Week 46 Changelog

22 Nov, 2025

Backend: authors are now retained in the hnbooks_ranks weekly index documents instead of being stripped out, by indexing the original entry payload directly. This sets things up for future features that need weekly author data.

Crawler author handling: Google Books and Open Library imports now both write to a single authors field instead of maintaining separate gb_authors / ol_authors variables, simplifying how authors are stored.
Weekly ranks indexing: the weekly indexer no longer builds a shallow doc copy or removes authors before indexing; it sends the full entry through to Elasticsearch.
Top-N generation logic: when building the weekly top list, the crawler now calls get_book_info(url_entry) before checking for a missing store field, and only overwrites book_info for carry-over entries that don’t have store set (i.e., items reused from last week).
Newsletter CTA copy: the “💬 Tell Us What You Think” section is now “💬 What Did You Read This Week?”, asking readers to share their reading log so you can feature a reader-suggested book.

Sample ES doc: removed hnb-book-crawler/crawling/doc.json, which contained a hard-coded example document and is no longer needed.
Frontend author display: removed the .book-authors CSS block and the author byline markup from both book.html (book detail page) and books.html (weekly list cards), along with the authors normalization helper in es_books.py. Authors continue to exist in the data, but they’re no longer rendered on the site UI for now.

Next up: Book descriptions (hopefully)