We’ve added a new feature to the site: a little orange box on the content pages where users can vote on content. Users can now click an Up or Down button on a book’s page if they think the book is good, or on a review page if they think the review is useful. After all it would hardly be fair to open the books to user critique without doing it for our own reviews as well.
The mailing list is getting an upgrade. First, we’re working through our backlist of subscribers, as we discovered that some never received their confirm emails during our early days with Sendgrid. These are being sent, and then if the user does not sign up within a week we are deleting them to save space and make sure we don’t contact them twice. We’re also looking at integrating the genre select directly into the sign-up form, so you don’t have to sign up and then use your profile to select genre, you can do it all at once.
Finally there’s a back-end upgrade. We had been using Analytics, AWstats, Statcounter etc. to measure traffic but all of these gave widely different figures, making it impossible to get an idea of how many people were using the site. All we did know for certain is that our bandwidth use has been increasing. After the shock of finding ourselves in the Alexa top 1,000,000 (Honestly? Us? We’re a tiny book club!), we’ve taken the plunge and on the 13th we linked the site to Quantcast, a professional level (but still free) stat counter. So far, their figures have been at the top end of the expected range, and once we have a month or so’s we can work out what to do with the site.
