

How I rebuilt 7books from scratch in 4 days - will_critchlow
http://www.7bks.com/blog/596001

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topcat31
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>

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ncavig
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?

~~~
topcat31
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

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smokinn
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.

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topcat31
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

~~~
smokinn
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.

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smokinn
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...](https://gist.github.com/724443/eaee0121e4085bcd8c8a5f47a79c36150b2e3803)

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.

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lkozma
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!

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sfphotoarts
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)

~~~
topcat31
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
I found that the blog is very good-looking, if you are debuting at webdesign
too, it's quite impressive.

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

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

