Follow new updates and improvements to Chill Subs.
September 1st, 2023
Hello fall! I'm exhausted today, so short and sweet:
Editor admin panel:
Automated access requests (kind of)! Now anyone in the Chill Subs team can see access requests in our admin panel and approve them with a notification email, not just me looking at the spreadsheet once a week and then manually updating the magazine in the database... So faster access, yay!
Fixed magazine search in the claim access form - while doing the automation, realized that magazine selection had been broken for a few months (I don't know how you used it all, thanks for your patience)
Listing pages:
each genre card has a green/red circle now indicating its submission call status:) for example, here's Alien magazine that's always open for nonfiction!
Write or Die:
New workshop cards! We realized the old ones kinda covered the instructors' faces sometimes, so here are the new ones! (check them out here!)
Created a page where you can have a look at the zine created during Lilith's Noah "Let's Make a Zine" workshop! https://www.chillsubs.com/writeordie/materials/in-my-feelings It's gorgeous. And there's another workshop coming, so hop on that train! :)
General:
Since it's the beginning of the month, our stats page is updated with the previous month's financials! (and it automatically updates all the other categories) It's really cool.
Premium cabinet (if you're not a member and what to help us build awesome tools, here's your link)
Realized some of the defunct and hiatus magazines were still popping up in the recommendations, so removed those!
Now when you add recommended magazines to your submission plan, the page is not scrolled back to the top (which could be annoying when you scroll and add a few magazines)
soo embarrassing: the submission history tab automatically fetches data from the tracker looking for all submissions with this piece title. and I forgot to add "only from this user" so if your piece title was really simple like "Love", you'd probably see someone else's submission woof. No more!
Alright, that's it! We want to dedicate September to our browse. Improve our database management process, finish our audit, clean up the database, and make the listing pages even cooler and the editor forms actually convenient. It's A LOT. But we're excited to finally focus on this and make sure we're the most intuitive, the most up-to-date website out there.
And also! Want to improve our sign-in. We know it's been painful for some of you. We don't want this process to suck forever, so we're on it!
Have a great weekend everyone!đ
Best,
Karina
August 25th, 2023
Hey everyone, Karina here! We've decided to try this new feedback & roadmap portal until we have enough resources to do it on our website. Each Friday I'm going to write an overview of the website changes here and include the link in our newsletter:)
We're doing all this to:
1) Make our lives easier - Ben spends more time with his email client than his partner, so something had to change. So we're getting more organized with feedback!
2) Clean up our newsletter. One day we decided to make our newsletter bi-weekly instead of weekly not to send too many emails, but because we have so many updates all the damn time, that newsletter became HUGE (and likely impossible to read). So we want to go back to the weekly format and also try out this new approach of having a short overview in the email and linking to a more detailed post here:) (hopefully, we'll bring our blog back soon and we'll be able to host these posts there!)
Soo here we go, updates!
Yes, we're still working on that full database audit. We've been at it all summer. It's A LOT. But we're getting there. We've finally developed a system of daily tasks that need to be done in order to keep the database as up-to-date as possible (it involves giant spreadsheets, secret technique number 1, secret technique number 2, and a lot of tears)
Here are a few things that you can enjoy right now:
Cleaner browse! We just removed about 200 magazines that are defunct/abandoned/on hiatus from our browse. They're still accessible from your bookmarks/tracker/Google, but they now have their status next to their name!
Fixed a bug where magazines always open for submissions weren't showing up in the Open filter (in case you didn't know, our Open filter is not stupid anymore. Earlier each magazine could be either open or closed, with no reading periods or individual genre statuses. Now it accounts for all of that!)
Payment and fee info is separated by genre now too! So when you go to the Genre block on the magazine page and click Learn more, you'll see all the payment/fee info specific to this genre. And on the magazine card in the browse, the payment row is a range calculated from all genres now :)
Our current members can request beta access to our new premium tools ("My Pieces" drive, magazine recommendations tailored to your piece, cover letter generator, and prose formatter). If you're a member, claim access is here. If you're not a member, go here :)
Updates:
Piece form
Our piece editor is not stupid anymore either! Now it supports bold, italics and all that! Well not all yet... we're getting there! And we're looking for a way to make the formatter work with the editor's input to preserve everything.
Formatter
The formatter didn't register flash as a supported genre, fixed!
Recommendations
Magazine word counts were not showing up for flash, fixed that too!
And thaat's it for now! Thanks so much for sticking around, using the website, and spreading the word:) May your weekend be as peaceful as this Turkish cat's. Just chilling by the pool.