September 19, 2008
Sunday morning 21/9/2008, the new bol.com store was temporarily online.
It is definitely an improvement to the old site. Previously when searching for the band daryllann, there were no results whatsoever. The new site now changes the incorrectly spelled band name to the correct spelling. This means that the site is more forgiving to spelling mistakes. This should help conversion rates. Although….. the album Renko found on Bol.com is not the correct album: Renko…..bol.com still have to sort out some data issues.
Revamped product sections
All product pages are revamped, but especially the games, DVD and music sections look hugely different. The site looks and behaves the same across the different product groups now.
I love the feature that you now can search for children games or hardcore games. Ordering a PEGI 3+ game for a four year old is not what PEGI is about. PEGI rating just sucks™
Shopping basket
The shopping basket and checkout has pretty pictures.
Nice eye candy.
Pretty urls
http://www.bol.com/nl/p/games/metal-gear-solid-4-guns-of-the-patriots/1004004006052238/index.html
Bol.com has got rid of all the ugly urls they used to have. SEO to the max.
Payments
Unfortunately the Postbank was experiencing problems which caused problems with my Postbank credit card or iDEAL payments. This killed some of the experience, but this is not something Bol.com can help. It was handled gracefully on the bol.com site. My Visa card had no problems whatsoever… Good… good..
Next steps?
ATG and Endeca transformation almost done. Time for the next phase….
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ATG, Digital world, Endeca, bol.com | Tagged: ATG, bol.com, Endeca | 
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Posted by Ronald Pulleman
September 7, 2008
Update September 8th 2008 As can be read in the comments by Aldo: a better, although not free solution is Audiobook Builder
I am a member of emusic, the retailer that offers a selection of independent music and audiobooks.
One thing which always bothered me a bit was the audiobook format. They split an audiobook in dozens of mp3 files which are not the best solution if you use iTunes and an iPod.
iTunes and the iPod have the so called bookmarkable format, that is, the track will resume playing wherever you left off the last time you played it.
There is a lot of information on the net, but I could not find a step by step process for the Mac how to convert emusic audiobooks to iTunes audiobooks.
This is my procedure for Mac OS X.
- Download two Applescripts scripts from Doug’s AppleScripts: Track Splicer and Make Bookmarkable. Install them as described.
- Add the emusic audiobook files to iTunes. They will be stored somewhere under music.
- Select the audiobook mp3 files. Make sure they are ordered correctly and run the Track Splicer script. This will create one big mp3 file.
If you like to split it in a couple of 1 hour files, like an iTMS audiobook, then select a smaller number of files and repeat the procedure.
- Select the mp3 audiobook and convert it to an aac (m4a) file with iTunes. (Right mouse: Convert Selection to AAC). Use a bitrate
applicable for audiobooks, since 256kbps or so seems like a waste of disk space.
- Select the aac audiobook and run the Make Bookmarkable script. This will convert the m4a file to m4b file. When you look under
Audiobooks you will see your converted book.
- For nicety find a cover and add it as album artwork.
Enjoy!
8 Comments | Mac OS X, emusic, iPod, iTMS, iTunes | Tagged: audiobooks, emusic, iTunes, m4b, Mac OS X | Permalink
Posted by Ronald Pulleman
