BSL BlogWe will be performing security updates on Friday 06/19/09.
We just finished fixing our automatic Twitter updates which mysteriously stopped working. If you would like to follow BookSaleList on Twitter you can find us at http://twitter.com/booksalelist! We also have plans to modify/upgrade the site a little bit to make it easier to add listings as well as new functions to help keep those who love book sales informed! We have a lot of ideas for new functions for our visitors, but many of them were very difficult to implement when we first designed the website! So if you are a visitor, tell us what you would like to see on the website. Continue Reading...
Since our mission is to be the most complete listing of book sales on the Internet, we're introducing a new program for membership referrals. If you refer someone to our website (Friends of the Library group, used bookstore, etc.), we will add a month to your listing! If you have a free listing, then obviously this probably doesn't excite you. However, if you signed up for a free Deluxe account as part of our Grand Opening special, the referral program will extend your Deluxe listing! To refer someone is easy. We've added referral links to your "My Listing" page. If you have more than one listing and would like us to apply the free month to a specific listing, simply copy and give that referral link to someone. If they use that link to sign up with us, whether they want a Free or Deluxe listing, you will get a month automatically added to your listing. If you only have one listing, you can either give someone the referral link or your user account email address. If you give them your email address, simply have them enter it into the "How did you hear about us?" field when they sign up. It's that simple! We've added a new section titled "Articles!" Whether you're planning your first book sale or you're an experienced organizer, we'd love to have your input and comments. We hope that this section will be a useful resource for planning, organizing and executing your next book sale. Continue Reading... We're introducing another new feature: PDF versions of our listings. Now, visitors can download and save your listing as a PDF! We hope that this will help spread the word about your event or store by allowing people to email the entire listing to friends and family. In last week's roll out of new features, this particular one had to be postponed due to an issue of getting the Google Map to render correctly. - Jared We're always trying to improve our service and the last couple of weeks we've been working on a host of new features. Ongoing Event To Be Announced Continue Reading... The last few days have been very busy here at BookSaleList. We've got several new features in the works which should really enhance the listings! We will post more information once we get all the features tested. One feature that we just finished adding is the ShareThis link at the bottom of all the listings, blog entries, and news articles. ShareThis helps BookSaleList incorporate the power of sites like MySpace, Facebook and other networking tools. Social networking is the latest way of sharing content with friends or family. Whether you have a blog, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, or just want to send an email to a friend telling them about an upcoming book sale, ShareThis provides a simple and easy to use solution. Continue Reading... Google offers many great tools to optimize websites and you can imagine my dismay when I logged in into their webmaster tools this morning and I had a warning that basically said that BookSaleList was considered to be distributing malware! After verifying the site, the logs, and the server to be sure I wasn't hacked, I started to research the issue on Google. Apparently EVERY website is now considered to be distributing malware: Walmart, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, everyone! So I can now breathe a sign of relief knowing Google is simply having techincal difficulties. Continue Reading... I spent the weekend optimizing the website for search engines so that when people search for book sales and related events, they'll be able to find your listings at the top of search engines. It'll take a little while before all the search engines crawl and index the entire website, but hopefully BookSaleList will be optimized for good rankings. A better ranking means that people will be able to find your listings quickly and easily. One way you can help us get a good ranking on the search engines is if you have a listing here, consider adding a link to BookSaleList to your webpage or blog. Simply cut and paste: <a href="www.booksalelist.com">Visit our listing at BookSaleList.com</a> I also added a Twitter Feed so Twitter users can keep up to date with new listings and events at BookSaleList. Twitter is a neat social networking website that allows people to know the answer to the question "What are you doing right now?" So I thought I'd let people know when we add new book listings! I can make this feature available to members, but I wasn't sure how many people actually use Twitter. If you have a Twitter account and would like to automatically let people know when you update your book listing, just let me know and I can make it available. - Jared BookSaleList gives book sale organizers the ability to create multiple listings. The website is designed so that a Friends group, that supports several branch libraries, could promote events for each library separately under one account. Discretion should be used in deciding whether you need multiple listings. For example, if a Friends of the Library group has a bookstore and a book sale, they could create separate listings. However, it should be noted that visitors might simply skip over multiple listings thinking they're duplicates. By keeping the number to a minimum, a visitor browsing for book sales won't miss the opportunity to find great values at your store! Further, each listing has the ability to store three different dates. So if you have a book sale every month, you could enter the first three dates and BookSaleList will automatically switch between them until it cannot find a date in the future. If we end up with a thousand listings for a single state, we may have to start thinking about limiting the number of listings allowed per user in order to make sure the visitors don't get overwhelmed. But until then, simply use your best judgment! 
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