I went ahead and did yet another redesign of the sign up page tonight. It’s easy to leave the design of sign up and login screens for the last moment, but I think they’re actually really important even though a user touches them maybe once per browsing session. Signing up is the first interaction someone usually has with a site–you want it be simple, familiar, and good-looking.

Here’s how it’s looking tonight

I can imagine adding a few more helpful lines of text between now and release. One of the nicer features is that the form will inform you of errors in your registration. It won’t reset upon error either, so you can just fix the highlighted errors and get signed up and on your way.

Have you voted on features yet?

A small feature, but one that will help you research your titles better, is the on-demand review links on the main page for each book.

All you’ll initially see are a few links to information on your book. This will keep things fast and light and not force a deluge of information upon you with each page load. In many cases, the reviews and blog posts will be the same day-to-day.

If you haven’t checked to see if anyone has reviewed your book recently, or if you need quick access to some reviews you know exist, click the Amazon review link and the reviews will appear on the page. Additionally, if you’re curious about whether anyone is blogging about you, there are a few helpful links to let you check. Clicking one will show you blog posts that are possibly related to the book in question.

After clicking the review links, the page fills with the most recent review and blog information.

I just installed a polls plugin by Andy Finnell that I plan on using to guage interest in various things.

The first poll has to do with some potential features and you can access it here.

Thanks for your feedback!

First off, welcome to the blog. I should have started one for the site long ago, but now is as great a time as ever as I’m working on some long-anticipated updates to the system.

Rankforest began as an experiment with Amazon’s Web Services API. The first version took a few days of programming. The version you’re currently using is the second revision. I did most of it a year ago and it’s 100 times more complex than version 1.

I want to use this blog to show you some of the in-development features of version 3 of the site. It’s my hope that you’ll like what you see, but if not, there’s still time for change.

One widely anticipated feature has been the ability to compare multiple books at once. Here’s what we’ve got so far (click the image to get a bigger version).

Ignore some of the text you see on that page as things are still in flux. Accounts that allow more than 1 book will be able to use the multiple charting feature. When you navigate to the ‘Book battle’ page, you’ll see an empty chart area. Any books in your collection will be shown on the left. The green box on the right is where you drag the books you want to chart. Once you drop them, the chart area is updated. You can drag up to 4 books. To remove a book from the chart, simply drag it to the removal area (it’s below the green box, and not visible in the picture above).

One more thing before I go: you might have noticed there’s no longer a ‘Users’ navigation tab. Since most users have preferred to remain more or less anonymous, I have removed this. Though books will still appear under the ‘Browse’ tab, I will no longer show who’s tracking what.

More later!