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Pages that stop breaking when we ship
v38August 18, 2026- Every time we released, anyone with Rulebound already open could hit a dead end — the page they clicked to had been replaced mid-visit, and the site answered with an error screen whose “Try again” button could never work. It turned out to be the most common fault on the site. Rulebound now spots that exact situation and quietly reloads the current version instead, so a release you happened to be reading through is something you'll never notice again.
- Search now tells you when it's the one struggling. If the index is too slow to answer, you get a plain “this is on us, try again in a moment” and a way through to browsing — instead of an error page that made it look like your search was the problem.
- Addresses that were never real books — the ones automated scanners probe every site for — now land on a normal “not found” page rather than an error.
Softer landings
v37August 11, 2026- The pages our ads point to now show a proper loading state while they fetch, and if something breaks there you get a clear error screen with a retry — not a blank page. Small, but it's the first thing a first-time visitor sees.
No praise nobody gave
v36August 5, 2026- The demonstration books carried badges — “Expert-reviewed”, “Popular”, “Cited” — and two dozen glowing reviews from readers who didn't exist. All of it is gone. Reviews written by actual people remain, and a book will only carry a badge the day it earns one.
- Three Explore filters existed only to sort by those badges, so they've gone too. What's left — Recently updated, Most saved, Free, Premium — is backed by things that really happened.
One honest name instead of twelve invented ones
v35August 5, 2026- Yesterday's release labelled the books we wrote in-house as demonstrations. That was the quick fix; this is the real one. The twelve invented authors are gone, and the books they carried are now published under a single byline — Rulebound — with the explanation on that one profile instead of a notice on every book. Nothing about the books themselves changed, and every other book on the site is written by the person whose name is on it.
Saying which books are ours
v34August 5, 2026- The books we wrote in-house to demonstrate the format now say so. Rulebound's whole argument is that a named author and a visible history are what separate a rule book from filler — which doesn't survive a starting catalog of convincing authors who don't exist. Those twelve books and their author pages now carry a plain note, and Explore says it up front.
- We now count visits ourselves, so we can see which pages actually lead somewhere instead of guessing. It runs on our own servers, sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device, and involves no third party — the privacy policy has a new “Visit measurement” section spelling out exactly what is recorded and what isn't.
A tune-up under the hood
v33August 5, 2026- A performance pass: pages now ask the database for everything they need at once instead of one query at a time, signed-in state is looked up once per page instead of four times, and the images behind link previews fetch a fraction of what they used to. Nothing looks different; most pages are simply quicker.
Saying only what's true
v32August 4, 2026- The home page claimed a book could be “co-authored, with reviews and comments.” It can't — a book has one author. That card now describes what actually exists: forking someone's published book into your own, with the lineage visible on both.
A better reader, and a profile of your own
v31August 4, 2026- Bookmarks and notes now live in the reader itself: the contents drawer gained Bookmarks and Notes tabs, and on wide screens it docks beside the book instead of covering it.
- The ribbon is a real bookmark now — click it to mark the rule you're on, click again to remove it — and it no longer lies across the text.
- Notes you wrote came back empty until you reloaded the page. Fixed; they also show up in the new Notes tab.
- “Start reading” now picks up where you left off, with a separate “From the start” for going back to page one.
- New profile page: your picture, name, role, location, focus, and about text, plus email and password, and a setting for whether your author page is listed publicly or reachable by link only.
- Two new front doors — /for/teams, on turning your team's conventions into a handbook people read, and /for/authors, on publishing the principles you've spent a career collecting. Both show a real rule pulled live from a published book, because that shape is the whole argument.
A menu that knows who you are
v30August 4, 2026- The header and footer now show only what you can actually use: visitors see Explore, Context Packs, and Create, while your Library, Lens, and Trails appear once you're signed in — no more links that dead-end at a sign-in wall.
- Phones finally get a proper menu. The header collapses into a clean drop-down with search and every section, instead of hiding navigation on small screens.
One address for everything
v29August 4, 2026- rulebound.ca is now the one true address: the www variant and our hosting provider's default domain permanently redirect there, so links, bookmarks, and search results all point to the same place.
- The site map search engines read now includes every category shelf — Programming, Design, Life, and the rest — so a search for a topic can land you straight on the right shelf.
