Delays and images

Delays and images

I’m feeling pretty frustrated that we haven’t been able to launch our beta yet. We’re still waiting on a few pieces before we can go live (even “beta live”) and I’m not sure when they’ll come through. Hopefully later this week! But in good news, we have book covers! We spent the weekend working on our automatic processes – collecting, sorting, and processing book data […]

We have a server!

A few days ago our server got provisioned and we’ve been tinkering with it ever since. We had a few teething problems, which took a few tiring hours of our time, but things are fundamentally working now! We’ve now mostly been testing deployments and running book imports. We’re working really hard on making the import process as fast as possible, because we’ll have a lot […]

Extracting series names from book titles – wins and failures

We’re still working hard on perfecting our code for removing series names from book titles. This definitely requires a lot of trial and error! Essentially our goal is to have three separate data pieces: Title of this book only. Name of the series it’s part of. This book’s position within that series. The tricky part is that the series name and/or position are often inserted […]

Two imports down, how many to go?

As I posted yesterday, we did our first significant test import with 130,000 records. We spent pretty much all of last night analyzing the results of that import and coming up with little tricks to improve some of the inconsistencies in the data. The main things we looked out for were: Different books by the same author linked under the same author record. Different editions […]

Frustrations from our first book data import

Frustrations from our first book data import

Last night we did our first significant test import of book data. Until now we’ve been testing smaller data sets between 5,000 and 25,000 book records. Last night we imported about 130,000 records. I spent this morning analyzing how the data came through and have a few things weighing on my mind. Editions in different languages In terms of end result, I want different translations […]

Handling different editions of the same book

Handling different editions of the same book

Settling on features for Bookhype has been an interesting challenge. I was constantly asking myself, “What do people want?” or “I know people want this, should I do it?” or “But I know some people DON’T want that, so what do I do?” One example of such a feature was supporting multiple editions of the same book. I knew right away that I wanted to […]

Bookhype

Bookhype is something I’ve been quietly working on since May. I haven’t said anything about it yet, but I think I’m close enough now that I’ll start putting out some whispers. 😉 Bookhype actually started in April. I found myself wishing there was a directory of special edition books, because I love finding and buying them. I didn’t know of one, so I created one […]