1,754 authors have turned in a book list for Shepherd or committed to writing one(amazing as always 😃).

August 9th - August 20th

Rough 2 weeks...

The last two weeks have been ROUGH. I have been running behind on both emails and publishing pages for authors to review (still a week behind on publishing). The good news is I have a better system on the way...

Next week we are going to move from our shared email account to ZenDesk. This move will help Jessy and I work a lot more efficiently. We will be able to tell authors when to expect a reply, when Jessy or I am on vacation, and a ton of other great tools. This move will also allow me to offload 1 to 3 hours of manual data entry I am still doing each day. Yay!

Preview: New Front Page & Search

The designer has done a great job and we are almost done with the frontend for the upcoming search feature and new front page. Here is a preview :)

Update on topic pages...

The developer is doing an amazing job and things are progressing quickly. Here is a real-world example to share how things are working so far...

Phil Halton's created a list of the best books on the war in Afghanistan and here are the topics that the system detected his book list was about:

That worked pretty perfectly... and this is prior to any human curation!

What else is going on?

My wife got her second vaccine shot which is awesome :). I am proud to say that our entire family and our immediate families are fully vaccinated (apart from the young kids).

I am really looking forward to my vacation coming in September. I am ready for some downtime, and I've got a lot of books I want to read.

Thanks, Ben