The production-hardening release
v28August 4, 2026- Every save now tells you the truth. If a note, rule edit, or pack change can't be written, you'll see “Couldn't save — retry” instead of a false “Saved” — across the studio, the reader, packs, and trails.
- Faster, smoother browsing: pages show a proper skeleton while they load instead of a blank frame, cover art lazy-loads, and the database got a round of indexing so lists and libraries stay quick as the catalogue grows.
- Sharing looks the part: every book now has its own share card in the book's cloth colours, and links carry the right rulebound.ca addresses everywhere.
- New Privacy and Terms pages spell out — in plain language — what we collect, what we never do, and what your authorship means. Both are linked from the footer.
- Under the hood, errors on our side now reach us with enough detail to fix them, usually before you'd think to write in.
A new mark: Bound Set
v27August 3, 2026- Rulebound has a proper logo — two brackets holding three rules, the first in copper. It reads as an open book and as set notation for a defined body of rules, which is more or less the whole idea.
- You'll find it across the site: in the header and footer, on the sign-in screen, stamped as a small colophon on book covers, quietly behind empty shelves, and animating rule by rule while a book opens.
- Browser tabs, home-screen icons, and shared links all carry it now too, at weights tuned for each size so the mark stays legible down to 16 pixels.
Describe a book and Rulebound drafts it — with illustrations
v26August 3, 2026- The blank page is the hardest part of a rule book. Now you can write one sentence — “a rule book for golfers explaining how to hit irons” — and get a whole draft back: chapters, numbered rules, the reasoning behind each one, what it looks like in practice, and when it doesn’t apply.
- You see the book’s shape first — its title, cover and chapter list — while the reasoning is still being written, then a review screen where you edit every field and cut whatever doesn’t belong. Nothing is saved until you say so, and it lands as an unpublished draft under your name: publishing stays your call.
- It tells the truth about what it wrote. A book drawn from a TV series or one person’s philosophy is classed as opinion, not best practice; it invents no citations or statistics; and it notes the assumptions it made. Books inspired by an existing work get original rules in that spirit — never its dialogue or catchphrases — and the About page says the book was AI-drafted and from which brief.
- Rulebound can also illustrate a book: an engraved cover emblem, and a plate facing any rule that helps it land. The drawings are vector line work in the book’s copper, so they stay crisp at any size and read on paper, sepia, and night pages alike. Draw, redraw with a description of what you’d rather see, or remove — per rule, from the studio.
Context Packs: hand someone the exact set to start
v25July 20, 2026- Onboarding to a task used to mean a book, a wiki, and “ask Sam.” A Context Pack is the curated minimum instead — the exact rules, cards, recipes, notes, checklists, access instructions, and links a newcomer needs, in reading order.
- Mix live and pinned references per item: a live reference always shows the source book’s current edition; a pinned one captures a fixed edition and never drifts when the source changes.
- The pack tells the truth about freshness — live items flag when their source book has moved since you last reviewed the pack, and a pack past its review date says so.
- A pack never grants access it shouldn’t: private content a reader can’t already see simply doesn’t appear, and access-instruction fields say how to request access — never carry credentials.
- Readers work through a pack top to bottom with saved progress; maintainers build and share from a studio, public or by unlisted link. Find them under Context Packs in your library.
One recipe, every platform: environment variants
v24July 17, 2026- A recipe can now read correctly on Windows/PowerShell and macOS/Bash from the same document — no more forking a whole recipe and watching the copies drift.
- State your environment (OS · shell · target) at the top of any recipe and the steps rewrite themselves to match. It's always shown which reading you're getting; nothing is detected automatically.
- Authors add per-step variants in the studio: narrow a whole step to some environments, or give a step a different body per platform, with a fallback for everything else.
- If you state a context no variant covers, the step says so plainly rather than quietly handing you commands for the wrong platform.
Reproducibility Review: “works for the author” vs “works for you”
v23July 17, 2026- Recipes now carry a readiness status — Draft, Ready for testing, Tested by author, Independently reproduced, Verified — earned by evidence, never self-declared: “Tested by author” needs a successful recorded run, and the independent statuses need another person's feedback.
