Blender Updates

Visitors to the Genre Blender this week will notice a slightly different look.  We restructured the site to have it run a little quicker, and also to fix some bugs we noticed when users tried to use the database with older web browsers.  Now the blender should work with up to three blends on older versions of iOS, and on older versions of windows.  Apparently we had a bug that was not offering user the option to blend in a third genre. Fixed!

I also took the opportunity to add some new titles to the database, which now top 550 titles.

The Blender has been live for almost five months, and in that time, users have done over 4500 different blends.  Most popular blends:

1. Historical Fiction / Mystery
2. Mystery / Romance
3. Fantasy / Romance

And since folks can now successfully search up to three genres, you must be wondering if there could really be that many titles with multiple genres. Yep.  The way I coded my data, with major (CAPITAL LETTERS) and minor (lowercase letters) genres, every combination of genres has at least one representative tiltle.  The rarest 3 genre combo? Horror/Romance/SF has only one title, The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill which actually boasts 4 genres, with a minor genre of adrenaline.  Believe it or not, there are 28 other 4 genre books in the database. But the blendiest book in the Genre Blender is Soulless by Gail Carriger which gets a FANTASY, historical, mystery, ROMANCE and science fiction designation. I love this book, and to me the dominant genres were fantasy and romance, but it does include a mystery (although it’s not the most compelling thing about the book) and it earns it historical and SF tags by virtue of being steampunk, an alternate history subgenre. I love everything-but-the-kitchen-sink books, but only if they are done this well.

Please enjoy the updated blender, and let me know if you notice it misbehaving in the future. I’m always looking for ways to improve it and make it more useful.