I’ve been working on a beta version of Booko for, like, 7 months now. I finally upgraded it while moving from Slicehost to Linode. I’ve made a large number of changes to the way Booko performs long running tasks and how those tasks communicate. But I’ll leave the nerdy stuff for later.
The biggest change from a user point of view is some integration into Freebase.com. You’ll notice extra information appear in book listings now. For example, the Booko page for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo now tells you:
- that the book is part of the Millennium Trilogy
- the other books in the series (The Girl who played with Fire & The Girl who kicked the Hornets’ Nest)
- the other editions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – hardcover and paperback.
The data at Freebase is a long way from complete, but it’s constantly growing. This should be a very useful feature. I’ll be doing more to integrate Freebase into the search results – for example, so a book shows up only once, listing the different editions in that single search result item.
List management also got an overhaul. That old list manager page was pretty bad. There’s still work to do, but it should be far more usable now. Log in and check it out!
There are still bugs to fix (soooo many missing images for cover art) and features to add (smarter list price calculation, used books).
Nice. Really love the site and service you provide. 🙂
Was curious as to why you moved to Linode? I saw that VPS performance post a while back and thought that as much as Linode came out on top, Slicehost weren’t ‘broken’ so didn’t see any real benefit in moving.
Is Linode a lot better than Slocehost for what you are doing?
I really enjoyed my time on Slicehost. The old version of Booko is still there in case anyone reports losing the contents of their lists since the migration ( no reported problems yet). The support people are great – any issues and I’d jump into an online chat and talk to someone. Had few issues. The biggest issue I had was when one of their name resolvers stopped working – it took me ages to figure out why the price grabbers were timing out and led me to write this article as a penance.
Linode has a couple of draws for me though. The one that pushed me over the edge is they dropped their prices to almost half of Slicehost. 512MB host on Slice is $38 / month compared to $19.95 on Linode. Booko’s got 2×512 hosts and a 2GB ($130 v $79.95) Web server – so it was a reasonable saving. Second, Linode let you arrange your storage into block devices – so I can use LVM and LVM based snapshots of MySQL for backups. Linode’s interface provides more control over your hosts and more functionality in DNS.
When it came time to do the upgrade, it was always going to be to a new set of servers – MySQL dumps are big and slow and I was planning to move to Nginx, – I decided a new set of hosts would be easiest. Whether they’re at Slice or Linode didn’t make much difference other than transferring database backups – which I did online, without writing out big files with this neat trick:
mysqldump --opt -u root -p booko | ssh -C db01.booko.com.au "mysql -u root -p booko"So, to summarize, both are great, but I’ve read that Linode has a slight performance advantage and are nearly half the cost.
Cheers,
Dan
Thanks Dan,
please keep up the kick ass work!
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