Yesterday we took the reference generator offline for nearly an hour to carry out a code and database update. The goal was to provide better and more accurate citations, that goal has been achieved even though the site was offline more nearly an hour. We feel it’s worth and hopefully you will agree.

Our service is built by aggregating book information from several sources (you will see these sources being acknowledged when you do a search). Naturally each data provider uses their own format.  We have been dealing that with successfully for quite a while. However occasionally we find that the same provider has subtle differences for different items of data. For example data provider A might have one format format for Catch 22 but  slightly different format for Battle Cry.  We had planned for it and our software is capable of detecting many of these subtleties and dealing with them successfully. However as the site grows and the usage increases, we are discovering new gremlins that we need to address. And that’s exactly what we did yesterday.

Foor example, you might have seen certain results where the authors data of birth had been prefixed to his name or you have have seen extra punctuation at certain positions. You might also have seen extra characters next to the year of publication. All these were manifestation of the subtle difference in formats encountered for certain data items – the gremlins. We are not complaining because the data providers re doing a great service without charging a penny for it. It’s up to us to accommodate them. And that’s what we did through the code updates yesterday.