Starting today I’ll be doing more and more of the site updates via Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter, it’s a site that allows you to post short status updates and messages. When someone begins following you on Twitter, they see your status updates.

You can check this page (or create your own Twitter account and join the conversation) to see Rankforest updates.

Let’s flash that number on the screen one more time:
http://twitter.com/rankforest

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.

I received an email from a user asking for a little help with adding new items to the Rankforest database. I created a video that shows the sign up process as well as the steps you take to search for and add a new item to the database. The quality isn’t spectacular but it should help give you an idea of the flow.

There are also a few more videos available at YouTube.

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!

Some of you may have noticed that even if you had a paying account you couldn’t see beyond 30 days when selecting a date range from the drop-down on the book detail page. This was definitely a problem and it should be fixed now.

This post would have been a little more appropriate right at the end of 2007, but here it is anyway. This is a list of the top selling items (they all appear to be books) listed on Rankforest, according to purchases generated off the product detail pages.

• Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball
• Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
• The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed
• Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)
• Securing Global Transportation Networks
• The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
• Ansel Adams 2008 Wall Calendar
• Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
• On Beyond Zebra! (Classic Seuss)
• Protect and Defend: A Thriller
• The Hidden Language of Baseball

It would have been a list of 10 but the last couple items tied. Ultimately, I think it can be useful to try and buy products (or recommend that others do) through the Rankforest links. The date of purchase will eventually be tied into the charts system so that you can correlate sales rank fluctuations with dates your book was purchased. (Also, buying through the detail page links supports Rankforest).

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.