It’s been a huge week here at UPCZilla, bigger even than the day we launched, we think.
First we migrated the whole site to new VPS hosting – the shared hosting was definitely not up to the job. Personally we have never set up a live web server from scratch (thank God for Bitnami) so that was pretty intense. Then we had to migrate the main UPC database to the new server, which rarely goes smoothly as the quantities of data involved are big and lots can (and did) go wrong.
We also made a lot of changes to the site behind the scenes to make pages load faster, which is very important these days.
Lastly, today we added nearly 600,000 new UPCs to the UPCZilla database! This feat was almost entirely thanks to the Product Open Data project and the hard work of those guys compiling huge amounts of data on products, brands and manufacturers, so we can’t claim much credit – though actually getting all that data into a form we could import did give us some headaches.
So that’s several BIG jobs out of the way. We are looking forward (after a short rest) to getting on with lots of other jobs too numerous to mention, but including optimising all our database searches (especially if we see things slowing down due to the increased quantity of data), culling a lot of crappy data probably, DOZENS of little fixes and tweaks to the site interface and presentation of the data, improved site design (including a half-decent logo!) and, some day soon, hopefully, to upgrade to the use of 13-digit GTIN codes, which will at some point supercede UPCs.
Oh yes, and to HIT THE MILLION mark, maybe before the year is out?