#136 - New Year, Old Improvements

#136 | 2 January 2023

        January 2, 2023

#136 - New Year, Old Improvements
Handling high levels of traffic, the launch of January Pages 2023 and the 2022 Reading Wrap-Up, and the upcoming redesign! 🤩

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#136 | 2 January 2023

New Year, Old Improvements

Happy New Year! 🎉

This time last year was super tough! While we were enjoying increased traffic, the product was suffering from the load and Rob and I had to spend most of each day monitoring the product, re-writing code, upgrading servers, and adjusting our architecture.

By the time we'd finished all of our updates weeks later, traffic had died down to a more manageable level and so we weren't able to test in earnest whether our changes had the desired effect.

Well, last week has proved that our updates were indeed effective! 😎

Visitor stats for 26 Dec 2022 - 1 Jan 2023

Before the last few days, the maximum number of current users we'd ever had was 3.2k (Jan 1st 2022), and the app would run slowly supporting that many people. Yesterday we had over 5.1k people using the app around the world and there were hardly any performance or stability issues! 🙌🏾

We hit a peak of 5.1k current visitors on Jan 1st!

Since last time...

We launched our January Pages Challenge for the second year in a row! 🥳

If you want to get into the habit of reading a little bit every single day, and have the chance to win wonderful bookish prizes from a range of brilliant organisations, then this is the challenge for you!

Last year we had 31k participants. I was hoping for at least 60k this year. Looking good!

It's not too late to join as you can backdate your progress entries if needed! You can find instructions on the challenge page. 😊

We also launched the 2022 edition of our Reading Wrap-up! 🥳

We released a new StoryGraph mood map chart! 🤩

Rob and I worked super hard to take it to the next level and delight our users and the feedback on social media suggests we achieved our goal! 🥰

You can find a link to your wrap-up on your 2022 stats page.

Next two weeks

I couldn't make it in time with the redesign so that's what I'm focusing on now, alongside dark mode. 😎

In the next issue, I really hope I'm showing you some "before and after" screenshots. 🤞🏾

What I'm reading

I went to my Up Next Suggestions in order to choose my first read of the New Year and American Kingpin by Nick Bilton is what I went for!

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

Haven't tried The StoryGraph yet? Check it out today!

Love the app? Consider upgrading to our Plus plan!

Want to volunteer? Apply to be a Librarian!

Use Mastodon? Check out our server!

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