BookRabbit is going well, and we want to invite a few more people to join the fun. With a view to that we’ve decided to make a fantastic offer.

We’re going to give away 1,000 books – free, no strings, not even charge for postage.

If you’ve not already registered, to get your free book you have to upload a picture of your bookcase and tag at least five books. Simple as that. We’ll then select a book we think you’ll like and send it to you.

No strings, nothing. Just you get to try the site, get a book and hopefully like both enough to stick around.

So – give it a go and tell your friends! We have 1,000 books to give away, but it’ll be first-come-first served. Full details at BookRabbit.com/free

Alert! Techy speak post ahead!

Still with me? Good, let’s carry on!

If you’re a regular user of BookRabbit, you may have noticed we’ve been experiencing one or two slight problems for the past couple of days (ok, that’s maybe a teeny tiny understatement). The good news is that we seem to have broken the back of it. First of all, thank you very much for persevering with us while we’ve been through this particularly challenging time.

For me personally, this has been the most stressful period in the development of BookRabbit, more than gearing up for the beta launch, even more than getting everything ready for the consumer launch! Have you ever had one of those problems to solve where everything you try seems to be a dead end? The whole development team has spent every minute scratching our heads and saying things like,

“Ooooh ooooh! What about…er…no, that’s not it either…hmmm”

So, on to the techy madness! Are you perhaps one the many people in the world that uses the anti-virus product AVG from Grisoft? It’s very popular, mainly because there’s a free edition I imagine. Now when you do a search on one of the popular search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. AVG scans each of the search results, and it looks a bit like:

AVG does this to make sure you’re not inadvertantly going to go off to some site hosted in Russia posing as an investment bank or some such where they’ll steal your whole life and fund terrorism with the proceeds. A very noble cause I’m sure you’ll agree! Unfortunately for us, when AVG was scanning BookRabbit, the User Agent (techy speak for web browser) that it reports itself as was causing BookRabbit some problems. Indulge me if you will whilst I try and personify this process:

AVG: Hi there, I’m not a virus scanner, I’m really Internet Explorer…kind of…can I have a page please?

BookRabbit: Sure thing Mr Browser, let me just make sure I’m giving you dates/times etc. formatted correctly for where you are. Oops, oh no, please no, erk, argh, eek, splutter…

AVG: Erm…hello? Are you there? No? [To user] I can’t contact that site, sorry – it’s probably ok but I can’t tell.

BookRabbit (some minutes later): gurgle, dribble, drool…oh, there we go, here’s your page.

AVG: Sorry, I gave up about 5 minutes ago

BookRabbit: Oh. [sulk]

Ok, back with reality now, for a while at least. A normal BookRabbit page request should take around 0.5 seconds at most to get generated by the server, and we can take maybe 100-150 of these concurrently. This is plenty for quite a high volume web site, but when you get 200 (which is our maximum) all taking 5 minutes to load you can start to see why we’ve had some problems!

So I hope we’ve solved that minor problem now and get back to doing what we love, adding lots of lovely new features to BookRabbit to make your stay there all the more enjoyable.

There are lots of new features being released from the BookRabbit development warren at the moment. One in particular I’d like to mention is the friend inviter that Tony has been working on.

Lots of us now have friends on social networks that we’d like to introduce to BookRabbit in one go. Now you can invite all your contacts and friends from your other social network accounts (FaceBook, MySpace, Linkedin etc) or your webmail account (Hotmail, Yahoo, gmail etc).

The Find friends link at the top of every page opens into the inviter:

From here you can select your webmail or social network of choice. Simply enter your email address and passord when promted and all your contacts or friends will be displayed:

Now you simply select the friends or contacts you want to invite and then customise the invite you want to send them. Easy peasy.

It’s a great way to quickly find and join up with your friends on bookrabbit. And if they are not already on BookRabbit, its a an easy way to invite them into the BookRabbit comuunity. Why don’t you give it a try today.