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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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…

You may have noticed a bug in our shopping cart… if you tried to adjust the quantity of an item in the cart, and just hit enter in the number box instead of clicking the “Change Quantity” button, the first item in the cart would be removed. Oh, and no quantities would be changed. Lovely.

It turns out, when there are multiple buttons in a form, hitting enter in a text field always makes it look like the first button was pressed. The first button in the form is the remove button for the first item in the cart. Boo hiss. And a bit of digging shows no obvious way to change this default behavior.

Our hack: we added another button to the form, essentially another “Change Quantity” button, added it as the first button, and marked it as “hidden” so it doesn’t show up in browsers. Seems to work… hooray!

Hardly worth blogging, but maybe it’ll save someone else a few minutes some day…

OK, now you can add blog comments as a separately manageable component of your RSS feed. If you want to help me test it out, leave a comment here :->.

I’ve been working on a tool that collects information on what our distributor expects to send us, and then compares that to what actually arrives. It turns out quite a bit of stuff is missing… for example, this week, exactly 0 copies of our order of Iron Man #27 arrived. A phone call has cleared this up (missing stuff should be coming next week…), and making this a regular part of our process should help prevent missing items, but it’d be nice if we didn’t have to do it.

On the plus side, the infrastructure built for this is the first step in allowing us to provide a shipping-this-week page, customized for every customer. Now, that would be handy…

Our RSS feeds weren’t showing the HTML version of any of the content (ie forum posts, blog posts, etc), so things probably looked a bit ugly in the RSS readers… that should be fixed.

We also tweaked where you get sent to when you click on a forum post in an RSS reader… no more having to jump to the end to get to the post that you want to reply to!

Little stuff, but it’s been bugging us for a while.

Sometimes, things blow up. Today we did a bunch of pretty normal stuff… put up the interview with Garth Ennis, started the next round of cover fight, sent out a newsletter, got the data up for the comics solicited in March (oooh, shiny new covers!), etc. Nothing we haven’t done before. BUT… sometimes things blow up. Due to a small bug, some new issues got set up incorrectly. Fixing that, we introduced a new problem with our data that caused some pages on the site to blow up when visited (mostly title pages, like the main Batman page). OK, we got that fixed too, but some visitors definitely got a less than ideal experience for a few minutes there. Grrrrrrrr.