The site upgrades are underway, and this is just a general update on progress.
We have ended our association with RiotAds, due to the ongoing video problems, and the ads have been removed from the site. There has been an immediate increase in traffic of around 10%, so it seems the site really was breaking unusably for some readers.
On the front end, video and newspaper reviews for a book are now visible on that book’s page. The sidebar is now fixed, and we have made a few changes. Category and Archive pages now have an Amazon widget in the sidebar to display books we gave a good rating to. There’s a direct to Amazon buy link on each review page, which was a really requested feature.
The emails are no being run by Aweber, which reduces our monthly costs by a quarter – more if we order in advanced. We actually ended up with 15,000 subscribers after moving everything to them, and their reporting has already identified several inactive users. There are a few issues – if you want to change email you have to unsubscribe and resubscribe – but the cost issue is prohibitive otherwise. Now we have a manageable list, the email templates will be getting an overhaul.
Our focus now is on two things: duplicate books and the search engine. We’re a lot more popular than we thought, and even though a fix in June stopped more duplicates being generated, we’ve still got over 5,000 in the archives. The most common one submitted their book 27 times, so wee think we have a fan. We’re in the middle of removing these and replacing with redirects so all traffic goes to the book’s current page. This should make the site faster, and save database space. This upgrade is planned for the next four days.
The search engine is because even the best wordpress plugins, Relevanssi and searchWP, break once you get above 20,000 posts. We’re a bit beyond that, and reluctant to use Google because of the ads (and it doesn’t search custom metas or integrate with the database). Our tame Java coder is reviewing ElasticSearch, Lucene, and a few other engines to see if he can make one work.
And finally we have four video reviews now up on DailyMotion, with more to follow if we can persuade our members to do another voiceover.
Otherwise we’re still on Patreon, still working on newspaper col for next year, and still reading books.
