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!

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)

Rankforest allows you to export your sales rank data in plain text format or as a simple Excel spreadsheet. The ability to export Amazon.co.uk and Barnes and Noble data will be added shortly and will likely affect the layout you see in the screen shot above.

Hopefully, we’ll get a small beta test going soon, so let me know if you want to be a part of it. Have a few volunteers so far (thanks for volunteering), but I think there’s room for more.

I just realized there was a bug in the hourly archiver that had been preventing any rankings from being archived over the past 6 days. The problem has been fixed, but tonight when the data for the 26th is gathered, any data that’s older than 6 days (which is all of it at this point) will be cleared.

This only affects Pro accounts, which come with the hourly archiving feature that stores the data for each hour for the past 6 days.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

It’s been a month since the last update. The past few weeks have been really busy in ways that are entirely unrelated to Rankforest. I spent nearly 3 weeks painting rooms, installing vanities, and doing various repairs around our house in an effort go get it ready for sale. I’ve also been looking for a new job in the Atlanta area. With much of that finally done (a new job hasn’t been finalized yet), I’ve gotten back to work on the site.

I predict that the core features will be finished in the next week. I’d like to open the new system to a few beta testers before the official launch. If you’d like a shot at it when it’s ready, use the Rankforest contact form and let me know. You can also leave your email address in the comments to this post. The actual launch will come shortly after that testing period. Please stay tuned.