Something I've been wanting to do with Crimespace from the beginning was to make it simple for people to find all the authors on board. Up until now there hasn't been any easy way to do this. So I decided to finally get off my butt (or on it), put my programming hat on and come up with something I hope you'll all like. But it's going to need a little work from members.
If you're a reader, there's nothing for you to do other than click on the Authors tab at the top of the page once all the authors come on board. Here's the link just in case:
http://crimespace.ning.com/authors
If you're an author (ie someone who's had your work published somewhere), click on My Settings in the top right of the screen, and then click on About Me. At the bottom, you'll find a new section labelled 'Author Profile'. Fill in the text area with an author blurb of your own design (easiest way to do this is to copy & paste the text under 'About Me' and tweak to taste).
Feel free to use some basic HTML and add links to books we can buy or stories we can read. Don't worry that it's marked private, it won't show up on your member page but it will show up in the new author section once you hit Save at the bottom.
I've done a fair amount of testing, but there may still be some kinks to iron out. Hopefully it'll all work smoothly and we'll have a nice Christmas present of an author directory on Crimespace. Speaking of which ...
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.
Cheers,
Daniel
Addendum: Author Directory To-Do List:
- Sorting by last name : This is a fair amount of work. Might take some time.
- Administrators need to be able to remove profiles from the directory: This is important. Not everyone seems to understand that they can't use the directory for promoting their romance or fantasy novels. This is a crime fiction site, folks.
- Search author profiles: This could be useful when you know a book title, but not the author.
- DONE: Fix sorting of names in lower case. Implemented by Ning.
- DONE: Fix numbering at bottom of page: implement Ning standard.
- DONE: Author search.
- DONE: Clearer separation between authors, maybe just a dark dividing line, especially for those with larger profiles.
- DONE: Add total number of authors to heading.