuthorAdvance.

Now that AuthorAdvance is finally up and running, you may be asking yourself where to start. The new site has lots to do, and it's easy to lose yourself in all the options. Here are five suggestions for things you can do right out of the gate to get up-and-running with AuthorAdvance...

1) Update Your Profile

I had a rare free moment as a batch of submissions are being uploaded to the new site, so I decided to use it to update everyone on the status of the data migration.

In short, the process is going well. Users and Titles have been converted and imported successfully. Submissions are underway, and should be completed late tomorrow. We've also made some changes to the fonts and artwork, and will continue to make tweaks right up to the launch date.

It's been a while since my last preview. Work on AuthorAdvance has been keeping me busy, but I'm taking advantage of a momentary lull to write a little about one of the most powerful features of the new website: Groups.

Groups are simply collections of user who have united around a specific topic or interest. But beneath this simple concept lies a robust way of interacting with other users and sharing information.