We’d like to start this blog post by welcoming the new yearbook coordinators, Harry and Becky, who bring their skills and experience to our team! They’ve joined us temporarily to help us during the busy season for yearbooks, which is just kicking off.

As always, we’ve been working hard to create new features that make it much easier, faster and more fun to make yearbooks! We’ve just launched an update that has provided some overhauling to photos and collages.

The first thing you’ll probably notice from this update is that you can now rate photos. This should become quite useful for yearbook editors when deciding on photos to include in the yearbook, since this should provide a good understanding of which are the most-loved photos.

You’ll also notice from the above screenshot that there are some buttons beneath the photo rating area: these are for the yearbook editors’ future reference. If there is a photo that really should be included in the yearbook, then it can be marked with a star. On the other hand, if there’s a photo that probably shouldn’t be included in the yearbook, it can be flagged.

This is the new collage submission process, where you can select the photos that you’d like our designers to include in the collages they create for your yearbook. Starred photos appear at the top of the list, flagged photos appear at the end, and everything in between is sorted by rating, from highest to lowest.

When you first load this page, the list of photos to include is automatically generated based on importance and ratings — but you’re free to adapt this to your liking. You can also use the sliders to adjust the amount of photos you’d like to display on each page, along with the amount of pages you’d like them to span over.

Finally, in the examples drawer you’ll find an assortment of collages that we’ve previously produced for other yearbooks. If you find one you like, simply click the “Use as a creative reference” button to support your creative instructions.

We hope you enjoy these new features. If you have any feedback, please do let us know!

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

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

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!

Thankfully, we don’t see emails with a horrifying hyphen: year-book or year-books. But, we do see a LOT of emails asking about a year book or year books, and one of Jake’s earliest comments on ‘house style’ was about using the word yearbook without a space – I didn’t know you had a choice!

With a background in linguistics and language history, I am sad enough to find the distinction interesting, so I looked into the background of the word. (and you get to read about it )

My girlfriend spent much of her childhood in America, and went to school there,  so that seemed a good place to start. Her high school certainly talked about yearbooks and not ‘year book’ or ‘year books’, and she gave a characteristic sardonic look at the suggestion that anyone might.

So far so good – as we know, Americans invented the school yearbook concept. Sadly, as well as a linguist I’m a pedant (they go together), so I looked further, and that meant Wikipedia…

Yearbooks are published in nearly all schools and universities throughout the US, and also those in Canada and Australia, but the form changes considerably.

In America, the yearbooks feature the entire school, with extra space for leavers and lots more feature pages for societies and sports teams. By the end of high school you’d have four yearbooks – not bad as a way to track yourself through and keep up with all the people you knew from different years!

In Australia, the yearbook is more like a magazine of events throughout the school year. It’s edited by teachers on the whole, and can be so lacking in student life that enterprising year 12 leavers will frequently make their own yearbook to publish separately.

Yearbooks in England – a relatively new phenomenon – take to doing a single school year, and so tend to give more like a quarter or half a page per student (depending on price). Apparently, it’s more common for year 11 to break down into forms, and for year 13 to have all the members alphabetically in one group (we’ll have to check our statistics and give some Beta!)

Everyone in the world produces sponsor pages to get money flowing – EVERYONE uses ‘yearbook’ and not ‘year book’.

But Wikipedia’s not the best for etymology. It does, however, disambiguate to ‘year books’ which were English law reports detailing precedents and legal tradition from the 13th through to the 16th century.

This looked promising, and sure enough an online etymological dictionary gave the original sense of ‘yearbook’ as a book of case reports from the law-courts for that year. It comes from a compound of year+book.

The earliest citation of yearbook in this sense was 1588, conveniently placed to be the English language’s continuation of the ‘year books’ mentioned on Wikipedia.

Much later, in 1926, you get the first appearance of ‘yearbook’ in the sense of a school annual in American English – so, yes, the Yanks really did invent it.

There’s your answer. Year book and year books is out; yearbook and yearbooks is in. (year-book/year-books doesn’t even get near the door)

Obviously, spellings tend to be governed by current linguistic trends, but more to the point, there was a conscious shift from year book to yearbook, and it happened a long time ago. Not only shouldn’t we use the two-word ‘year book’, but we shouldn’t have been using it for the last 500 years

Yours faithfully – comments from the Cod

Our system is quite unique in that as you progress building your yearbook — inviting new members, uploading photos, adding custom pages and so forth — you are given the opportunity to preview exactly how your book will look once it’s gone to print. We’re keeping this useful feature but making important changes:

• Allowing members to upload two profile photos each
• Making our templates accommodate this second photo
• Text that wraps and flows professionally around objects on the page
• Rounded corners on borders and photos

The greatest change, though, will be that because of the new programming of our PDF system, we will soon be able to create unique, custom templates when one of our lovely customers requests it. For example, if the selection of templates provided doesn’t suit you or you like the look of one but would prefer it with a few tweaks here-and-there, we will be able to modify an existing template or create a brand new one for your yearbook.

Compared to our competition, I think this is getting the “best of both worlds” — everyone uploads their entries and photos online, the editors choose or requests a template and the final yearbook feels impressive and gleams with professionalism. Plus, unlike some of our competitors, you won’t need to wait a week or more for your template to be generated for you

The last few months in Jake and Jamey’s room haven’t just been about increasing monitor volume. While Nic and I keep on top of everyone’s needs, they’ve been programming like demons.

So what’s new? There’s even better security and backups for the online information and enough server capacity to support all the yearbooks people can throw at us. And come New Year, something else — a new and more versatile PDF creator for the online yearbooks!

First though, we should mention the yearbook chat!

This little feature — found now in the bottom right corner of the online yearbook — lets us give instant support and advice to editors, and editors can also use it to talk to each other. What’s more, Jamey spent an entire afternoon stocking it with open source smileys .

Jake intends to extend the system later in the year to have a separate ‘room’ for editors to talk to each other without our help desk getting involved, and potentially another room for all members to talk to each other too. It’s going to make for an awesome community within each yearbook.

I can’t speak for the tech side of things (although I know J&J gave a talk at a local Cambridge programmers’ meet that went down really well: Refresh Cambridge) but for helping customers it’s amazing! We can help with little queries instantly.

Even a little random chatter goes down well while it’s quiet still. Shows people are on the site and enjoying it!

Chat history has all the conversations stored, and so it’s a great place to gather tips. And from our end, all those emails with typos in are a lot less hassle