That's super cool. I launched a book recommendations feature this year, which works vastly different. I ask users what their favorite books are(which you can rank), and then allow them to import their goodreads data which includes star reviews, and books they have read, then I determine your favorite style of books based on genres and subjects, then use opensearch to find similar books. It's a lot more complicated than that, but seems to work well. I'm always looking for ideas on how to improve this feature. Interested in what you are actually doing on the backend on the how-it-works page. thanks!
It's much more powerful if you're a member. you can restrict the results to certain genres or book lengths, as we as published date ranges, etc. If someone wants to try out the more powerful feature, DM me and i'll mark your account as a member.
I failed out of college my senior year because I discovered EQ. So many fond memories. I created a guild on a new server and it ended up one of the most famous and best guilds on any of the servers. The amount of planning and management it took to lead a large guild was just ridiculous. It was a full time job. I even created one of the first "loot" web apps in php 3 and mysql just to keep track of player participation and make loot more fair.
Most of the team who created World of Warcraft were members in the guild.
some of my fondest memories:
- getting pretty far in the Plane of Air, which was an incomplete end game zone with almost impossible to beat bosses.
- defeating the Avatar of War, which was not supposed to be killable. We figured out we could charm his guards by having a huge number of enchanters and use the guards to tank him. We managed to beat him and they patched/fixed the guards and made them uncharmable shortly afterwards
The death penalty in the end game zones was originally very tough to work around. You needed a key to reach the zone, but if you died the key required to get into the zone was on your corpse inside the zone. So if everyone wiped/died getting everyone's corpse back was a multi hour event.
I think it's most useful for discovering new reads, especially with the advanced search and recommendations functionality. I do agree i could do a better job of non spoiler summaries. good idea
- Series have always been a problem. Some book lists will include the entire series, and then some will have individual books. If the series is sold as a single book I'll often just include that. Like Lord of the Rings. Sometimes I will include only the first book in the series on a list, to prevent always adding every single book in a series when a list mentions "harry potter series".
basically I don't have a perfect way of handling series'
for the last point, kind of. If you add a book to the default "My Favorite Books" user list, it gets aggregated and used for this book list which is included in the rankings. https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/463
I do plan on open sourcing more of the code over time. I also have started working on other sites using the same algorithm implementation (music, movies, video games)
This has just been a side project over the year generating passive income. I get around 250,000 page views a day, and with ads, memberships, and affiliate links I make around $2,500~ a month.
Tech stack is ruby on rails 8, postgresql 17, opensearch, redis, bootstrap 5.3 hosting on 3 servers on linode.
recently launched book recommendations feature for my books side project that I put a LOT of work into. I might be biased but I think it works well as long as you give it your favorite books.
warning: account required, and the full featured version where you can specify book length, include/exclude genres/subjects, etc requires a membership. if you would like to test it though just e-mail me at [email protected] and I'll mark your account as paid.
that's awesome! I've had many many side projects launched in the past 2 decades, but the only one still going is my books site https://thegreatestbooks.org
I created it 17~ years ago mostly as just a tool for myself and now it gets roughly 8 million views a month.
The hardest part of any side project is actually launching it and making it somewhat production ready. I always spend the vast majority of my time dealing with devops/deployment issues/tasks
here's my recommendations feature: https://thegreatestbooks.org/recommendations
It's much more powerful if you're a member. you can restrict the results to certain genres or book lengths, as we as published date ranges, etc. If someone wants to try out the more powerful feature, DM me and i'll mark your account as a member.