MyKidsLibrary.com - Big, New Features! - Comment 1

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.