MyKidsLibrary.com - Editor's Blog

Big, New Features!

MKL Editor — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:02:40 -0400

It's been a couple of months since MyKidsLibrary.com was launched. Our small, thoughtful core of testers provided some absolutely invaluable feedback, and we have just made the new features -- and many fixed bugs -- available.

Right now, you are looking at the single biggest new feature: Discussion Forums. Using our Forums, MKL members will be able to hold open, free-form discussions on the subjects that they choose. Members can also create entirely new categories of discussions to organize them in meaningful ways. We hope that the Forums will be the glue that holds the MKL Community together and allows us help one another in many ways besides finding the best books.

There are a host of other less-obvious but still-important changes:

Rich Text Entry. Previously, Members were limtied to entering jsut simple characters without any kind of formatting. We have changed all text boxes to now allow a nice range of formatting choices such as bold, italicized, underlined and struck-through text; four different paragraph formats; numbered and bulleted lists; different fonts and font sizes.
Book Discussions. Whenever a new book is added to My Kids Library, a discussion is automatically created for it, and a link to the discussion is added on the book's page. While Members can still add Reviews of the book right on the page, having a Discussion available will allow for commentary and talk about it that isn't really a Review.
Automatically-resized Avatars. Your Avatar is the optional picture that you upload to be part of your Profile. Previously, My Kids Library was unable to cope elegantly with large photos; you either had to resize it yourself or have it display at its natural -- possible very large -- size. Now, when you upload a picture, several copies are made of it a different size that can be displayed without throwing-off the layout of the page that it apepars on.
Printable Reading Lists. Now, each Reading List has a Print button that will print a special version of the Reading List that is concisely-formatted.

That's just a quick rundown; we hope that you'll enjoy discovering all the changes that a couple of months of hard work have brought to MKL. As always, we hope that any time that you think of a new feature or capability that would make the site more valuable to you or just easier to use that you will suggest it. You can send an email to feedback@mykidslibrary.com or create a Discussion in the Suggestions category of the Forums.

Many, many thanks to all of Members, present and future.

Why MyKidsLibrary?

MKL Editor — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:05:34 -0400

I first conceived of My Kids Library in the early Summer of 2007. While waiting for Story Time to start at the Maynard Library, my kids and I were trying to round up a selection of books to last us for the week. They are both voracious readers, so getting enough books and finding good books was important and quite challenging. My boy, just turned 3, liked baseball, cars, trucks and firemen. My girl, 4 1/2 at the time, liked elephants, dogs, ballet and stories about girls. Managing them both while also making somewhat thoughtful book choices was a large and often frustrating task, and sometimes, I just had to judge the book by its cover and hope for the best.

On this occasion, my daughter found a book about a dog and asked me to check it out. It appeared to be a reasonable selection, so I added it to our pile. After Story Time was over and we had returned home, she asked me to read it to her for bedtime. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this was a book that a parent would read to a child to help them understand and cope with the death of a beloved family pet. She figured it out by the end of the story, and she had some tricky questions for me to answer before she went to sleep.

We don’t have a pet (I’m very allergic), so I didn’t particularly appreciate having to explain to my daughter about death at a time that it wasn’t strictly necessary. I really wished that I’d been able to easily plan ahead to select certain books, that I’d have had access to other parents’ experiences and collective wisdom.

That’s the kernel of My Kids Library.

We couple easy access to the experiences of parents, grand-parents, teachers, librarians — anybody who reads to children — with tools to help us easily remember what we need to check out from the library or buy at the bookstore. And often, isn’t that the hardest part, just remembering? Most of us lead hectic lives that demand all of our energy and attention to stay organized, to remember, to be on-time. My Kids Library tries to help by making it easy to create lists of books, and to access them.

So it has been just about a year since the very first notion came to me, and we are now starting full, public availability of this service. In all likelihood, you are reading this blog because you have signed up and are just starting to explore the site. Thank you. And welcome. Your participation is what will make this site special and useful and a pleasant community for us all. I am eagerly awaiting your feedback. I’d like to know what is good and what is bad and how you think that the site could be improved. Drop me a note at editor@mykidslibrary.com with any ideas or concerns.

Now, the hard part...

MKL Editor — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:59:49 -0400

So, the MKL team has been hard-at-work adding features, tweaking the user interface, generally making it all work better. A year later, having learned Ruby on Rails, acquired hosting, written thousands of lines of Ruby, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, we are faced with the truly difficult part: building a community of users.

The Internet is so big and so deep and so wide that it is genuinely chellenging to find ways to let people know about a new service that they might find useful. We're hoping that users, as they find MKL through word-of-mouth, will recommend it to their friends and keep it growing that way.

But, we can't help wondering, "Isn't there a way to get the word out that is a little faster and mor effective?" Without an advertising budget to buy Google AdWords space or some other advertising, what options to we have to let the world know about My Kids Library?