What better way to ring in the new year than with a brand spanking new website? The old Unshelved site had a certain charm, but it was seven years old. That's a lifetime in Internet years. So I spent much of the summer updating our software. I used my new comic strip Not Invented Here as a guinea pig, and after a successful test run it was finally time to bring Unshelved.com over to this new, more reliable server.
Most of the changes are under the cover, but you'll also see a new website design accompanied by a larger, easier-to-read format for the comic strip. You'll also notice we're missing some features, such as Search, the store, Pimp My Bookcart, etc. I'll be adding these back in over the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience.
But that's not all. We're changing our schedule too. When we launched Unshelved we were aiming at newspaper syndication. You know, back when there were newspapers. So we adopted a newspaper schedule: seven days a week. Later we made the Sunday strip the Unshelved Book Club. Well, newspapers may run seven days a week, but our website statistics overwhelmingly show that most of you work five days a week. We think that sounds nice, so we're adopting a five day work week too. Starting next week, Unshelved daily strips will run Monday through Thursday and the Unshelved Book Club will run on Fridays.
But wait, there's more. Starting next Friday the Unshelved Book Club's trademark comic strip book talk will be accompanied by typed-up reviews written by Gene, myself, and a small cadre of trusted reviewers from all walks of life. We'll be recommending books new and old, fiction and nonfiction, with a uniquely Unshelved approach.
We do not enter into these changes lightly. They represent a solid year of planning and arguing. We hope you like the new Unshelved as much as we do.
P.S. Apologies to our RSS feed readers - you probably just got a bunch of repostings.
P.P.S. Apologies to our email subscribers - your email is a little late, and looks different. Please bear with us.
My trip to beautiful Whistler, BC (including its beautiful library resulted in a slight delay of this posting, so this week's winners each receive a bumper sticker in addition to a signed Unshelved book of their choice.
Question of the Week: from BookMasterJMV, who was looking for ways to get patrons to use self checkout. I'm not holding a grudge that my answer wasn't chosen.
Answer of the Week: from Dayton ILL, to Velva's question asking Answers users to suggest nonfiction titles for prison libraries. I'd love to know who ordered that book and why.
Visit Unshelved® Answers if you've got questions or want to share your knowledge with others. And please vote up good questions and answers.
One last reminder that our Store and Pimp My Bookcart pages will shortly be going on vacation for a month or so while I switch our site over to a server running software so new I'm still writing it.
Our sponsor this week is Harper Collins, publisher of This Book is Overdue! by Marilyn Johnson:
Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, breathed merry life into the obituary-writing profession.
My favorite question this week came from Eric Williamson, who asked for help finding a science fiction audio book he listened to 10 years ago. He provides an amazing amount of detail, but no one has named that book yet. Come on, people!
Answer of the week goes to sarah, whose response to Bubbles' question about what to look for in a MLIS progrom included these magic words: "...pick a school that has professors that have actually been in the field as librarians." I couldn't agree more.
To ease Eric's pain, and to reward sarah's thoughtfulness, both get a signed Unshelved collection of their choice.
Visit Unshelved® Answers if you've got questions or want to share your knowledge with others. And please vote up good questions and answers.
