Welcome to the September edition of the Book Notification newsletter.
This month, a primary focus of our work was on site speed. Our goal is to ensure that Book Notification delivers an optimized and fast experience for all users, and that it passes all of the Core Web Vitals tests issued by Google.
We already have excellent hardware infrastructure in regard to speed, but there are a lot of software and coding related enhancements we can do to make things even faster. Unfortunately, with a site like Book Notification, it can make things rather complicated.
Caching webpages to save on database requests is a common enhancement. This caches a version of the page on the server, so that when a visitor clicks on the Lee Child listing, rather than our system having to run various database queries to generate the page, it instead serves the previously generated page.
This works great for static webpages. However, Book Notification has ever-changing dynamic data, such as “most-read” status of books, average ratings etc. We don’t want to serve that sort of data on a delay, so there was a lot of work by the development team on that aspect of things; checking for any dynamic data changes, and then updating the cache immediately. Then work to make sure that doesn’t slow down the site, with all of the work being done in the background.
The other difficulty is related to geo-targeting. Depending on your country, we will display different online bookshops which you can purchase from. If you’re in the USA, you see the likes of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. If you are in the UK, the options would be Amazon UK, Waterstones etc.
Here’s the problem: Steve from Birmingham, England visits the Lee Child page and a cache is generated. A minute later, Jill from Wisconsin, USA visits that same page. Jill would see the cached page, which would display UK retailers instead of American retailers.
So that was another big hurdle; being able to generate pages for every country, with real-time updates for each data change
Thankfully, the work is primarily done and after a few more tests, we will be rolling it out on the site over the next couple of weeks so while the site is already very fast, this will make it that much faster.
For October, our current development plan is to work on various smaller-scale items that have popped up over the last month. There should be a lot of smaller new features launched by the time the next newsletter hits. We’ve also launched one of the most requested features by users this month.
Last month, we ran a contest where every comment you make on an authors page will earn you entry into a draw with 10 $25 Amazon gift cards as a prize, and will run that contest again this month. Note: Each comment counts as an entry, and it’s possible to win multiple times. We received over 300 comments within the last month. Thank you to everyone who contributed – you are really helping us out, and it’s great to see so much discussion going on. Here are the winners this month:
- cdngramma
- Cindy R.
- Denis M
- DianaB
- joanwatts
- LeeLo
- Linda (email starts with lindas.books)
- PRSY
- Velda D
- Zipporah D
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment. That sort of content really helps out the site, plus we really enjoy reading all of your comments. We’re running the same contest this month – read on, for more about that.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
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Site Improvements & Updates
Currently Reading: This was a very popular request by users – the ability to mark a book as “currently reading” or display it somewhere as “currently reading”.
We have big plans in regard to user homepages and our own internal social network, so we planned to make that part of that. But you kept requesting this – so we bumped it to the top of the list!
Here’s how it works: you click on a checkbox beside a book, which default marks it as read as is standard. You then choose the start date of the book – say September 29th. But no end date yet because you’ve just started it. Our system will pick this up, and will now display it when you click on the user avatar icon as shown below:
From there when you finish a book, you can easily click the book title to mark the date you finished it, and then it will be removed from there. So that’s how to keep track of books you are currently reading.
New Content Added
In addition to adding authors, we post a lot of book news and book-related content to Book Notification each month. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter:
Monthly Contest
Quality content and discussion are always beneficial for our website. This month, we are asking you to write a comment on an author’s page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, what their best book or series is, or about an adaptation of their book. Any and all comments are welcome.
We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a comment from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each comment earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter multiple times so comment as much as you want!
The comment form is at the bottom of every author’s page, titled “Author Discussion”.
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated.