What an amazing week it's been. With the announcement of Shelfari on Facebook, Mashable listing us in the top 10 most beautiful sites, CNET reviewing us, and some crazy dudes on Metafilter spending their morning debating our pros and cons, we've had a lot of traffic and a LOT of new registrations. Welcome everyone. We love you.
I've asked KevinD a couple of times today what our CPU usage was, and while its certainly not peaking, it's definitely nudging northward. We noticed yesterday that as thousands of people started importing their contact lists to find friends on Shelfari and invite them, that we had not fully optimized that code and for a few hours we had a sluggish importing process. We got it fixed and updated, but it was a bit frustrating for a few users (including us).
We're quite mindful of performance issues especially since our friends at the handy book cataloging service LibraryThing had their site down for the better part of five days last month. Even with record-breaking page view numbers on Shelfari, thanks to the dynamic duo of KevinB and KevinD we were nowhere near that kind of a meltdown. But we know that massive growth requires investing. We've already invested in the architecture that will scale. Josh and Kevin made the difficult decision a few months back to make behind-the-scenes improvements that will make success beautiful, not crushing. While I (Dave the marketing guy) fretted over that decision, I'm very pleased now.
Hopefully we'll have a big server-shucking party, and our Seattle Shelfari fans can join in. :)
--Dave
Thank you for all the hard work you've put into making Shelfari such a great place for readers of all kinds of books.
The Shelfari Book Bloggers is having a Reading Challenge during the month of August. Details are at:
http://shelfaribookbloggers.blogspot.com
Hopefully in promoting the challenge this will also make more people aware of Shelfari. It's just such a great place! :)
Posted by: Ma Titwonky | July 27, 2007 at 09:03 PM
Thank you for taking the time to really listen to what your users want! This site is amazing! I stumbled upon it while browsing lifehacker.com and Shelfari has shot up to be one of my most favorite and visited sites on the web!
Posted by: Buddy | August 07, 2007 at 09:37 AM
Do you have an API ?
Posted by: Vivek | August 30, 2007 at 10:55 PM
hi dave,
the post to blog flash widget seems to be broken.
Posted by: Jay | September 04, 2007 at 08:33 PM
Well, I tried to fill in my shelf, but it looks there is no way to add any book whose ISBN begins by 88. Since ALL my books begin by 88, it looks like I cannot add any book at all. There is probably a bug in your code, but I cannot understand which one :(
Posted by: Dario de Judicibus | September 06, 2007 at 07:27 AM
Why can't I add books which do not have an ISBN?
Posted by: Dayna | September 07, 2007 at 11:57 AM
I understand the growth because of good concept, but these days, performance issues have been so frequent, I cant browse shelfari without any problem (of timeout or slowness) for an hour!!
You guys, need immediate attention regarding this. If needed, take help from Microsoft itself for solving your issues (if you are hosting site on IIS)..
Posted by: Jigar Mehta | September 07, 2007 at 02:23 PM