Next Novel Project
Find your next book to read
Someone had suggested a few changes to the the genre classification system in the site since there were a few odd books being shown (for instance, fantasy books would show up as top romance books since they technically were under that genre...)
Made a few tweaks last night to only search the top couple of tagged genres for each book, so that should be more or less fixed now. Hopefully it lets people use that feature more
So its almost midnight here and I just finished up a feature to find trending books... I have 0 idea if this is going to work properly but I just pushed it to the server and am rolling with it.
https://nextnovelproject.com/trending
A bit annoyed the Goodreads API isn't properly getting image URLs, but whatever. I'll just have to change the design when I've recovered a bit more sanity
After getting 100 visitors in the first few days, I learned that the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is categorically incorrect. :(
That said, the visitors have continued to slowly trickle in and I've gotten to 500 total so far!
Anyways, after the initial traffic spike, the follow-up traffic has slowed a bit. There has been a core group of about 10-20 returning visitors per day that has been nice to see (since people use the site!), but nothing particularly strong on the 'user growth' side.
I added a little sentence to the landing page asking people to mention the site to their friends. I have absolutely no idea if that will lead to anything, but why not!
After finishing up the site (and sharing it with a few friends for some quick feedback), I shared it with the small community over at r/goodreads to see what they thought of it. Was hoping that since most of the people there are basically power-users of the site/app that they'd know what things to add. Got a lot of good responses and feedback and have been continuously engaged with the community.
https://www.reddit.com/r/goodreads/comments/i4bwgb/since_goodreads_still_doesnt_let_you_sort_books/
Twitter, on the other hand... I set up a Twitter account and have basically gotten like three visits from the site. Haven't yet given up hope, but not the most promising platform at the moment...
Got the website up and running and the backend code to update the data fully automated.
The data collector is built with Python to interact with the Goodreads API and save data to an AWS database. There's a lot of cleaning of the data that's involved from when it comes out of the API unfortunately, but it is what it is...
The frontend is built with Nuxt, Express.js, and Sequelize. It's all hosted on AWS Lightsail, running a Dokku instance (with a LetsEncrypt plugin)... So a lot of different pieces getting everything working together, but here we are... with a working site...
Comment