I’ve just completed moving the site over to the newer, faster servers, and everything appears to be working fine. There was no downtime that I was aware of, and everything went really smoothly. I’ve not done any concrete testing of the speed yet, but the site seems to be functioning a lot faster now. I’ve still got a few optimizations to make in the code to take advantage of some new features. The site is fairly complicated, so there is a chance that I missed something. I’ll be keeping a close eye on some log files over the next couple days, but if you see anything strange, please let me know about it so that I can make sure that it is running correctly.

For anybody that is interested in the technical details, the new servers run CentOS 6 which includes updates to many applications. I was specifically looking for some of the latest MySQL and PHP features that weren’t available in the CentOS 5 standard repository. The physical servers are also much more powerful and have more memory and faster/bigger disks as well. They are hosted with RimuHosting.com in a very well-connected data center in Dallas TX.

I know the site has been having some issues lately and for the past week or more have been working on installing some new servers. I’m ready to move the site over to the new servers this evening. I’ll begin working on it around 9pm EST, and it will probably take a few hours. I don’t expect there to be any down time but wanted to give a heads-up just in case their becomes any issues. After the upgrades have been completed, I’ll be able to optimize a few more processes. It may take me another day or two to get that completed, so hopefully everything is running perfectly on Monday. I’ve specifically chosen to make the changes on a Friday night and over the weekend to try and minimize the possible disruption.

A recent article about the working conditions at an Amazon Fulfillment Center has gotten some interesting coverage. There are varying opinions on the slant of the article, but I found some interesting information about the operations and expectations of those employed in these facilities that gives some insight for those sellers who use FBA regularly.

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I’ve had the chance to introduce some significant new features to BookScouter recently and am pretty happy with how things are working. Now I need to figure out what the next step is 🙂 With so many BookScouter users, I want to make sure that we are working on features that will be useful to people so that BookScouter will continue to be the most comprehensive, accurate, and easy to use tool for comparing prices on selling used books.

We’ve put together a short survey that I’m hoping will help us learn and quantify how and why people use the website. We’re interested in learning a bit about your book-selling ventures and what other tools you are using that we might be able to integrate with.

Please take a few minutes to complete the survey. Most users should be able to finish it in about five minutes. We’ll send you a free BookScouter.com t-shirt for your time, and you’ll be helping to make sure that BookScouter.com has the best tools for you to use.

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I’ve had a pretty good response to the offerings with BookScouter Pro and am happy to announce that it is now free for non-profit organizations to use. To get that set up, make sure that you have a Free BookScouter.com account, and then Contact Us so that we can work on setting up the free Pro account. We’ll need a copy of a document that verifies your non-profit status.

I’ve had numerous requests from users to show the Amazon Sales Rank and some basic Amazon pricing information on the site. I’m happy to announce that is now possible. You’ll need to put in your Amazon Product Advertising API credentials to make it work. There is a new link for "Manage your Amazon Access Keys" on the screen right after you log in. That screen describes the process and what needs to be done to enter your AWS Access Credentials.