1,754 authors have turned in a book list for Shepherd or committed to writing one(amazing as always 😃).

August 9th - August 20th

Rough 2 weeks...

The last two weeks have been ROUGH. I have been running behind on both emails and publishing pages for authors to review (still a week behind on publishing). The good news is I have a better system on the way...

Next week we are going to move from our shared email account to ZenDesk. This move will help Jessy and I work a lot more efficiently. We will be able to tell authors when to expect a reply, when Jessy or I am on vacation, and a ton of other great tools. This move will also allow me to offload 1 to 3 hours of manual data entry I am still doing each day. Yay!

Preview: New Front Page & Search

The designer has done a great job and we are almost done with the frontend for the upcoming search feature and new front page. Here is a preview :)

Mockup of the new front page and search feature coming later this year.

Update on topic pages...

The developer is doing an amazing job and things are progressing quickly. Here is a real-world example to share how things are working so far...

Phil Halton's created a list of the best books on the war in Afghanistan and here are the topics that the system detected his book list was about:

That worked pretty perfectly... and this is prior to any human curation!

What else is going on?

My wife got her second vaccine shot which is awesome :). I am proud to say that our entire family and our immediate families are fully vaccinated (apart from the young kids).

I am really looking forward to my vacation coming in September. I am ready for some downtime, and I've got a lot of books I want to read.

Thanks, Ben

Building Book DNA

Building Shepherd - Preview of search + new…