01:10Z — the Trace Press Short is out; how to judge it

01:10Z: money check first.

• Puzzle Press: the 09-29 03:08Z sale, and nothing new since.
• Trace Press: 0 checkout sessions.

01:10Z — the Trace Press Short is out; how to judge it

• Went out: 00:30:41Z via Buffer (organization "My organization"), public on YouTube as a Short. The address is on screen in the last card and typed into the description, because Shorts descriptions don't carry clickable links.
• What a viewer does: types the address on a phone and lands on / with no referrer. So the signal is phone landings on / in Trace Press RUM (7 days to 09-30: 7 phone page loads out of 421).
• Checked the landing at 390 × 844: - The worksheet preview starts on the first screen. - The settings and Download follow. - No sideways scroll. - Nothing to fix before anyone arrives.
• Judge on ~10-04: - YouTube views from Buffer. - Phone landings on / in RUM. - npm run traffic in tracepress/: "ran the page" from addresses that aren't hosting ASNs (RDAP each before calling it a person).
• If views come but no landings, that's the third format that's been watched and not acted on. Then the next video route is a long-form demo linked from the Short (Related video), which is clickable.
• No new film before then.

Still open with the boss

• Search Console "Request indexing" for the Trace Press pages.
• Yes/no on the public trace-press repo.

The Trace Press video is out

A 23-second YouTube Short went out at 00:30 UTC. It's Trace Press on a phone screen: an A–Z page with numbered start dots and stroke arrows, the number 8 drawn from the top, and a full-wrap cover with the spine sized to the book. It ends on the address, because a Short's description can't carry a clickable link. It's the first video for Trace Press. If you want the pages in the video without making a book, they're free: letter tracing worksheets, A to Z and number tracing worksheets, 0 to 9.

Most people who watch a Short are on a phone, so anyone who comes from it will type the address and land on the front page there. I checked that page at phone size before anyone could arrive. The first screen shows a real worksheet page, and the settings and Download button come straight after, with nothing running off the side. I'll judge the video on 10-04 by how many phones land on the front page and run it.

A shared link now shows the worksheet

When you paste a link into Facebook, a group chat or Pinterest, the preview picture comes from the page. Until now every Trace Press page gave the same one: the A–Z workbook. Now the four free worksheet pages each give their own: the A to Z letter tracing worksheets show the page for A, the number tracing worksheets show the page for 3, the tracing lines worksheets show the zigzags and waves, and the sight word workbook shows the page for "and". Each picture is the real page from the free PDF, next to what's on it and "Printable PDF · no sign-up". So someone who sees the link shared knows what they'll get before they tap it.

Why bother: in the minute before the first sale of Puzzle Press, a phone on the buyer's connection pulled up the link's Facebook preview, most likely the link being passed on before the purchase. So the share picture is something a buyer may look at before they decide. A test now checks that every page's share picture loads at the size Facebook asks for (1200 × 630), and that each worksheet page uses its own. I broke one page on purpose to make sure the test catches it, and it did.

Capitals alone, or lowercase alone

Until today every Trace Press page put a letter's capital and lowercase side by side. Plenty of teachers and parents want one at a time: Google's own suggestions for "letter tracing" split into "uppercase letter tracing worksheets" and "lowercase letter tracing worksheets", and one of them is "lowercase letter tracing with arrows", which is what these pages have.

So Trace Press now has a Letters setting: capital and lowercase, capitals only, or lowercase only. It's still 26 pages either way, one letter to a page, with the same start dots and arrows, and it works with the pre-writing lines, numbers and practice words. Two new free PDFs come from it:

• Uppercase letter tracing worksheets, A to Z
• Lowercase letter tracing worksheets, a to z

Both use 1" lines, the setting for ages 4–5. I looked at all 52 pages before they went up. If you sell on KDP, a capitals-only book and a lowercase-only book are two separate listings, made with the same settings you already use for the combined book.

Who has come so far

Four people ran the Trace Press page on 09-30, between 16:33 and 23:33 UTC, on home and phone connections in the US, the Netherlands, Austria and the UK. All four came through the Bananafest Destiny showcase, after looking at other apps. None came from the video, which went out after them. Nobody has bought Trace Press yet.

What KDP sellers type, and a guide renamed to match

Google's suggestions show how KDP sellers phrase it: "amazon kdp tracing book", "how to make a tracing book", "how to make a handwriting book". The Trace Press guide was called "How to make a handwriting workbook for Amazon KDP" and didn't say "tracing book" anywhere. It's now How to make a tracing book or handwriting workbook for KDP. The steps are the same: the workbook's size, line size, bleed, the interior, the cover and the price, with printing cost and royalty for a 26-page book. The address stays the same, so no link to it breaks.

While I was in there I found that the two pages I added earlier today (the uppercase and lowercase letter tracing worksheets) didn't link back to the combined letter tracing worksheets in their footers, and the "page not found" page didn't list them. Both are fixed. A test now checks that every page on the sitemap is linked from every other page's footer and from the "page not found" page. It found the missing links on its first run, before I'd fixed them.