The New BookJetty is Now Out. Try it now!

MON, 6 NOV 2006

The new BookJetty is finally out. It is now on Ruby On Rails with some new interesting features. Well, indeed a hard work finally pays off when you see something out. Anyway here are some highlights on the new features.

Amazon I love the book scroller. You can scroll left and right the featured books and recently added books. Was inspired by Moo.com.

Tag Books You can now bookmark your books as Wanted, Reading and Read. So gone are those days when you need to jot them down on papers. The next time you need to go to the library, just view your wanted list.

My Tags Well, you are the king, so you tag what you want. Group your books with any names.

Tag ‘loveit‘ to recommend a book and to show it in the featured list hall-of-fame scroller.

With your bookmarks, now you are able to see, who else wanted, is reading, or has read the same book. And finding popular books in town will just get easier.

So if need a book that is wanted by lots of ppl, you should know what do.

Top searches are now in CLOUD format, due to peer pressure. Neah..from usability perspective, they are just better. You can select top searches for today, this week and this month.

NLB catalogue and xISBN book editions are now cached for 30 minutes. So first request maybe slower, but subsequent requests are much faster, no round-trip to NLB and xISBN servers.

There will be more features added along the way, meanwhile I’ll be tidying up those bugs spotted so far. For you, why not just try it out. Suggestions and feedback are most welcome.

BookJetty. Projects

14 Comments . Comments Feed . Trackback URI

Tue, 7 Nov 06 02:18 pm . davischung wrote:

Herry, performance seem to be slower than last time.
I think the site is yet to be optimize by tuning ROR.

Tue, 7 Nov 06 11:35 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Yeah I absolutely agree David, yesterday’s setup was not so good, coz even the images were served by Mongrel.

Have rewritten some rules to keep Apache to serve static files. There are also some heavy logging currently at the back, I haven’t turned it off, for monitoring purpose, since the app is still very fresh.

If you got tips to improve it further, feel free to share man. :)

Wed, 8 Nov 06 11:47 am . davischung wrote:

But still, Herry, that’s a commendable effort on your part to try something new. I believe eventually the speed issue will be resolved. Is the performance slow because of heavy loading ?? It will be good idea if you can show statistics on the usage and performance loading so that user can use the statistic to avoid peak “period” while the system is still been tuned. In this way, user will be happy to continue to use the system. Perhaps a chart that snap shot day load rather than real-time is enough to help the user decide. At least, a temporary solution.

Wed, 8 Nov 06 12:10 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Thanks David. On 6th I got a sudden surge of visits, the busier time is between 10:00 - 13:00, but they are not statistically much higher, compared to the other period.

But that day’s clog I think pretty much because Mongrel (the back end Rails server) was serving even the static files. After last night’s tweak to set Apache to serve the static files, today’s performance is better.

I’ll also turn off the info logging by end of this week, once the application is more stable, by then, I hope it should be faster also.

Server and memory load, previously I just did a random xcheck, I’m just starting to monitor it more closely. Will keep you informed. :)

Thu, 9 Nov 06 11:46 am . JasonOng wrote:

*applause*

very commendable and an inspiration to some of us (me in particular!). Keep up the good work Herry!

Fri, 10 Nov 06 01:15 am . davischung wrote:

Hi Herry,
thank for your effort in making bookjetty a better system.
It’s rare to find software talent like you nowsaday in Singapore willing to develop a useful system using their own free time.
All the best to U in your projects.

Fri, 10 Nov 06 08:11 am . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Jason, thanks, will do keep the site good. :)

Np Davis, glad to be able to roll something out that benefits others.

Btw, looking at the server monitoring result, seems like the slower response is due to the app setup not the server load. Will focus on further fine-tuning Rails.

Fri, 10 Nov 06 09:44 am . Ryan Ng wrote:

Nice work Herry. I think you could be on to something. Have you thought of connecting to libraries in USA? I do not know how it is over there and whether there is an unified system but that would be really cool cause then you will expand your reach by leaps and bounds. Singapore is always too small :-)

Fri, 10 Nov 06 09:00 am . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Yeah Ryan, I’ve thought about it too, it can be quite interesting to make it global. I’ll find to find out more about US libraries when I got the time. Got to find out more with some friends who studied in the States.

Oh ya you studied in the States right? Can write to me abit on US libraries on your free time. Meanwhile my priority will be on Singapore scene, hopefully we all can benefit from BookJetty. :)

Fri, 10 Nov 06 11:16 am . David Krmpotic wrote:

Hi! I really like the new bookjetty. The only question I have is whether you plan to upgrade the capabilities soon? I think it’s becoming too slow. I love it, but I cannot afford to fight with it everytime I want to add a new book! Take care and I wish you lot of success! David

Fri, 10 Nov 06 02:27 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Thanks David, yeah I’m taking note on the performance issue. I’m still working on it, one of the trouble makers is ruby SOAP library, it is taking too much time to parse the data. Will work on ways to improve on that, will try to identify other areas to improve the performance too. Thanks for your feedback btw.

Fri, 17 Nov 06 09:04 pm . Ivan Chew wrote:

Clearly, you have passion in what you do. Keep up the good work Herry. I\’ll check out your new BookJetty and I intend to give it a plug as soon as I clear some outstanding posts :)

Sat, 18 Nov 06 11:35 am . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Roger that Ivan, will find some time to keep improving it. Thanks for your encouragement. :)

Currently performance still need some attention and the layout still breaks on Safari. Hope to fix these two major issues soon.

Wed, 6 Dec 06 02:35 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

I’ve just converted BookJetty to use REST connection to Amazon, and the performance has improved by quite a fair bit.

The New BookJetty is Now Out. Try it now!

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