A new feature just went live that allows you to embed a small snippet of code onto your site in order to display sales rank information for your book(s). If you’ve ever used Google’s AdSense, you’re probably familiar with this kind of widget. The code snippet for any item Rankforest tracks can be found by going to that item’s detail page and clicking the “Get a widget for your site” link. As an example, this is the page for Freakonomic’s widget.

Some of you may have noticed brief (10-30min) outages over the past 4 days. I was working on upgrading some software on the server and there was an issue with the upgrade that took a few tries to get right. Things seem to be running smoothly now. Please let me know if you experience any problems.

Rankforest was upgraded to rails 2, which offers reduced memory usage and a slew of performance and security enhancements. The new and upgraded platform will serve as the base for upcoming feature upgrades.

Thank you for your patience.

I hope everyone had weather as good as what we experienced here in Atlanta this weekend. It’s been awhile since the last post and I wanted to mention some of the updates I have planned. I’ve received some good feedback that I’m working on integrating into the Help section. That should help new users get acquainted with the site faster. The site will also be migrated to a faster platform sometime before April 1 (so you know it’s not a joke). Both of these changes are actually fairly minor in terms of new things you’ll see but they should enhance your overall experience.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

Rankforest can now track actual sales at Amazon.com. The sales date and quantity are provided in a list format and can be used in conjunction with the charts to see how much a certain sales volume affects sales rank.

The primary limitation is that the sales must be mediated by the Rankforest website. For example, there are see this on Amazon.com links on each item’s detail page. These links lead to Amazon.com, and, if the item is purchased, the sales are tracked. Each item also has a special tracking URL that you can copy and paste into your own site. Using the URL is effectively just like linking to the item on Amazon.com, with the added bonus of having purchases tracked.

This feature is most beneficial to items that sell in relatively small quantities. A single author or small publisher that makes the majority of their sales through their own website links to Amazon.com could more accurately gauge the relationship between sales volume and sales rank.

The sales volume data will be updated at the end of each month. There are already several months of data available for any books that have sold through Rankforest in the past. The data for February will be posted in another week, so if you’re curious to see how things work you still have time to make purchases this month.

Any sales generated through these links benefit Rankforest.com. You can read a little more about this feature on the main page.

I added a new way to sort your collection. It’s called ‘fast moving’ and basically equates to the difference between the current hourly sales rank and the sales rank from the previous day. The difference is displayed next to the current hourly rank in red text. Take a look at a screenshot:

If the current hourly rank happens to be null (this happens once a day as room is cleared for the next day’s rankings) or the previous day’s rank is null (this could happen if you just added the book–it has to be around for a day before it has a daily rank stored) then (0) is displayed and signifies that there’s been no jump.

This feature pulls from the Amazon.com sales rankings for now and doesn’t show you how fast your books are moving on Barnes and Noble or Amazon.co.uk.

Update Also be sure to check out the latest new feature.

I just finished pushing a fresh code update to rankforest.com. Included in this update are several bug fixes, many of which went easily undetected. They weren’t harmful, but they sapped the site of some of its energy doing unnecessary work.

I also added a simple update to the book battle view that lets you hover over an image and see its title. This was suggested by a customer who frequently compares many similar looking items and was having difficulty discerning between them.

This update also includes the site notification feature that I mentioned a previous post and is probably the reason you’re here, reading this post.

Most importantly, this release includes major performance updates. The main item listing view should be 2-10x as fast as it was. The detail pages for items was improved similarly. The charts were also the recipient of some optimization love. You should notice your charts loading faster (after the first view anyway).

I have more updates planned over the next few weeks but I wanted to make sure things were blazing fast first. Nothing’s more annoying than a slow site.

I spent a good deal of time testing the new features but won’t deny the possibility that I might have missed something. If you notice any strange behavior don’t hesitate to let me know.

While the blog is useful for discussing features and maintenance updates, I can never be sure that everyone has seen the latest posts. To make it easier to keep everyone informed, I created a System Notification feature that simply displays a message within your collection if any system notifications are available. To the right of the notification there will be a “dismiss this” link that fades the notification away, never to be seen again.

It’s pretty simple, but I’ll be using it to announce upcoming features and site performance upgrades.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I updated some of the libraries and system dependencies that power Rankforest. The updates were primarily aimed at fixing security holes, but there might be a small boost in performance also. I hope everyone that could enjoyed some time off. More later!

As you may have seen, the new version of the site is finally up. I’ll be fixing issues and adding features more frequently than I have in the past now that the bulk of the work is done. I still have some great ideas queued up for implementation (grouping the items in your collection into sets and then viewing stats for each set is one) and appreciate any feedback. For the moment we’ll stick to getting everything that’s viewable now working perfectly.

A lot of progress was made this weekend. As a result, I’m working on the final few things I have on my list and then I’ll release. I still haven’t opened it up to my small cadre of beta testers, so they’ll get the first whack at things to help prevent glaring mistakes from going unnoticed.

Right now I’m working on a way to keep old urls working. The only place it’s critical–if it even is–is the detail pages. Right now the urls look like this: /detail/{ASIN}/{number}. The new urls are like this: items/detail/{number}/. I’m going to make some 301 redirects from the older urls to the new ones. The problem is that the new urls make no use of ASINs. I’m working around that.

The new Rankforest is both less expensive and more expensive than the current version. I’ve noticed that the majority of users track a single book, so I’ve created a plan that’s half the price of the current $6/mo to accommodate that. The prices go up from there and I’ve tried to fit the pricing schemes with actual usage patterns.

Back to work