KidPub just celebrated its 18th birthday…very few web sites can claim to have been around for as long as KidPub has.
We’ve made some significant changes at kidPub in the past few months that, while not really obvious to most, are setting us up for what should be significant growth in 2013.
The first is a change to the servers that run KidPub. We’ve moved from relatively old hardware to some very fast Intel Core-i7 rack-based servers. The old hardware was struggling a bit and some pages on kidpub.com were taking several seconds to load. With the new hardware the most heavily used pages load in just under 1/5th of a second (200ms). For our members and guests it means that pages are very fast…and the new servers should hold us for the next few years. KidPub is in the top 50,000 web sites (measured by Quantcast) and traffic is growing at about 30% per year.
The second big change is a migration from our old book royalty tracking software, Dashbook, to a new Filemaker system that was built in-house. The new system is much more efficient and automates a lot of the process that goes into publishing our books. We spent most of January building the software. Now everything about each book is in one spot, and tasks such as setting up a new book on Amazon, which used to take 20 to 30 minutes, can be accomplished at the click of a button. As we launch new advertising for KidPub Press and also our new Watergrass Hill imprint for adult authors this automation will let us focus on the books rather than the process.
The new Filemaker system and the retirement of Dashbook means that we are now 100% Mac in all the software used…Dashbook was the last Windows program in the mix. And yes, we’re still building Hackintoshes to run everything, though the web servers are running CentOS Linux.
2013 is going to be a big year for KidPub. We should see traffic grow to 3,000 visitors a day, and the new KidPub Press For Adults business is going to occupy a lot of our time. I still can’t believe that I’ve been doing this for 18 years now…time to start planning that 20-year celebration, eh?