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 Edition Vol. 8 Treasure Hunters

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Annihilation: Conquest Vol. 2 Hardcover

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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…

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.

We’ve just made some updates to how subscriptions work… nothing fancy, but a couple hopefully useful bits of polish:

• When you add a subscription, it starts out highlighted on the top of the subscriptions page so it’s easy so find and set things like what issue you want to start with or how many copies you want.

• You can start a subscription with “the next issue”, whatever that is—handy if you already have all the issues or volumes already released, and you just want the next one, even if it isn’t in our system yet.

• Subscriptions are smarter about where they start: if you’ve ordered some issues to try them out, and then subscribe, we automatically start your subscription in the right place.

• When you add a subscription, you’ll automatically see the items that we’ll be sending next to the subscription… you used to have to wait until the “magic update”, that only happened a few times a day.

Stuff also got reorganized behind the scenes, and is tested better, so the whole system should be more solid.

Let us know what you think, or if you see any bugs.

Has it really been two months since I’ve written anything here? It been feeling harder and harder to get new features done, as we deal with the day-to-day firefighting of running a new site and service. We’ve also been working on some basic infrastructure, like a beefed up test suite (thanks Tyler!) that will let us know when we break something, but that’s not something easy to see from the outside.

Still, we’re making progress. Little tweaks here and there to make the site more usable and less frustrating. Some important stuff scheduled for the next few weeks, like getting our graphic novel listings up to snuff. And, Nick just started this week. Once he’s up to speed, we should see some good progress. He’s already been on his inaugural burrito run, so clearly things are happening!

Most of the stuff we’ve been working on lately is behind the scenes stuff… not exciting, but necessary. You know, stuff like getting people the right comics and getting our data cleaned up. This week, though, we hope to deploy two fun little features.

One of them we’ve been kicking around for a while (the code was finished weeks ago by Nick P, who did it for us as a contract project), and is even mentioned somewhere on our site, but has taken us some time to get around to integrating: quizzes. Build quizzes, take quizzes, should be fun. TJIC will be rolling it out this week I think, once a few things are cleared up.

The other one I won’t get into, but it involves a lot of clicking and Tyler was already pretty far along with it on Friday afternoon….

We’ve just put together a few tools to help us fix up bad data, and I’ve been correcting some of the more obvious blunders. I just merged All New Booster Gold and Booster Gold (it started out being solicited as All-New, but they seemed to have dropped that part). Every subscriber to the All-New version of the title got an email explaining the tweak to their subscription, and all the subscriptions were correctly merged. Gotta love it when technology works!