25 Oct 2008
Another month has passed and we are glad to inform you that we have made various major improvements to MahShelf. We hope you enjoy your stay, and we will come back soon with more frequent updates.
- Explore: Yes! All 3 main categories (Comics, Manga, Others) are now in one place: the Explore tab. We have also made some changes with the sorting mechanism so you can find comics much easier.
- RSS Feed: Also in the Explore tab, you can now subscribe to each category to get the latest comics uploaded to MahShelf.
- Forums: As you can see, we have added a Community tab, with the whole new forums so everyone can go there and discuss whatever you want.
- Chat room: The Community tab has one public chat room. So if you feel bored, go there and shout out something :D
- Profile Info: More things for you to fill in and tell others more about yourself. Check your account and see the Profile section next to the Setting section.
25 Oct 2008
As you may know Flash 10 came out a week ago and due to its change in security policy we had to change the uploader as well as fix our flash player. It was fun doing pair programming with Kelvin. I myself was coding a brand new navigation, a forum and its feed. Thanks to MVC architecture, those things only cost me a week and it was a piece of cake. Meanwhile, Kelvin has completed tailoring the feed system and the flash player. Nice, MahShelf is running with its full speed.
25 Sep 2008
Phew, the last 3 weeks sure are busy. We have been working on a lot of advanced features to enhance our users' experience. This update consists of design retouching, small changes we have made, and reply to some feedbacks from everybody. So, here goes:
- Enlarge button returns: since the last time we took down this feature because of some conflicts in the codes, many users have mentioned about putting it back, as reading in fullscreen ignores other things going on such as instant messages and mail notifications. So now it has been repaired, and has yet to show any error. One thing should be noticed though: after clicking the Enlarge button, an extra click on the Flash reader is required. If you try to roll the mouse wheel right after clicking the Enlarge button, your web browser will immediately exit the enlarge state.
- Better exploring: there has been a problem that everyone doesn't know what to read and what's hot right now. So we have decided to change the 3 tabs Comics, Manga and Others to display all books, instead of just featured ones. They are sorted in terms of Book views (Most popular), Book rates (Most rated), Number of comments (Most discussed) and Date added (Latest)
- IE6 issue: oh yes. There have been a hell lot of bugs of MahShelf in IE6. We are really sorry for the bad experience you had. But for now please bear with us and upgrade your web browser to a newer version, or switch to Firefox or Google Chrome. Thank you for your patience!
- CBR and CBZ issue: unfortunately for security reasons, we can not accept CBR and CBZ, or RAR and ZIP file types right now. But you can always rename the CBR and CBZ files you have to RAR and ZIP, extract them and upload to MahShelf for now. We will try our best to solve this issue in the near future.
Happy reading!
MahShelf editor team
04 Sep 2008
Hello everyone!
Thanks for visiting MahShelf! We have been most impressed with the recent number of visits from our users. In this month we will keep releasing even more cool new features for reading and sharing digital comics online.
So, first off, we are extremely happy with the feedback we've known so far. We are determined to make digital comics become the most popular trend on the internet, and also, to turn digital comics publishing into a profitable business. That said, please continue to let us know if there's something you'd like us to improve. Just try suggesting something to us, and we'll prove how much we value your ideas and opinions.
Anyway, back to the new changes. Last month, we've added many improvements to the site. Some major ones are:
- New explore page and reading trend feature
We've been receiving many uploads each day. While this is really exciting, we realized that many visitors don't know where to start reading or discuss. Therefore, we bring you the new explore page, which can be accessed by clicking on the "view all" link besides the "Books currently being read" in main page. From there, you can easily find the most recent, most viewed, most rated and most discussed books.
Also, main page of MahShelf has a feature called "Reading trends", which shows particularly topics that are favored by other readers.
Suddenly forget what you've finished reading? You can use the "History" feature to help you quickly turn to the books you've read. This feature only available when signed-in.
When you subscribe to other users (Or add them as friends), you will receive notificatons of their new uploads in your "Account" page.
Sending personal messages to other users in MahShelf is now possible.
So, sometimes you just want to change your nickname, eventhough you don't want to change the account name. Now you can modify it from your Account page, in the "Profile" tab.
29 Aug 2008
This week we have banned over 50 books reported as copyright infringement. It is time consuming for us to find out whether the contents uploaded to our system are legally appropriate or not. Therefore, we are going to apply temporary banning to any user account that has copyright infringing contents as first time warning. Should the user is reported to continue uploading such contents, a permanent banning will be applied.
