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We’ve updated the shelf pages. One change is what happens when you go from one page to another via the “Next” or “Previous” button. In the old way, the whole page would refresh. Now, only the shelf part will change. The rest simply stays still.

This way of changing content is commonly called “Ajax”. The spirit is that only the parts that need to change will change, resulting in lighter load and speedier browsing.

But there’s a downside. Browsers are not designed for Ajax use. If you don’t refresh the whole page, the back (and forward) button will not work, along with history and bookmark. That’s a BIG downside, considering that the back button among the most used browser function.

There are hacks for fixing this. We surveyed a few and settled with HistoryManager. Problem is, the javascript framework we use is Mootools 1.2 and HM will only work in 1.1. We could wait, but the thought of a broken back button on aNobii was simply too painful to bear. So we opened HM up and did the update ourselves.

Here’s our code to share:
http://static.anobii.com/anobi/HistoryManager/HistoryManager12.js

Thanks to volunteering efforts around the world, aNobii now supports 12 interface languages, with a couple more to come. Big thanks to every involved!

The current translation platform has a couple drawbacks:

1. In the translation spreadsheet, the un-translated texts are mixed with translated ones, making them difficult to spot.

2. It’s difficult to know which text is used in which page. In other words, texts that are no longer used will remain, making the translation process longer.

3. HTML tags are embedded into the texts. For example, to display this:See all books on wishlistThe text to be translated would be something like:See all books on <a href=”person_wishlist.php?all_d=1&pid=35&”>wishlist</a>

Problem is, if the stuff inside the <a> tag is copied wrongly during translation, the link will not work properly for that particular language, and the mistake will be difficult to debug.

To fix them, we are now taking off our translation platform for an upgrade. It’ll be back in a couple days. Stay tuned!

The issue described in the previous post has now been resolved. No more NFS, no more ugly errors its malfunction ensued. And as a side-benefit, pages now load quicker. Horray!

(We promise the next post would be less geeky)

At around 7:00pm GMT November 21, our website became inaccessible for 1 hour. Again, we are deeply sorry for the downtime. What happened was that our Network File system became unmountable and needed a reboot.The majority of data are stored in the database. The rest are caches of temporary data in the form of files.When you have one web server, you can put all those files into that server’s local file system. When you have more than one, you need to put the files where all the web servers can access.One of the easier ways is to use a Network File system (NFS). With NFS, the web servers will the folders on the shared file server as if they are local.The biggest drawback of NFS is that, when something goes wrong, and the shared file server became unmountable, the web servers will stop, as if there’s something wrong with their “real” local file systems. In short, it drags everyone down.To make things worse, with this type of error, we cannot display anything friendlier than the discomfortingly-worded “Service unavailable : Internal error : 132″ page.We have been moving away from NFS recently but there are still some older stuffs that we haven’t converted. Rest assured we’ll be speeding up to achieve independence from NFS these couple days.

At around 5:50pm GMT November 14, our website became inaccessible for 8 hours. We are deeply sorry for the downtime.

Here’s what happened:

1. We upgraded PHP in our servers
2. The upgrade made our service unavailable
3. We failed to notice that until 1:30am. We reversed the upgrade in 15 minutes and the site went back on

What should be a minor issue turned into a major downtime (8 long hours!) simply because we were not alerted to it quickly enough. Definitely not something to be proud of. We have now wised up and included this type of issues into our monitoring and alert system.

We’ve always taken extra care to protect your data and make sure the hardware is always-on. We are using this incident as a wake-up call to ensure our software gets the same level of care as well.

Whenever I visit someone’s shelf, the first thing I look is how much our taste overlaps. This is what aNobii used to show:

Easy to understand but sometimes too simplistic to be helpful. Perhaps I’ve read a book three times while the other person got it as a gift and left it to gather dust ever since. Perhaps I found a book a total waste of time while the person hailed it as the best thing written ever. Not to forget that the absence of the same book could sometimes speak louder than its presence.

So we’ve spiced things up by including a slew of different ingredients into cooking up the “taste compatibility” score. Here’s the new look (heavily influenced by Last.fm’s take):

We’ve tested around before settling with the current formula but it’s by no means final. Let us know what you think of it!

2 million books!

The momentum has been exciting. But at the same time the site became noticeably slower. So it was time for some changes. Not only short-term patches but also longer-term solutions to make it easier to scale-out for growth in the future.

The biggest problem area is the database. The busier the site, the busier the database. Thing is, database capacity is one of the trickiest parts to upgrade.

Memory of the whole cluster, on the other hand, is much simpler to expand. So in the past weeks, we’ve done some recoding that would allow us to aggressively shift the loads to the memory.

This memory cushion quite dramatically reduces the workload of the database. aNobii runs a lot smoother these days and we are glad the works paid off. We will now move on to other parts of the architectural revamp.

Recently we have seen some glitches here and there, and in the past two days it got a lot worse. Quite a few of you experienced frequent unexpected log-outs that presented us with no choice but to stop the site on more than one occassion. We’ve finally gotten to the bottom of this today and fixed the problem. Trust us, we understand the pain of not being able to check out interesting books and post that reply in your favorite forum. Our apologies!

The good news is that we’ve improved some fundamentals during this fix so some of the pages now load faster than ever. We’ll just have to make sure such good won’t come at such a cost again.

As you may have noticed, we’ve just hit the 1M mark. Yes, the community is still small by many measures. But the pace is strong and more people are discovering the fun of aNobii every day. Thanks for spreading the words!

On another note, one of the most frequently-asked questions we get is about ads. Specifically, why there are no ads. The concern is that if we don’t have ads, how is aNobii going to survive in the long-run?

The short answer is: we believe we have not reached the point where it’s worthy to divert our attention to running ads. By keeping ourselves lean we are able to laser-focus on improving the aNobii experience for now.

All in all, things are going better by the day and yes, we are here to stay.

As always, we are brewing some new updates. Stay tuned!

We usually update aNobii on a daily basis. Some touch-ups here, some bug-fixes there. Chances are the aNobii you see now is a slight improvement over the last visit’s. We like small victories. We live on them.

But there are times when bigger changes are made. Those are the tricky ones. They sometimes bring in new concepts that require some efforts to sink in. And they often relate to various parts of the site. They are in effect one cloud of changes.

On the eve of the half-millionth book added to aNobii, we launched a major update of this sort. We’ll go over them one by one here. In the meantime, feel free to try to spot them yourself.

Did I mention we’ve reached that half-a-million milestone?