Monthly Archives: September 2008

Bug Fixes for IE

Well, I think I’ve found the bug that makes IE not work so well with Booko.  The section of the page which displays the prices is updated via AJAX (with a GET post), but the first chunk of text for that section (with the spinning icons) gets cached by IE. The solution is to add an Expires header to the response. The actions which respond to GET requests got the following code:

headers["Expires"] = "Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"

I should probably put a more correct value in there – but it’s always going to be set in the past at some point.

A Mass of Booko related things.

It’s been a busy week for Booko. I sent out some email to almost everybody in my address book, advertising Booko. If that’s why you’re here then, “Hello!”. Hello if you’re a friend of a friend.  But that’s it.

Thanks to Wendy, who recommended a new store, which I’ve just added to Booko – The Book Depository. Looks like it’s pretty competitive. Based in the UK, but with free World Wide Shipping it’s a good addition to the lineup. This brings the total stores searched to 16 – a nice round, base 2 number.

Angus & Robertson have updated their site. Looks pretty nice. One big improvement is that it’s now possible to link directly to book pages. For some reason, the URL for all book pages all begin with “fiction.angusrobertson” – I’ll have to keep an eye on that.  Performance seems way better than their old site.

Thanks to everyone who found bugs. The biggest downside of including your boss in your mass mail out is if he manages to find a bug. And naturally he did (Rob also found this bug). Turns out IE 6 sucks. If you search for a book, you only ever get spinning icons indicating that it’s looking up the price. It actually caches that page and never displays the prices. For this, I’m sorry. I’m not sure if I’ll fix it. I’ll have to check the stats and see how many of you are still on IE6.

Other bugs reported include another IE bug related to Javascript (Thanks Gilly!) and Paul pointed out that Booko degrades poorly when JavaScript has been disabled.

Feel free to send in any errors / ommisions / faults / bugs to bugz@booko.com.au

Random Booko updates

Well, I’ve added a blurb to Booko’s front page. Should have done this a while ago – makes it feel more like a proper website. It’s probably a bit too much text, but I’ll work on it.

Fixed a bug reported by Timo and Dan B (And probably others) – clicking “Add to Cart” before the prices were fully loaded made the cart behave pretty strangely – usually you’d get several items in your cart or some such. The problem was that the cart price can’t be calculated until all the prices are available. I’ve hidden the link to add items to the cart until all the prices are correct.

Figured out how to set a timeout for getting prices from stores – and set it to 15 seconds.  May need to tweak this a bit. Some shops were taking too long to respond.  (Thanks Dan B for the suggestion)

Tweaked the HTML for the cart, adding another separator. This site is now, without doubt, very separated.