I walk in the woods every day with my dog Luna, we found this yesterday:

A new volume of Atomic Robo is about to begin… and it’s looking pretty sweet! I know exactly how sweet, because I’ve got a copy right here in my hands… we just got our shipment of the HeavyInk exclusive variant cover of Atomic Robo Dogs of War Part 1! Want one?

Cool! Because everyone who gets a copy of the regular issue through HeavyInk will get a copy of the variant cover for free. Get yours!

Atomic Robo Dogs Of War #1

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We just rolled out a little feature: on your profile page, you can see a list of other people on the site who have similar taste in subscriptions to yourself. Maybe they’re people you already interact with, maybe not. When I find someone who likes the same stuff I do, I always like to see what they’re reading that I haven’t checked out yet… hopefully you’ll find this useful too!

This is just a little update to your profile page, which hasn’t changed much recently… Tyler and Dan are working on something much, much bigger!

Apologies if you don’t like spiders…

We’ve now built two websites using Ruby on Rails: SmartFlix.com, and some kind of online comic store thing. According to at least one source, both sites are among the 100 most popular sites built with rails:

http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Compete+Rankings

That’s a little surprising, but nice to see… thanks, everyone!

For quite some time we’ve had an odd glitch with our graphic novel listings: fairly recent items would become unavailable, about a month after they were first listed on our site. This happened because we try to be very good about only listing items as available if we’re pretty confident about their actual availability, and we didn’t have a good information on that. Now… we do! You’ll find a bunch of fairly recent stuff available again, like

Bone Color Ed Vol. 8

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Annihilation Conquest Vol. 2

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Flight Vol. 5

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Out of Stock

Runaways Vol. 8

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Astro City The Dark Age Vol. 1

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We have a nice community of people who love comics, and we have lots of web pages dedicated to comics, and one of our goals it to tie these together in useful ways. As a tiny step in that direction, on any page dedicated to a comic title you can now see the people who are subscribed to that comic who have elected to make their profile and subscription list public. Just playing around and testing it, it’s been a nice way to find people who’re reading the stuff I also read.

Very useful for me, maybe useful for you… if you have a Diamond Code (this is the code that our primary distributor Diamond Comics uses to refer to comics, graphic novels, etc and looks something like APR084084), you can drop it in the search box and, if it’s in our system, we’ll return the item it’s attached to.

Is there any other kind of data you wish you could search on?

Two recent improvements should smooth out some wrinkles:

1. There used to be an problem when we were shipping comics where we’d print out your invoices, start packing stuff up, but you could still click “cancel” on an issue. Of course, by that point the cancel wouldn’t have the expected result, ‘cause the comics were as good as shipped. That’s been fixed up, there’s a new status that reads “shipping”, and these items can no longer be cancelled. Of course, you can still cancel right up to the moment that we press the “print invoices” button.

2. We’ve been running short on some popular comics. This has happened most with series that start off with luke warm reception, but then get more popular. We’ve made some tweaks so that we’re more aggressive about ordering during certain parts of a comic’s life cycle. We have all sorts of cool stuff planned to help us get better at predicting demand, but this is a start.

Finally rolling out a new feature, a page that lets you know what’s going to be shipping in the near future:

http://heavyink.com/comics/shipping_soon

You can look at all the issues that will be shipping, or just the issues that will be shipping to you (see the “Just your issues” over to the right).

This page is likely to be updated every Friday to cover the next week, though the schedule will depend on information we’re able to get from our distributor.

We’ve also got historical information, so you can travel back in time to see what’s going to ship three weeks ago. Not quite as exciting as knowing what’s going to ship three weeks from now, but maybe still useful.

I haven’t connected this page from anywhere on the site yet, just thought I’d point it out a little early for those who have been waiting patiently for features like this…