Rankforest will debut with the ability to show you how books similar to yours are selling. Similar books are those that were purchased by customers that bought your book. With this feature you can see how well you’re doing within a particular sphere of consumer interest.
Once you have an account, you can add new books (or music, DVDs, etc) to the tracker. The amount of new items you can add will depend on your account level. Since 80% of what’s added to Rankforest is books, the default new item search form constrains the search to books on Amazon. This should make finding what you want to add easier. If you need to open the search space to all of Amazon, simply click the link out to the right of the search button.
Each search will present you with the items you’d see if you were searching on Amazon’s site. To begin tracking an item, simply click the Add link out to the right of each item and sales rank statistics will begin being collected.
I still haven’t had a server provisioned but I’m told it could be this week. After spending some time configuring it and setting up the new Rankforest, I’ll invite the people who have expressed interest in beta testing the site (if anyone else is still interested contact me or leave a comment).
Well, the hosting provider I’m planning on going with has quite a backlog. The 2.5 weeks I had mentioned in a previous post turns out to be more like 5 weeks. That’s really more than I care to wait so I’m planning to just pay more money up front in order to get to the front of the queue. Hopefully I can start tuning the server within the next week and a half. The new Rankforest will be running on a setup similar to the one depicted in the following image, for those that are curious:
(image via o’reilly)
Update: It seems Pound spawns a lot of threads per connection, so I might consider Nginx as the reverse proxy balancer.
I had a job interview last week that I’m really excited about. I’m still waiting to hear back, but the whole experience delayed my progress. Additionally, I just found out that the wait list for the new servers I’m moving to is about 2.5 weeks 3 weeks (ouch). I think in the end they’ll be worthwhile.
Once again, if you’re interested in the beta test once it’s ready, just let me know (you can use this or leave a comment)