Rankforest has collected nearly 2.3 million individual sales rank data points since the service began in 2005. If your book (or CD, DVD, etc) isn’t being tracked yet, add it using a free account.

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!

Tell her about it
Tell her everything you feel
Give her every reason to accept
That you’re for real

I watched an episode of Scrubs last night that was centered around those lines. They’re somewhat relevant here, anthropomorphically speaking. I put up a new site poll here. If you’ve got some time, let me know what features you’d like to see. If something’s not listed, please contact me and I’ll add it to the list or otherwise take it into consideration.

Oh how I wish a picture of me on my computer could have made it into Lyndon Stambler’s article on Amazon sales rankings. The article is an interesting look into the world of Amazon rankings. Though Amazon has dropped sales volumes, there’s still a lot you can get from the rankings, even if some is inferential. With Rankforest’s charts, you can gauge the effect of a bookstore promotion. And by using rankings gathered from Barnes and Noble and even Amazon.co.uk, you can get a better picture of how your book is doing.

It’s been awhile since the last post. I’ve been pretty busy the last couple months caring for our dog, who has lymphoma and hasn’t responded well to any treatments.

I’ve been mulling some new features based on feedback I’ve received recently. I’ll try to bundle it up into a poll in the next couple of days to see which things you’d find most useful. Nearly half of the site’s visitors (the other half is comprised of IE and all the other browsers) are using Firefox. I’m working on a new charting option that those using Firefox will be able to utilize.

A few small bug fixes/enhancements were implemented this weekend. A more friendly 404 page was added to help guide incoming hits to the new pages since many URLs changed. The most important change affects how the hourly rankings are reported on the chart. The mess I described in the previous post has been replaced with something more readable. The times are reported in EST for now, no matter where you are.

Currently, the numbers along the x axis of the hourly ranking charts don’t mean a whole lot. The first number represents the ranking gathered at about 1AM EST. From there it progresses hourly (if you have an upgraded plan) or every four hours. Let’s say you currently see rankings for 20, 21, 22, and 23 at the bottom of your chart and that you’re on the free plan with updates every 4 hours. The first number (20) corresponds to the first hour of data collection (around 1AM EST). It follows that 21 is from 5AM, 22 from 9AM, and 23 from 1PM. (This means that at 5PM, when the next update occurs, the chart will start showing the series 19,20,21,22,23 on the x-axis)

I have a more readable solution in the works, but the charts will remain that way for another few days.

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

My apologies to everyone for the dearth of posts and updates. Not a whole lot has happened on the Rankforest front over the past month beyond some progress on setting up the new servers.

In the past month I found a new job in Atlanta and we moved. A lot has happened around that. I’m finally in a position to put some more time into the release. A lot of the work will center around configuring the server and making sure that all of the currently tracked books are moved over in as seamless a way as possible.

The new site will have different urls. I’ll do my best to redirect you to the appropriate page based on the older urls, but some urls will probably stop working entirely.

Thanks for your support!