⚙️ New page-level options

Yet another re-work of the notes page, this time with some new features! The dialog / thread options have been moved to the options button for notes, along with new options for transferring a note to a new page (Thanks mom for recommending this feature) and deleting notes. We have a bunch more features planned for page options so keep an eye out!

📰 New Biblish.com

Say hello to a whole new Biblish.com! We took some time to redo the main site, and have started working on some new products to go along with Papertrail. These are still very early in development, but we are excited to start expanding the Biblish universe.

⛔ New Authentication system

Visually, our sign in page should look the same, however it is now on biblish.com instead of Papertrail. This way, you can have one shared account across all of our (future) Biblish projects!

💻Technical upgrades

For those interested, we have been working extremely hard upgrading our code base to support multiple projects. What started as a single nextjs project is now a multi-project monorepo with shared packages across all of them to keep things consistent. With all this being finished, we are putting our efforts back onto Papertrail.

🐛 Minor Improvements and Bug fixes

• Real 404 pages
• “Explore” button on main page will now redirect to your library if you are already signed in
• Links in notes no long break width on small devices
• Signing in with apple should now properly follow redirects

📝 More Editor Improvements

This one took quite a while (Sorry!) and is the main reason we haven't sent out updates the last few weeks. We are back on track now, so stay tuned for more features! We completely remade the notes page from the ground up, drastically improving performance - specifically when switching what note is being edited. We are also able to improve the markdown render engine! Try out some of the new features like Github flavored markdown, gemoji support, and easier line breaks (no more needing to double space to make a new line!).

🧵 Threads

You can now start threads off of other users notes! These are private between you and the author of the note, and gives you a space to start a discussion around each other’s notes. We still have a lot of work to do for threads, so stay tuned!

🐛 Minor Improvements and Bug fixes

• Hitting next page now goes to the next page from where you are editing, not the actual next page in the book
• Preview state no longer sticks when switching notes
• Emails now have a link to unsubscribe (see bottom of the email)
• ‘Log in’ will now immediately show when loading any of the external site pages
• Bios are now visible on user profiles
• Users names will show if set instead of handles on user profiles
• User profiles now show the users handle
• Blank notes are not counted on the total note count on the explore page
• Profile settings no longer shows stale data after updating profile
• You can now subscribe to a users notes directly from their notes page on a book
• Most pages have a new bread crumb navigation
• Books without a cover on the search page now have auto generated covers
• Updated on-boarding to align with current site state
• And more!

📝 Brand New Note Interface

As you may have seen, we switched some things up with our editor. This will be most apparent to our frequent markdown users. We switched off of a ‘what you see is what you get’ editor in favor of a plain text editor. There were a few reasons for this, mainly because the old implementation was very unstable and prone to breaking with different user input, along with not quite supporting everything we wanted. If you are a an avid user of markdown, the new editor should feel much more consistent and easier to use.

💻 Syntax Highlighting for Code Blocks

This change also brings with it full syntax highlighting for code snippets, and consistency for any and all markdown across the site. There are some more features we will be implementing this next week, specifically adding in some github flavored markdown features so stay tuned 👀

⚙️ Per-Book Editor settings

We moved everyone that currently had an account on Papertrail to use markdown editors by default for books already in their account, but any newly added books will default to plaintext. Head over to your book settings if you want to change it!

👷Under the Hood Changes

As you may have noticed, we missed a change log last week (I was on vacation, sorry!) but we have still been very hard at work. These past 2 weeks in particular have been jam packed with upgrades to our current tech stack and refactoring out old code, and adding in some more admin tools for our analytics team. Next week will be back to user facing features, so be ready!

🐛 Minor Improvements and Bug fixes

• We have a logo! Check it out in this email, and on our site.
• Fixed hitting next page on mobile would automatically open the keyboard which would sometimes obstruct the next page button.
• Fixed handle not getting updated after creating an account in the side bar
• Switched to a new site font, let us know what you think!
• Added option to disable spellchecking in notes
• And more!

📫 New Invite to Read dialog

We made some tweaks to the layout of the notes page. Specifically, the book settings icon has moved to the top of the page next to the title of the book. In its place, you can find an Invite to Read button where you can invite your friends to your notes.

🤚 Request-able Notes

Private notes are now request-able! If you see someone reading something with private notes, but you are still interested in them, you can now request to have access to them. This is also paired with the invite dialog, where you can optionally automatically request to see the notes for a user that you invited to read your notes, even if they do not yet have an account.

🗨️ On-boarding Guide

A big request we got from our users was to add some sort of on-boarding tool to help people understand how to use the site. We will improve this over time, but we added a simple guide to help get you started on your reading journey!

🐛 Minor Improvements and Bug fixes

• Public notes are linked from a books page
• Explore page now highlights public notes
• Fixed some code block issue in notes
• Fixed loading page for book settings
• Fixed authors on explore page
• Fixed URL in the “Create your Handle” dialog when first signing up

What do you want us to work on next? Come join us in our discord and let us know!
https://discord.gg/6AkBphQWd3

🔗 New link previews

Papertrail now supports rich link previews. If you send a link to papertrail on social media, it will now have dynamically generated previews. For links to books, this will preview the book itself, readers, pages, and note count. For shared notes, this will show the author and the number of notes taken. Try sharing a link to check it out!

💻 Redesigned Layout

Not a massive change, but we removed the main header of logged in portion of the site into the side navigation bar. We think this looks a bit cleaner, and lets the main content of the site take up more room. Let us know what you think in our discord!

