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BookCrossing is getting a mobile-friendly makeover!

November 15, 2018
Hi everyone, Reno here. For the last few months, I've been working on a complete makeover of the BookCrossing site, making the design mobile-phone responsive and looking/working good on any platform.

Along the way through, editing over 260 files, I found and fixed dozens of currently existing bugs.

Notably, book cover lookups should work much better, especially with Google Book search. Related note: Amazon book search severely throttles our requests, based on our amount of affiliate click-thru sales, so I'm featuring Amazon affiliate links more prominently and removing second-tier bookseller links.

There will be a prominent ad (served by Google) in the sidebar for desktop users and in the footer for mobile users, only for non-Wings members. As we've been running in the red for years, this is an attempt to increase revenue and make the project more sustainable. The ads are removable with an adblocker, but of course we would appreciate you not using one and occasionally visiting our ad sponsors, or, even better, getting Wings. :)

We're removing the social network log on / linking options, as they are bug-ridden anyway. If any of you have been logging with successfully with FB, Twitter, or GoodReads, first of all I'm surprised, and second of all, please contact support and they can set you up with a temporary password. (If it happens there are many of you, I can put back those login options.)

We'll also be automatically enforcing SSL by redirecting http:// requests to https://, to make the site more safe and secure without you having to think about it.

Our support team has put it through its paces (thanks for your incredible help folks!) and we've ironed out what bugs were found. I'm sure you all will find some additional issues, and I'll work as quickly as possible to fix them. I'm also sure you'll be shocked by the new look and feel; that's natural for any change of this scale.

If last minute details go as planned, I'll be deploying the new version later this morning, Nov 15th. The site may be down for a couple of minutes during the changeover.

I've started a forum thread for feedback: here.

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