Starting from next week we will take this issue more seriously. We are relying on the whole community to help us monitoring the site’s contents. The “Report” button would be a helpful feature for you to inform us about inappropriate contents. We are working hard to bring you the best reading experience and social features of online comic books. And we will act immediately upon any report or feedback we receive.
04 Aug 2008
We have made a lot of changes around here for the past 3 weeks. First of all, as you can see, we have a "Feedback us" tab floating in the down right corner. You can send us anything from ideas to improve MahShelf.com or some errors occurred while using the site. We always appreciate your opinions and will do our best to improve this service the way you want it to be.
Now to the good stuff...our Flash reader has been upgraded once more. It rocks! I won't tell you everything we have done with it, as you can find them out yourself later. But here's the best part: when you read to the end of a comic book, other related books will appear right inside the Flash reader. So now you don't have to switch between Fullsceen mode and Normal mode whenever you finish reading a book.
Reading in Fullscreen mode is the best! And with this improvement, you will find it most convenient reading comics, manga and other graphic novels here at MahShelf.com.
Also, check out our Wiki page. You can access it by clicking the "Help" link on the top right corner of the site. This is where every usage of MahShelf.com will be listed and instructed. Your contribution in this page is mostly welcomed.
And to sum things up, we are very happy with this update. The future of reading comics online become a popular trend is within our sight. Thank you for your supports!
The MahShelf administrator team
21 Jul 2008
First we would like to say sorry for the inconvenience brought by the outage. Amazon, our storage provider, is having a service disruption that's causing problems serving our comics and manga content.
As far as we know, Amazon storage has been very stable, we have not encountered any service downtime since the beginning of MahShelf and they offer an SLA for the S3 service, guaranteeing 99.9% uptime. You can keep track of their efforts over on their own Status Dashboard.
Meanwhile, we will release a newer version of MahShelf after the outage. Possibly we will fix some minor errors and improve some user interface experiences. Please bare with us and come back after a while, we know this is no fun, and we’re truly sorry of what happened.
16 Jul 2008
The purpose of this entry is not to disparage the muxlim website but to remind myself that those things may happen to young startup and show the lesson of avoiding them.
- Try your best not to show the users errors, instead inform them something more friendly like "Oops, something weird happened".
- Why does Muxlim use the Agavi framework? Is it supposed to be the next generation one? I have never heard of it before I met the error. But the real question is that isn't it too risky to use a early-staged framework due to the lack of documentation and support? But I believe that the folks at Muxlim has made a right choice.
- Team MahShelf has something to learn from this error: let's release frequently and constantly. Look at the latest date that Muxlim released the next version of their website :2008-07-09. Let's move our asses to make the next release faster :D
- Doctrine is a good ORM in my opinion, so I need more time to think how to migrate from Propel to Doctrine and it will be a severe pain in my head. Oh well, it is still fine, I have made several "180-degree" decisions like that since I was in charged of MahShelf project :D
PS: For those who still do not understand this entry is about, Muxlim.com is a social network found in Finland and this entry was inspired by its error shown during its down time.
10 Jul 2008
Hi, long time to see in this blog. And that was because I have been in my summer holidays in Espoo, Finland. It is such a nice city though there was not many interesting activities there. For me, hanging out with friends is enough fun.
Here is the list of things happened while I am away:
- Tasks, tasks, more tasks are coming and I have no choice but to finish it in order to keep up with the schedule.
- A brand new forum for Vietnamese students in Finland. It was created with the passion to replace the old one which is not quite well-organized and supported. Take a look and enjoy yourself there. :D
Updated: Looks like the old admin board did not accept to migrate to the new one. I agree that the old one has been the playground for the early students for a while and it has a great impact on them. But why did not they realize that the old fun time just passed away, the playground is rotten because of the way they administrated it: full of irrelevant posts in some important forums, no connection with other Vietnamese students in other cities and absolutely no help to the newcomers.
I heard that the only (functional) admin shares no access to the control panel to the other admin. Therefore he is the one who responsible to upgrade, react on emergency and have total control on the backend. If that was true then I do not have anything to say more, a communist forum, ehr ?
Hmm, feel free to post comments here :)
03 Jun 2008
Every book now has its own external reader that you can embed in any website to share with others. Usually, all you need to do is copying the code from the book page and paste it into your website.
Unfortunately, not every forum and blog allows HTML code due to some security issues. However, most of them support the convenient tag [flash][/flash]
[flash]http://somesites.com/flash.swf[/flash]
All you need is a simple hack with those tag by copying the book code
And append it to flash url like this
[flash]http://www.mahshelf.com/swf/external_player.swf?code=kEukYkEqk4[/flash]
There you go, enjoy sharing your books!
