Category Archives: News

Improved Site Speed and Web Crawler Management

Quick Summary: The website is running 20% faster across all pages (<2 seconds load time), especially book details pages. This was accomplished by prioritizing page load speed and fresh information for real visitors, rather than everyone (which included a LOT of web crawlers and bots).

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since we have talked on this blog so I wanted to give you an update of the work that has occurred over the past few weeks. While nobody has complained (since the site was still loading pages in less than 3 seconds), I still realized there was room for efficiency in the code that runs NovelRank. Why? Because at any given second there are 40-50 real people accessing the site, while many multiples of that number of pages are being accessed by robots: web crawlers, bots, rss readers, widgets, etc. That’s a lot of information to process, and while NovelRank’s servers (~$100/month in costs) have been up to the task, their load was starting to getting high.

So I went to work identifying the sources of the database server overload and came up with this list (highest to lowest):

Charting requests, especially for long-term data (more than 30 days)
Detail stats for salesrank: minimum, maximum, average, etc (refreshed automatically every 30 days)
CSV exports by bad bots who do not obey NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW
Activity tracking for individual books (how I can tell someone is still looking at it)

Continue reading →

System Tweaks: Abuse Prevention

Recently there has been a large amount of requests on the system that are either by an automated system or one or two overzealous individuals. Specifically involving requests for charts and exports (CSV) of information. After a few days of research and data collection, an automated system has been created to help ensure that this does not become a detriment for all NovelRank users.

Image courtesy of RowdyKittens on Flickr Here’s the info you need to know.

If the database is currently overloaded by too many requests or is working very hard on a current requests (in regards to time), you may receive an error page when attempting to export CSV data. Simply retry your request a few seconds later (in most cases). In the case of charts, a message will be displayed in the chart area notifying of the server overload.

All of these abuses are NOT from user accounts, but individual book pages (details page). Thus, I’ve only implemented these methods to address the problem areas. I reserve the right to, in the future, implement the same measures for user comparison charts and user CSV exports.

I hope this results in a continued fast NovelRank experience for everyone.

Image courtesy of RowdyKittens on Flickr

NovelRank 2012 Donation Drive

Mario Lurig - Creator

I believe that NovelRank authors will support the things they value, so I’ve decided that from now on there would only be one donation drive a year. Prove me right.

NovelRank is the creation of one individual, but benefits many authors worldwide. It costs over $1100/year in server costs just to keep things running. In the last year, NovelRank has kept pace with new worldwide domains to allow you to get a better idea of how your titles are doing in multiple Amazon sales regions. It has also added new CSV exports, added book cover image zoom, and fixed bugs reported by users. NovelRank is a solid source for you to maximize your marketing efforts and keep enjoying being an author. However, to keep this site free and keep improving it with new features, I need your support.

Here is the best part: By making any donation, even something as small as $5, puts you into a drawing to have your book featured on the website. Donate $25, $10, $5, or even make a total donation that equals $1 for each book you track. I’ll draw 15 email addresses from the supporters, and they will be contacted to identify the title they want to be featured on the website. It is my hope that this drawing will encourage more individuals to make donations and provide enough support to keep things rolling.

Finally, the Featured Books section on the TRACK page (highest traffic page on the website) are reserved for donations over $100. It’s a special thank you for those that are able to give more, so I’m offering them a little more.

Optional: Use the NovelRank Supporters Amazon Wishlist and send me an email.

Thank you in advance for supporting the site.

A note about recent donations: 7 titles have been ‘held over’ through the rest of 2012 due to high enough donation level (per previous donation drive rules) and being caught in-between the regular schedule. These are already in rotation as a thank you for their support.

New CSV Export – Full Date and Time Data

Hey look, a new feature! Added by request (thanks Tom from Greece), there is a new CSV export option available for you. When you are viewing a book’s detail page, you can use the button at the top to expand the Export to Excel/CSV options.

From there you will see a new link that will start the download of a single CSV file that contains the date, hour, and day of the week (screenshot is an early version) of every sale since tracking began. It’s sorted by newest dates first, but the date is in a standardized format which will allow you to sort the spreadsheet in the opposite direction using your spreadsheet program.

Previously, this data was only available through the charts and only for recent sales (for visibility), so this new feature provides a lot of functionality for quickly analyzing sales estimate data on your own. Finally, all CSV exports have been improved to support the newest domains on NovelRank: Italy, Spain, and China. Apparently, nobody noticed that these were not being exported. Don’t worry though, I noticed, and it is now fixed!