How I rebuilt 7books from scratch in 4 days

http://www.7bks.com/blog/596001

by will_critchlow • 16 years ago

38 16 16 years ago

topcat314• 16 years ago

Thanks for posting this Will. I think this quote from my original post rings more true than ever: "Learning to code is like learning anything from scratch; at first it's mind numbingly difficult. For example, when I first started learning Wing Chun (a martial art) I was like a baby gazelle on ice. Uncoordinated, falling over a lot and certainly no good in a fight. You stay in this "completely inept" phase for longer than you think. But then, once you start coming out of that phase your rate of improvement is quicker than you think"

I've learned so much and gotten so much quicker at writing code (and writing better code at that!). I'm really happy with the front-end changes in particular with V2 - jquery really is like black magic. Even more so than python!

For those that missed the original "making of" it's here:

http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001

ncavig• 16 years ago

I'm actually quite curious about your amazon affiliate model, and what your upkeep cost vs income is?

Looks like a great site and will be perusing as I finish my current reading material. Any thought in a book recommendation engine or looking into amazon's api for similar items/books to integrate?

topcat314• 16 years ago

The answer to this is quite simple:

Revenue ~ $100 so far but I've barely had any real lists added (plenty of geeks have added lists saying "testing" etc etc). Now that V2 is live I'm going to put a lot of work into building a solid community around the site.

Upkeep - $0 - it's hosted on appengine which is free :)

In the long run I'm hoping to get some pocket money from affiliate links but at the moment I'm concentrating on building something that people want so I can build a community.

Using the similarity API is on my radar, I nearly included it in V2 but in the end decided it would be better to just stick to the core stuff and ship that. Any ideas on what would make a recommendation engine awesome are always welcome! tom@7bks.com

Thanks

smokinn3• 16 years ago

Is it just me or is the main site broken?

All the top lists either have outright broken images:

http://www.7bks.com/list/196001

or a big 7 Missing Image pic:

http://www.7bks.com/list/484001

http://www.7bks.com/list/565001

http://www.7bks.com/list/57001

etc

Only 2 of the lists actually show book covers. (The Ian M Banks and Mind Bending Fiction lists.)

Maybe a 5th day was in order.

alimoeeny• 16 years ago

It looks OK.

topcat314• 16 years ago

Hey - you're right.

That's because I only just launched the new site and all the top lists from the past week are old lists created before images were possible!

I know the site isn't looking too consistent the moment but I'm really pleased with the way the new lists look - take a look at the latest lists and see how the new style looks.

I'm new at this coding malarkey and error handling and exception handling is still somewhere down on my todo list so not everything works perfectly... I'm working hard to fix everything tho!

Thanks

Tom

smokinn3• 16 years ago

Ah ok that makes sense. I'm a big fan of not cluttering up my codebase with special cases for launches if things will resolve themselves naturally in a couple of days.

It's a pretty nice product though. Here's my list: http://www.7bks.com/list/610009

Maybe a suggestion for the future: A corners/groups kind of feature? So that I can filter by what my interests are. Maybe implemented as tags? Amazon already categorizes the books so if you have access to that you could build the tag cloud automatically and let the person making the list add/remove from it.

kingsidharth• 16 years ago

I wonder what pushed you to learn, make and ship in 4 weeks. Really, what was the driving force?

sfphotoarts• 16 years ago

why is the trend currently to making everything so big? Im not Tufte fanboi but information content is a big part of design, and while i wish you the best of luck with your venture, I would love to see the design be less about big and more about density. (Chrome/9)

henry81• 16 years ago

I agree.. It seems every time I get a bigger monitor, websites progressively get larger to where they take up way too much real estate.

topcat314• 16 years ago

Clearly I like big bold design. There's no doubt about that. That said, I see your point and I think it's a really hard balance to strike. I don't think I've gotten it right yet and actually I've found the front-end design the hardest part of building the whole site. I think certainly there's elements where I could make it more compact but still look good but I do like the big bold list format I currently have. I'm going to keep working on it and eventually hopefully I'll find a layout that pleases everyone :)

ismaelsow• 16 years ago

I found that the blog is very good-looking, if you are debuting at webdesign too, it's quite impressive.

bhudman• 16 years ago

I actually like the big letter design because I think it emulates minimalism. If you have big letters, you have to avoid putting other crap on the page, and it gets you to focus on the one message (as opposed to a bunch of other things on the page)

nhangen• 16 years ago

Really cool idea, and great execution. I'm picky about signing up for little apps like this, but I like the idea alot.

lkozma• 16 years ago

I made something similar a few years ago, although much simpler, I admit.

If anyone interested: http://www.sharebookbox.com

(you can use it with your own affiliate-ID)

7books looks nice, btw. Good luck with it!

smokinn3• 16 years ago

Quick question: What's the definition of "Top"?

Is it the most pageviews? If so, your top list is going to become stagnant since putting something on the homepage is going to give it a disproportionate amount of views.

Suggestions would be measuring clickthroughs to amazon or disregarding clicks from the front page in a list's rank or (my preference) a time-based ranking that would always eventually shuffle the top lists off the from page. There's an example of that here: https://gist.github.com/724443/eaee0121e4085bcd8c8a5f47a79c3...

When testing those kinds of things I like to implement more than one and see which I like best personally over the span of a couple of days and then split my population based on userid and see which drives better engagement. Of course, in your case I would suggest just making some "secret" urls (simply unpublished) like http://www.7bks.com/home/time and http://www.7bks.com/home/amazon that you can check out and see what you prefer compared to the current home.

How I rebuilt 7books from scratch in 4 days

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