[trumpet sounds] [like a fanfare, not a brass band. obviously] [although I do like brass bands]

I am proud to announce... the new Snowbooks website!

[trumpets end]

The website - well, really, the online system which generates it - has been about six months in the making, ever since Rob waved a red book at me which looked intriguing. The book was called Ruby on Rails Tutorial. After reading that book, and several other equally thick ones, and by asking a lot of questions on places such as stackoverflow, I haven't looked back. I have had the *best* time learning Rails - it's been enjoyable to build something out of nothing, and a huge source of pride to do it well.

The result is Bibliocloud - an online system which contains all our bibliographic, title, contract, sales, print, contributor and marketing data. I've also just run this period's royalties, rather successfully, through it. (I've linked to the site, but there's no point in going there yet - there's nowt to see unless you have a sign-in. Which you don't. And it's SHA1 hexdigest encrypted, in case anyone's feeling nosy.)

At some point later in the year we're going to release Bibliocloud as commercial software. You can let me know if you're interested and I can keep you posted. But until it's ready, I'll be running it privately in beta. It's already got a full test suite of 2000 tests, but using it for six months or so will allow me to get it very finely tuned. Only perfection will do.

Here's a video with a bit of a guided tour. Do shout if you have any feedback, not just on the website but on the data itself. We've always liked automation, but now it really is a question of pressing just one button to update the website as well as our Onix feeds and AIs, so I'm going to be on a bit of a data-update frenzy over the next few weeks. So if you see any gaps - and there are plenty, in author bios, reviews and endorsements - then do drop me a quick note.