- Authors can run a Reproducibility Review in the studio: fifteen concrete checks (missing tools, versions, sign-ins, hardcoded paths, rollback, success criteria…) each marked passed, needs attention, or couldn't be determined — with the exact edit that fixes it. No unexplained scores, ever.
- After running a recipe, you can send the author structured reproduction feedback: whether it worked, where it diverged, and in which environment. Authors can turn a failure report into a failure note attached to the exact step, one click.
- Verified recipes show which environments they were verified in, right on the badge.
rulebound.ca
v22July 16, 2026- Rulebound has a real home: https://rulebound.ca (www works too), with HTTPS throughout.
- The old azurecontainerapps.io address keeps working, so existing links and bookmarks don't break.
Housekeeping: deletes, feedback, and this very page
v21July 16, 2026- You can finally delete a rule book — a Danger zone at the bottom of the studio, gated behind typing the book's title.
- Navigation now shows a slim progress bar at the top of the page, so slower page loads visibly respond to your click.
- This Updates page: every release, what changed, and why.
- A contact page — questions, bug reports, and ideas land with us directly.
- A newsletter you can subscribe to for weekly update summaries.
Lens Draft: turn a work trail into a recipe
v20July 16, 2026- End a work trail and Lens can distill it into a draft recipe — the steps that led to the result, in clean order.
- Every proposed step cites the trail entries it came from; anything Lens infers without evidence is labeled a gap and excluded until you opt it in.
- Dead ends become failure notes attached to the recipe; project-specific values become placeholders, secrets never survive.
- Nothing saves until you review the draft and choose one of your books.
Professional polish
v19July 16, 2026- Loading skeletons across the app, friendly error pages with reference codes, and branded 404s.
- Under the hood: client-side telemetry so we can see and fix real errors faster.
Work Trails, Failure Notes, and Field Notes
v18July 16, 2026- Work Trails: a private working journal — paste commands, errors, and decisions as they happen; convert the keepers into book content.
- Failure Notes preserve what didn't work — symptom, cause, and fix — attached to the rule, card, or recipe step where the next person will hit it.
- Field Notes capture observations and lessons per chapter.
- Recipes now show "If it fails here…" troubleshooting on steps with attached failure notes.
Meet Rulebound Lens
v17July 16, 2026- Paste a situation — a plan, a PR description, a decision — and Lens reads it against books you choose.
- Findings are grouped into conflicts, applicable rules, and considerations, each citing the exact rule it came from. No citation, no claim.
- Every analysis ends with a grounded checklist of concrete next steps.
Recipes and Run Mode
v16July 16, 2026- Recipes: ordered, repeatable procedures with prerequisites, per-step verification, and rollback notes — authored in the studio like everything else.
- Run Mode: step through a recipe and record how each step went; your run is private evidence, never an edit to the published recipe.
Command Cards and the command palette
v15July 16, 2026- Command Cards: the exact command with placeholders, when to use it, and what success looks like.
- Fill placeholders and copy — destructive commands ask for confirmation first, and secret values are never stored.
- Press ⌘K anywhere to search commands across your books.
Author books as rich as the originals
v9July 15, 2026- Worked examples with side-by-side ✕/✓ code panels, editable per rule in the studio.
- Sources and related-rule links, live-editable.
- Upload your own cover art.
The honesty pass
v8July 15, 2026- Real numbers everywhere: the landing stat, follower counts, and "Most saved" sorting now reflect actual activity.
- Clearer sign-in and sign-up messages — including "that account already exists".
- Review tags you can self-select are now only ones anyone could honestly claim.
Reference Mode and real covers
v7July 15, 2026- A deep per-rule reading mode: sticky anchors, side-by-side code panels, related-rule jumps, and linked sources.
- Cover art for the flagship books and rebuilt author pages.
A library that remembers where you were
v6July 15, 2026- Resume rows with your rule position and progress bar; bookmarks deep-link straight into the spread.
- Search now looks inside chapter titles and rule text, not just book titles.
- Reading-time estimates on every book.
Launch-day polish
v5July 14, 2026- Fixed the landing shelf and mobile header layouts.
- Security hardening on the database policies that keep private books private.
Rulebound launches
v1July 14, 2026- Living books of hard-won rules: chapters, numbered rules with reasoning and exceptions, read in a two-page spread.
- Write your own, remix others', publish editions, and build a library.