We’ve had a couple of bits of feedback that the site sometimes isn’t as fast as it should be, and it can be hard to search for books and use the bookcase application.

So this week Rob and Nick have implemented a new search engine that now operates all the book, author, user and content searches on the site.

So searching should now be blisteringly fast and bookcase tagging should be much easier.

It is also a more intelligent search, so you should now get better search result. Give it a try.

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.

Something to keep an eye out for.. we have three badges in circulation, a gold (not real obviously) enamel BookRabbit inverted ‘R’ founders badge – given out to the first few orders, at press events and various other special contacts.

A plastic pin badge – randomly given out with proofs for discussions, and some orders.

Finally we have a silver (also not real) enamel badge, which we’re giving out to extra special contributions, ideas welcome as to how people could earn one.

Let me know any unusual ways you picked one up!

I noticed an article on Spiked-Online from Frank Furedi, he’s a sociology professor at Kent University entitled ‘Let’s turn a new page in the world of reading, Teaching children that books are mere resources to be ‘consumed’ is having a baleful impact on reading, culture and the quality of public life.’

It is worth reading and I think fits rather well with the call for an emotional attachment to books that I made at the BA conference.

9 months out.

BookRabbit from idea to launch shares the gestation period of a human child, and, despite it sounding clichéd, I do feel quite a bit of anxiety about whether it’ll be able to hop or not. Over the next few days we’ll do all we can to make sure that it can, especially focusing on the very simplest things, search, browse, messaging etc to ensure that people can use the site. Usually helps.

But now for something completely different:

Some time ago I grew increasingly worried about the likelihood of the UK government following the lead of the US and attempting to monitor people’s reading as an indication of political views, this has historical precedents that most will be aware of, but that the current climate of fear seems to legitimise. This looks like coming true at least in part. In the US they have set up the very commendable Campaign for Reader Privacy, I think that we may well need to take a similar stand over here.

New Home

You may have noticed – depending upon how you come to this blog, that it has a new home, and will over the next few weeks have some new bloggers to. From today onwards this blog will be the ‘official’ BlogRabbit blog and being the friendly sort of business that we are – everyone in the company can post should they so wish. (That reminds me – Adam we’ll need a disclaimer!)

Kieron