Quality of Life Changes

So I recently dropped several new features or layout changes and wanted to just throw down a news post to talk about them all. If you notice anything odd, please do feel free to drop me a line.

• Page count is now tracked in the database and I ran a huge update to grab all the page counts for the books in the database.
• I merged the links to reference websites into a single column of links now so you can just click wherever if you want a reference now. I use those sometimes myself to see if things have changed or compare covers (some day we will try to get covers here).
• I’ve made several updates to the updater on the back end and now instead of JUST updating books with new release dates, it can find price changes, page count changes, and even pickup the code that Lunar uses if it’s missing (making direct links to IST and such easier).
  • We now refer to Lunar primarily for publishers that use both PRH and Lunar because that means Lunar handles their Direct Market and that’s usually the date we’re after. This will also ensure we aren’t pingponging back and forth anymore when the dates occasionally go out of sync between the two (I’ve seen it happen with both DC and Titan).
  • I changed the format of the book updates page so it will now tell you all the things that were updated. You can see obviously almost every book was touched by the initial page count load in but you can also see when multiple updates are made at once and it’s just a nice little indicator for people that like to see what has changed recently.
  • I went through a whole BUNCH of back end code that’s just generally making things easier and easier for us to keep up to date and add new stuff. The more of that we have, the quicker new things make it here and updates find their way.
• I modified the layout for the details popup to look a little nicer. On desktop you have a nice little side by side view and on mobile it is responsible and will go to a single column again like you are used to. Also a few style changes there for the heck of it.
• The tables on the site now have sticky headers. It took a lot of messing around but I’ve finally got the menu for the site consistently at the top in the same place and then the headers for the tables on the site also following you down while you scroll which is just a really nice thing to have. Even better, because I found a way to do this natively with CSS instead of having to do crazy stuff, you can still use the columns to sort the table as you please!
• I modified a few bits for the main menu so it should now properly display on phones in both portrait and landscape mode. Things are responsive in ways that are a little more consistent (including for logged in Patreon users). You’ll notice that if you’re in that awkward stage where you aren’t getting the hamburger menu anymore because you’ve gone into landscape mode or are on a tablet but things didn’t fit before, I’ve responsively shrunk the name/font size of the menu items to keep things looking nicer and more consistent!

As always, if you have suggestions for the site let me know! I do actually use this site for myself so I try to think up things I would like before anyone even has to ask but I very much appreciate suggestions on how to help people out. Some things are of course easier than others but I can always write it down for later!