Ahoy Travelers!

Today we released a new version of the private beta site, with a ton of improvements!  The primary goal was stability and usability - however we did manage to sneak a few new features in.

One of the features that was added with this release is full previews.  There was a version of previews before, however it only included the first few lines of the chapter.  Now, you can view the full text of each section before you check out - click on the “preview” links to the right of each chapter and section item of the book when you view the table of contents.

Another new feature is the ability to see all your guides as they go into production- before, if you built more than one guide, it only showed one of them being built. We’re also including a first release of Order History so that you can see (and download again!) any books that you’ve built in the past.

Enjoy the new release, and as always, let us know if you have any problems!

Howdy travelers!

We’ve been hard at work on version 1.1 since our first beta was released on June 1st. We’ve been going through your excellet feedback, and hopefully have fixed many of the major bugs that were lurking on private beta launch!

Our main goal with this release was stability- hopefully, you’ll notice a big difference. We cleaned up some of the styling and site content, streamlined the guide creation even more than it already was, and squashed a whole bunch of bugs. As always, if you run into problems, be sure to let us know.

We’re also testing a few new features, including the most popular feature request: When building a guide, you’ll notice a new “preview” link next to each section and subsection when the table of contents is generated. This will let you preview the information in that section before you build the guide. Note that it’s not perfect- you’ll notice that the preview is often incomplete (or missing altogether) - it also doesn’t include images or maps yet. We’re working on it!

Be sure to let us know what you think- we want to hear about the good and (especially) the bad! We’re not just looking for bugs and errors - if you find anything that’s not completely clear or doesn’t work exactly like you think it should, please email us at product@offbeatguides.com!

Earlier this week, we were having trouble with some mail providers flagging our email as spam. As of today, we’re able to successfully send mail to Yahoo!, AOL and GMail without any flags being raised. Hotmail (or Microsoft Live Mail), however, is a slightly different story.

If you’re a Hotmail or Live Mail user, make sure you check your Junk folder for messages from @offbeatguides.com.

The Junk folder, if you’ve never been it before, is just below the Inbox folder on the left-hand side. Click it and you should see a message (or two) from @offbeatguides.com. For each @offbeatguides.com email, select the message and then click the Not junk button in the top button-bar. You’ll only have to do this once and then Hotmail will remember your preference.

We’ve been in contact with the (remarkably responsive!) folks from Microsoft, and we’re working on the problem, so I hope we’ll be able to get all of you hotmail/live/msn mail users feeling the love soon. More as things progress!