Well… a lot, actually!

For starters, the annoying ads are generating much needed revenue for us. I am deeply appreciative you guys are putting up with them. Thank you!

We’ve also, I hope, successfully switched hosting companies. Our new company charges about half of what our old one did and, thus far, appears to be more stable. We are still, however, recoding the site to make it more stable and less demanding. Over the years, as our database has grown, we’ve struggled to get enough bandwidth for the sheer volume of data AAR has. If we want to be able to continue to grow, we need for our coding to be as efficient as possible. So, you may still see some weirdness on the site but it’s my hope that most of that is behind us.

In other big news, we are going to absorb the fabulous site AudioGals. They have decided not to continue on and their publisher, Melinda, did not want all their wonderful reviews to vanish. So we are in the process of adding their 2000+ reviews to the database at AAR. They’ll be tagged in a way that readers will be able to identify them as AudioGals reviews and will also be searchable through PowerSearch. I’m very excited about this–their work is wonderful.

Despite not having a podcast or being on TikTok, we’ve managed to keep our traffic numbers up there. Thus far this year, we’ve had over 750K views of the site and our visitors spend over two minutes at a time. I think we could do a lot better if we actively worked with a PR person but that’s not yet in the budget.

I’m also thrilled to share that a major American university is now working with me to archive all of our data for academics to use. Not only is it about time great that academia is starting to take romance seriously, it is also gratifying to know that all the work the many many wonderful reviewers and publishers who’ve created AAR since its inception in 1996 will never, I hope, vanish.

So, that’s what’s up here. Any questions? What’s new with you?