When we launched the “Next Book” list we knew people would love how easy it is to know exactly what book you need to read next. Many users have asked if there was a way to make it even easier to make a series they are following #1 on their “Next Book” list. Well here it is!

Just visit any of the series you’re following. There’s now a new icon on the series page for moving that series to the top of your “Next Book” list.

Just click the icon and you should get a notification telling you the series has been moved to the top of the list.

It’s that easy!

Around the FictFact office we’ve become big fans of Google’s Chrome web browser. As we continue to add authors based on our awesome user suggestions, we realized we’d love a tool so we can easily search FictFact for authors we come across on the web. So we went ahead an made one! If your a fan of Google Chrome, go ahead and install our new extension for searching FictFact from any page!

FictFact Search Menu

When we launched FictFact we hoped that it would not only help people keep track of their favorite series but also help them discover new series to read.

For a while now, we’ve had a “Recommend Series” section on every series page, so users can check out what other users are interested in. The recommendations are based on what users follow and if you’re logged in, filter out series your currently following.

Today we’ve taken the step to make those recommendations smarter. When you’re logged into FictFact, you will now see a “Not Interested” button next to each recommendation. Just click that button for each series you’re “Not Interested” in and that series won’t appear again.

You’ll be helping make our recommendation engine smarter and hopefully will help us help you find more series to read.

@bkirsten and the FictFact team

This is inspired by Ravelry’s and Stack Exchange’s bullet point architecture details. We’ve seen a whole lot of growth in the last 6 months over at FictFact, and we’ve recently rebuilt a large portion of the site from the ground up which has allowed us to spread load across more (but cheaper) machines.

FictFact is a book series tracking site that is primarily built on Microsoft’s ASP.NET and SQL Server. Without the kind folks at BizSpark we probably couldn’t afford the licensing for either one of those so we thank them for their support.

Traffic

• 300,000+ Page Views per Month
• 18,000 Uniques per Month

Data Center

• All of FictFact is currently hosted in Amazon EC2 (their East location)
• Amazon S3 is used for backup and for serving static files (images)
• Amazon ELB is used for Load Balancing

Production Servers (Amazon EC2)

• 3 Web Servers (Windows 2008 Server / IIS / ASP.NET 4.0 / Small Instances)
• 1 Database Server (SQL Server 2008 / Large Instance)
• 1 Solr Server (Amazon Linux / Solr / Small Instance)

We recently moved from a large web server to several small after our code rebuild. We’ve also discovered the huge cost differences in buying Amazon reserved instances (it’s more than halved our monthly cost), so if you’re planning on running a project for at least a year and you’ve got the upfront capital I would recommend doing it. Worst case is that if you end up growing you can use those reserved instance for something else.

We do realize that we are over compensating for our traffic, we could run on two small web server instances but we run a third to run backend applications written in C#. The third web server does handle some of our traffic, but we’d love if Amazon ELB had more control on what traffic goes to who. Most likely we will move to something like HAProxy for future load balancing.

Software and Technologies Used

• C# / .NET
• MSSQL
• IIS
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Amazon Linux
• Solr Lucene for search
• Postmark for email sending
• MailChimp for monthly bulk emails
• PHP for scripting
• Python for background jobs
• SVN for source control
• Amazon S3 for backup and static content
• jQuery

Development and the Future

Most of our development is done in Visual Studio 2010 (thanks again Bizspark), although obviously things like shell scripting, php and python development is usually done in Textmate. There are only two of us (out of a three person team) doing development, so that’s why the operational decision of doing everything in Amazon was decided. When the site REALLY REALLY takes off we can see how cost effective it would be to move to physical hardware at a NOC, but for the time being Amazon is working fine (knock on wood).

We are currently experimenting with queueing with ActiveMQ and Python for some of our “heavier” processes, plus we are looking into using Amazon Map Reduce for making the recommendation engine a bit smarter as well as for generating better reporting.

Although we have looked at using Amazon’s Database offerings we’ve decided to stick with more of a “go with what you know approach” as far as the database is concerned. We are looking in things like Scribe for logging which will be useful for reporting purposes.

And for those who are asking “Why not Microsoft Azure?”, it simply doesn’t offer the flexibility we are getting with Amazon. The major deterrent was it’s lack of ability to run Solr which was tremendously easy to implement and the cornerstone for a whole lot of what we do.

Questions/Comments can be made here or at FictFact’s GetSatisfaction page.