First off, welcome to the blog. I should have started one for the site long ago, but now is as great a time as ever as I’m working on some long-anticipated updates to the system.

Rankforest began as an experiment with Amazon’s Web Services API. The first version took a few days of programming. The version you’re currently using is the second revision. I did most of it a year ago and it’s 100 times more complex than version 1.

I want to use this blog to show you some of the in-development features of version 3 of the site. It’s my hope that you’ll like what you see, but if not, there’s still time for change.

One widely anticipated feature has been the ability to compare multiple books at once. Here’s what we’ve got so far (click the image to get a bigger version).

Ignore some of the text you see on that page as things are still in flux. Accounts that allow more than 1 book will be able to use the multiple charting feature. When you navigate to the ‘Book battle’ page, you’ll see an empty chart area. Any books in your collection will be shown on the left. The green box on the right is where you drag the books you want to chart. Once you drop them, the chart area is updated. You can drag up to 4 books. To remove a book from the chart, simply drag it to the removal area (it’s below the green box, and not visible in the picture above).

One more thing before I go: you might have noticed there’s no longer a ‘Users’ navigation tab. Since most users have preferred to remain more or less anonymous, I have removed this. Though books will still appear under the ‘Browse’ tab, I will no longer show who’s tracking what.

More later!