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Hi Daniel! thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed).

Hi Daniel! thanks for your feedback! Your release of hn-books.com really made me realize I should carry on, that the topic was interesting (which I believed). But I was quite far from being able to ship and busy with a lot of client work, too. I totally agree that the navigation is the tricky part, and I have a lot of work to do on this :) I'm really curious to see other people approach to solve the general issue of finding useful books! In all cases, thanks for the kind words, appreciated!

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know. Cool work! EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382
- thibaut_barrere 16y ago
  Well it deserves a blog post to describe how things work a bit, but roughly the things that help on the load are: - fragment caching with redis/rails 3 (with some warmup script) - the full search is handled by solr - nginx and passenger are quite fast I still need to make some work to compress the js/css together. The images themselves are served by Amazon. On the size of the list: well I really have a bias toward "data aggregation". My two previous side-projects (http://www.learnivore.com http://www.learnivore.com and http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/ http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/) were already "ETL"-based. I have another project where I will manually curate the list, though... I think both approaches (data-driven or manually curated) have their pros and cons... Glad you like it in all cases!
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
    - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
      Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Great page load time, by the way. (I know I'm a dweeb for noticing such things) I also like the fact you're using smaller image files -- I'm sure it helps with loads. And it's cool that you have a bazillion more books than I do. I struggled with how many books to include, and I'm still not sure I got the balance right. If I had to do over, I might go with a much wider list as you did. Don't know. Cool work! EDIT: FWIW, I enjoyed your site and our thread so much that I took a bit of time today and blogged about all book sites that are popping up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250382

thibaut_barrere 16y ago
Well it deserves a blog post to describe how things work a bit, but roughly the things that help on the load are: - fragment caching with redis/rails 3 (with some warmup script) - the full search is handled by solr - nginx and passenger are quite fast I still need to make some work to compress the js/css together. The images themselves are served by Amazon. On the size of the list: well I really have a bias toward "data aggregation". My two previous side-projects (http://www.learnivore.com http://www.learnivore.com and http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/ http://www.toutpourmonipad.com/) were already "ETL"-based. I have another project where I will manually curate the list, though... I think both approaches (data-driven or manually curated) have their pros and cons... Glad you like it in all cases!
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I don't want to drive the thread down super-deep, but if you have any questions or there is any way I can help, please shoot me a line. Perhaps all of us doing this can compare notes some time.
  - thibaut_barrere 16y ago
    Hehe - good point. We should chat later on yes, always good :)