🐛 Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

• Trying to insert a code block in a note will no longer blow up the site 💣
• “Others reading” no longer includes you in the search page 🧑
• Hitting next page would show far too many shared notes in some situations ➡️
• Trying to use the site while logged out will now properly redirect you to sign in again ✋
• … And more!

New Home page

Check out your new homepage! You can now see your recent books, and any outstanding invitations right in one place. We have some pretty cool plans for future parts of this page, so keep your eyes out 👀

Search revamp

Searching for new books and searching your library just got way easier. Both now have full autocomplete for books already in the biblish library, and come with quick actions to help you find what you’re looking for. Searching for a new book also has some new additions, like being able to search by isbn, author, and more!

Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

• Fixed UI for adding a book and subscribing to an author from a book’s page
• Fixed UI broken scroll affecting smaller screens on certain pages
• New icon library being used for general purpose icons
• Added back button on book settings page
• Fixed previous shared notes not showing up in some edge cases
• Fixed changelog email not sending to all users
• Fixed library page popin when adding and deleting books
• Added confirmation dialog for deleting a book
• … And more!

Book pages

Each book now has a page showing its top note takers! Here you can directly add a book to your profile, and even share it with your friends.

New landing page

Say hello to our new landing page! Our site looks a little less bland, thanks to a screenshot of the site and some blurbs about who we are and what we do.

New Explore page

We now have an explore page where our top note takers and top books can be found. This is a great way to find new popular books, or popular note takers!

Settings page for notifications

Under settings > notifications, you can now set if you would like email updates for changelogs (Like this!) and invitations to book notes.

Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

• Fixed adding books that do not have listed authors, categories or publishers.
• Improvements to user profile page view
• A bunch of other smaller bugfixes

Oops! We missed a change-log last week, thanks to some crazy schedules, but we still have some new, cool features for you.

Profile Pages

You can now see and share profile pages. Here you can see what books your friends are reading. You can add those books, and if they are public notes, subscribe to them.

Book Pages

Books also have their own pages! When inviting people to read a book, they will go to the book page and be able to add the book to their library as well as subscribe.

New UI for notes

Notes are now more constrained and overall have a cleaner user interface, especially on larger screens.

Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

• Sharing notes now sends an email with an invite link
• Lot of misc UI/UX fixes

Infinite scroll for pages!

Notes will now automatically load as you scroll up or down in your, or others notes. This took us a few tries to get right, but the final product is well worth the effort put into it.

Shareable notes (kinda)

You can now share your notes with other people. This will be heavily improved in the coming weeks. To share your notes, simply replace /library/[bookid] with /[handle]/[bookid].

Minor Improvements and Bugfixes

• Searching for a book will now fade the screen during loading
• Going to the search page with text in the search bar will automatically search for that book
• Fixed sidebar not closing on mobile on navigation
• Timestamps for when the book was last read
• Publisher details in library book cards

Discord Server

We want to hear from you! We are building this platform for you, the user, so we want to know what you want. Come give us your feedback, suggestions, or just come and hang out with us! You can find our server here

New library features

You can now search your library from the search bar at the top of the page. You will also find a new “Add to library” button to search for new books. You can confirm the page count of a book before adding it to your library as-well.

Bug fixes

We had some issues from last week that we were able to fix up. Most importantly the settings page is now a consistent style / format. Taking notes was also sending too many requests, which should be fixed.

Another busy week here at Biblish. Here is the update for the week!

Notes!

This is our most important part of the app. Here users can take notes on a given book with full markdown support. Notes will automatically save as you type, and you can jump around to different notes as you wish. I will note, that as of writing this I have not implemented infinite scroll, so if you take enough notes you wont be able to get to some of your older ones, but dont worry they are still there. Some other cool features on the notes page include

• A progress bar showing how far you are in the book
• Next page / skip pages buttons for easily marking progress in your book
• Jump to note button to quickly go to a given note (this may not work for notes that are too far back for now)

Google Auth provider

Although you can see all of the different authentication providers, we are still working on getting the api tokens setup. Hopefully by the end of next week we will have most of them setup, but for now we have google and discord. (Currently we are in a google sandbox, and only allowed emails have permission to signup via google).

Privacy, TOS, and our footer.

Another important part of our site, we added pages for our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These were put in our footer which can be found on the blog, or any unauthenticated part of the site.

We were pretty busy this last week. We are proud to announce that logins and account creation is completely done, however we are not opening it to the public yet.

Profile Settings

Users can now change their bio, nickname, and avatar from a profile settings page. When logging in for the first time users will also be asked to select their username.

Personal Library

We have started on the most simple implementation of a users library. Users can add a book via ISBN, and if the book is in google’s database we will be able to add it to our system.

Other

We also had a lot of bug fixes and improvements to our infrastructure. This is the very early stages of the project so there is still a lot to do, and a lot to fix, so thank you for following us along this journey!

Hey there! Welcome to our little project. This is our very first change-log, where we give updates on the project and give insight into the process, technical and not. We will do our best to give updates at the end of every week, so stay tuned!

Our very own blog!

The blog and change-log are the first things we built here at Papertrail. We believe keeping customers updated and informed helps us not only connect with our users, but also helps us stay motivated. Shout out to linear for the inspiration in their article here.

Landing page

Starting out simple, we have a very minimalist landing page for people unfamiliar with our site.

User Profiles

Users can now log in with discord (more to come later), and access our site. We decided not to implement the traditional username / password flow for superior security and decreased friction when creating an account.
Keep an eye out for blog posts on how some of this stuff is built, the technologies we used, and more!