Heavy snow keeps Bill on the go

By Ed | December 22nd, 2008 | Category: Bonanzle | No Comments »

Bonanzle’s Bill Harding has blogged that he’s going through some of the coldest weather on record, complete with two snow storms that have already happened, and a third one scheduled to arrive over the weekend just past.

Apparently he’s always been a big fan of the “snow day” (a day when it is officially not possible to get to work or school). However, since his daily commute is all of about 15 steps, which is even longer than mine, taking a “snow day” is a bit of a problem.

He kept the “snow day” spirit alive anyway, by taking a break from the usual “todo” list and adding features he’s been wanting to add to Bonanzle.

Switching between pages “in booth” no longer refreshes page. Which means that it’s faster to browse through big booths, and that if you’re chatting in a booth, you won’t have to refresh your chat when you move to a new page. He also rates it as “looking cool”.

Email, blog comments, and hand picked lists now have same formatting options as forums. That is, smileys now register as smileys, and you can use bold, italics, and pictures and stuff. A help page about the site-wide formatting rules is to follow.

Doing an item search now searches for users and hand-picked lists as well as items. If a user’s name, or the words in a hand-picked list match the term you search for, it will get highlighted at the top of the item search.

Also added was the most highly requested feature on the “Next Up” list: you can now determine the price for calculated shipping items from the items’ page. If you’re logged in, it will use your zip code to calculate. If you’re not logged in, it will ask your zip code and use that.

Late in the day he decided on the next fun thing to add, and added it. As he only gave a hint, it had the Bonanzlers going Bananazles trying to figure it out. One of them is convinced it’s a feature that shortens booth URLs allowing them to fit more easily onto business cards.