We’ve added the ability for listing pages to have a feature image. Think of these like the timeline photo at the top of your Facebook profile or the header images that can be added to your Twitter profile. Basically this gives you the opportunity to make your web fiction’s listing page stand out. Illustrations of the cast with your logo would work well.

Currently adding these is a manual process and for now is only open to the author (or authorised person), so please email info@muses-success.info (or message chrisclarke with the Muse’s Success PM system) with your image and the name of your novel. To help us verify who you are, it would be helpful if you could use the email listed as your contact address on your web fiction’s website.

The requirements are that the image is:

- 940 pixels wide.
- No minimum height but must not exceed 200 pixels (we may allow more height if you can provide a good reason but not much higher).
- Safe for work.

Please also mention your preference for whether the image appears above or below the page title (This Web Serial Title By Author Name). We may standardise on one or the other but currently this decision has not been made.

We reserve the right to accept or reject your image at our discretion. You maintain full copyright for your image — only granting a license for Muse’s Success to use it on listing (and related child pages such as recommendations, reviews) pages.

While code updates have been slow, Muse’s Success is not dead. I’m creating this post to inform you of where we are headed in 2010.

Firstly, lets speak about some recent changes that I announced on our Twitter account but not here on the blog. The rating average calculation has been completely rewritten and should in theory work better than the old one. We are now using a weighted bayesian average combined with some influence alterations based on various variables such as user level and how helpful a review has been. Rather significant is that if a user has both reviewed and normally rated an item, only the review is now counted, so we have eliminated the ability to vote twice using this method.

I’m working on tidying up the source code, and taking care of some issues. This is my main priority at the moment as any feature additions will build on this base.

Probably the next change you will see most visibly will be the addition of statistics regarding the user ratings being added to listing detail pages. You’ll be able to see how many guests have rated as compared to how many registered users, and the averages for each set of users.

After this, the next change to be rolled out will be the new homepage that I posted awhile back on Twitter, and revised URL’s. We will finally be getting rid of the redundent browse/view/ in the URL. It was simply a carry over from our WordPress days and isn’t really needed. You’ll be able to access listings with a URL as simple as muses-success.info/tales-of-mu/. Of course, we will keep the old url’s working much like muses-success.sorrowfulunfounded.com URL’s continue to work well after we have made the move to muses-success.info.

These are the most basic changes coming – I would love to announce more but I can’t be sure when I will have time to code them up. I’ll just say you can expect Muse’s Success to become much more open and transparent.