We’ve also brought online further servers to help us with two important tasks: creating previews of your books (the ‘Update PDF’ feature) and sending your books to the printing press when all is ready-to-go.

Right now everyone here at AllYearbooks is incredibly busy helping our customers finish the content of their yearbooks off, creating collages, awards pages, covers and lots more. Big boss man Jake is sending dozens of yearbooks off to print each and every day

Adding a messages or signatures page (when logged into yearbook: 'All pages', 'Add new pages…' and then 'Signature/messages', the fourth option)

Many of our customers choose to have a few pages at the back of their book like these, it makes it feel more professional and complete to have somewhere for your members to sign each others’ books and leave memento messages and farewells. Of course, if you have your own design you can simply upload this as a JPEG or PDF file directly into your book.

We also have a plethora of custom page backgrounds that can be assigned to particular groups of profile pages. If you have a particular background that you want to use, make sure it’s in JPEG format and exactly 2,554 x 3,583 pixels in dimension, then send it as an attachment with an email to our email address (find this under ‘Contact helpdesk’, last link on the menu, in your yearbook).

And finally, we’ve cleaned up the photo gallery area of the yearbook site. It should now be easier to add new photo folders and see an overview of your existing ones:

Cleaned up photo gallery area on yearbook site

Based on feedback from visitors and customers, we are currently on a mission to improve the ease of use and usability of our website. You should see many gradual improvements of the next month-or-so which will make both your and our lives easier. If you are having any troubles, problems or have any questions about your yearbook or the site, don’t hesitate to have a chat with us about it

Amazingly, there was a man standing in our office in about ten minutes! Now that’s what I call service! Completely amazed and confused ‘big boss’ Jake talked with the nice man, we moved the cardboard out of the office, and someone has just picked it up for recycling (rather than just going to the tip). Result!

Kudos to Cambridge City Council and the mysterious man who drives an expensive Chrysler! If only our deposits came in that early from our customers!

Normally I’m busy coding new features, fixing bugs and generally improving our website alongside Jake. But recently I was helping out for a brief period also designing the photo collages and so forth. We’ve hired more help – so far, in the form of Pratik (aka ‘the Master’, ‘Mr P.’ and dozens of other pseudonyms). He’s been beavering away helping Nic and David clear out some of the collage work and doing so remarkably quickly!

Now, on to the exciting news… next year’s website! We’re planning Big Things™ for next year; some of the ideas we’ve had so far are:

• Completely custom templates: This year we’ve been able to help quite a few of our customers out with having their own page design. However, next year a sophisticated, flexible system is currently being built that will allow you to have just about any design you can conjure up! But more importantly: we’ll be able to create and show you the design in breakneck time!
• Clean redesign: Jake has been busy prototyping a clean, streamlined and ‘Web 2.0′-feel redesign for our main website (the one you see when you’re not in logged into a yearbook)
• Going international: we’re thinking about expanding to allow yearbooks to be made from other countries, not just the UK, and hence language support on the website and the final printed yearbooks
• Facebook app: So many of our current users have an account on Facebook, so we think we should have the ability to complete and manage your yearbook entirely through a Facebook app
• iPhone and iPod Touch app: Continuing the trend of making AllYearbooks available whenever and wherever you are, we think an app for these popular devices would be very useful
• Chat rooms: the ability for all of the hundreds of members in all of our yearbooks being able to chat with each other, their editors and us – the trusty AllYearbooks team

Finally, here’s a sneak preview of what Jake has been working on and constantly refining to make sure that our website is very easy-to-use, modern and accessible:

A screenshot of the work-in-progress prototype design Jake has been creating for next year

We just launched a completely overhauled ‘Members’ area within our yearbooks. Instead of the slow, long list of members that it used to be, the Members page is now based around a fully-featured search that allows you to quickly see, at a glance, various useful things. For instance, our system now lets you see a list of members who:

• Are in a particular yearbook group, e.g. ‘Teachers’
• Aren’t in any of your yearbook groups
• Haven’t written anything for their entry
• Haven’t uploaded a profile photo
• Who have uploaded the most photos

And that’s not all! The essence of the new system lets you simple type ‘smith’ into the search box and find all members with that name, Google-style.

To follow up from the previous blog post, this short screencast demonstrates how photo uploading works for our yearbooks. The much-demanded feature to be able to upload more than one photo at a time is here.

In the future, we plan to add a Flash-based file uploader to enable everyone to upload files on-the-fly

Recently, we upgraded the photo management so that it’s now easier to use and work with. You can now navigate between photos in a fashion similar to websites like Facebook or Flickr; whilst viewing a photo, click on it (or click the ‘next’ link) to go to the next photo in the set.

The other major improvement is the ability to upload more than one photo at a time. We now allow everyone to upload three photos at a time, and each photo file can be up to 10 MB in size. (To save time uploading, we recommend you resize all your photos with the “Large” options using Image Resizer on Windows XP.)

Other notable improvements include:

• Mass captioning and adding of descriptions
• Browsing between: all of a members’ uploaded photos, all photos in a photo folder or all photos in your yearbook
• Using left/right arrow keys to quickly flick between photos in a set
• Rotation of uploaded photos

When we launched the new features last week, the chat system let us get immediate feedback from you, our customers, and the new site updates were well praised

Today, we upgraded the chat system to iron out some bugs, and add support for a certain less-capable browser that is still installed in a large proportion of schools and colleges: Internet Explorer 6. Our chat system now works fully on Internet Explorer (version 6 and later), Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and more!

So, if you’ve got any questions about your yearbook, the website or anything else, simply login and start chatting to us. During working hours (and often outside of them!) someone will reply within a few minutes, sometimes seconds

Lots of the copy wording on the main website and yearbooks area is being updated to make it more clear, concise and easy-to-use. As mentioned by David in that blog post, the large update culminated over two months worth of changes, bug fixes and effort which drastically improved the ease-of-use and speed of using our service

Watch this space, over the coming months you will see our website becoming even more straightforward and easy-to-use, making your favourite yearbook company even better!

Our main office server which hosts our network shares, backup system for the live website and a plethora of other things now detects whenever one of our USB backup drives are plugged in. The logic is: we plug in one of our backup drives at the end of the day, wait a few minutes for any changes to copy across (thanks to rsync), unplug and store them at home.

More importantly, all of our drives are fully 256-bit encrypted (not just password protected!) meaning that if one of these drives was lost or stolen, it be almost impossible for someone to crack the encryption and gain access to our customers’ data.

You can rest assured that here at AllYearbooks we take data privacy and security very seriously.