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.
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.
I’m working on a new feature that should be ready shortly. Though Rankforest has always offered RSS feeds to keep track of rankings, some users have expressed a desire to get updates via email, especially in response to some sales rank value criteria, such as breaking into the top 100. Soon this will be possible.
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.
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.
Rankforest can now track actual sales at Amazon.com. The sales date and quantity are provided in a list format and can be used in conjunction with the charts to see how much a certain sales volume affects sales rank.
The primary limitation is that the sales must be mediated by the Rankforest website. For example, there are see this on Amazon.com links on each item’s detail page. These links lead to Amazon.com, and, if the item is purchased, the sales are tracked. Each item also has a special tracking URL that you can copy and paste into your own site. Using the URL is effectively just like linking to the item on Amazon.com, with the added bonus of having purchases tracked.
This feature is most beneficial to items that sell in relatively small quantities. A single author or small publisher that makes the majority of their sales through their own website links to Amazon.com could more accurately gauge the relationship between sales volume and sales rank.
The sales volume data will be updated at the end of each month. There are already several months of data available for any books that have sold through Rankforest in the past. The data for February will be posted in another week, so if you’re curious to see how things work you still have time to make purchases this month.
Any sales generated through these links benefit Rankforest.com. You can read a little more about this feature on the main page.
Rankforest will be undergoing some minor server updates this weekend. Downtime should be limited to a couple of minutes. I’m also working on a new feature that I hope you’ll find exciting. Rankforest will soon start showing Amazon.com sales data for books bought through Rankforest.com. I’ll provide more details when the feature launches.
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.
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).
