LAMP hackers?
Earlier on this blog I called for a Flash programmer. A blog reader found me one. (The new Flash-based widget will be coming out soon.) Now I'm looking for a LAMP guy—Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, particularly the MySQL part of that—to help me with some scaling issues. Is that you? Do you know her?
I have some limited and particular problems now (eg., the slow query log). But I could see this evolving into something more steady. I can pay a low-decent hourly, and you'd have the pleasure of working on something cool.
Bonus points for living in Portland, ME or Boston, MA. But I suppose this doesn't matter these days.
Update: The widgets are back up again. They were responsible for a lot of the speed problems. I had no idea how often they were getting requested! Fortunately, the code had a lot of room for speed optimization.
I have some limited and particular problems now (eg., the slow query log). But I could see this evolving into something more steady. I can pay a low-decent hourly, and you'd have the pleasure of working on something cool.
Bonus points for living in Portland, ME or Boston, MA. But I suppose this doesn't matter these days.
Update: The widgets are back up again. They were responsible for a lot of the speed problems. I had no idea how often they were getting requested! Fortunately, the code had a lot of room for speed optimization.
posted by Tim at 5:35 PM
39 Comments:
I'm sitting here working on the 3rd edition of my book, _PHP, MySQL and Apache All-in-One_ and I would love to help you out (being a big ol' fan of LibraryThing as you know) for free and all, but you kept saying "guy" and "him" so that rules me out (being a girl and all).
Bummer!
Duly noted. I favor "him" or "her" over circumlocutions, but that one may have crossed the line. I reversed it. We'll give that one equal time. My apologies.
Any chance I can tempt you?
I was kidding! I mean, I am a girl, it's true. But I wasn't offended or anything, it was just so many masculine pronouns in a row it made me laugh.
Of course I'll help any way I can. A couple of months ago I said I'd contact you to see how I could help out, and I never did (enterprise app project isn't quite put to bed) and you kept releasing things and releasing things and releasing things ... I figured "damn, he doesn't need my help!" :)
Email's in my blogger profile, just give a holler. A holler and a db schema to look at would be even better!
Well, it's a relief that I didn't offend you!
Don't others stop offering. I suspect JM is rather steep for me. I want the kind of programmer who hasn't been recognized for their skills yet--hungry and without a sense of their value. :)
I'll offer my services; though I haven't written the book on MySQL like your other offer!
--Paul
paulsmail@gmail.com
You missed the "free" part, didn't you? I also had two rackmount servers I just pulled out of my colo that I was going to see if you wanted at at steep discount.
But yes, yes, everyone offer their time to Tim, if you have time and skillz.
My Husband might be able to help. He programs those things (two I am sure of and two I think so). He probably also matches the "hungry" qualification. :P
Click on my name for his website.
Now would be a good time to read this comment. I'm rewriting the widget code—which does give me an idea of how far I've come—and I just tripped an all-authors process...
(This is also why I haven't written to you two yet. LibraryThing gets a widget request every 2-3 seconds. I'm messing up a lot of blogs.)
Some day I should consider open-sourcing this. I know there are people out there who'd get involved.
switch to LAOP - Linux, Apache, Oracle, PHP and I got of ton of people that can help you out :) If if you don't want to go totally open-source maybe you want to expose one or a set of web services that people could use to help you out as well.
Speaking of re-writing the widget...
has anyone reported that the widget is displaying twice now? On my blog, I set it up to display two books, and now there are two instances of the widget displayed (2 books each, two headers). I checked my template and it still calls for one instance with two books displayed. Looks like a bug.
FYI... sorry to add to your burden, but cool to see the process of some nice people signing up to help you handle some of the load on this cool project!
-Bruce
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the tag system.
I repeat, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the tag system.
:)
[fixed]
anyone else seeing a bog when you search on tags? if I do a search on say "read", I get the same book listed multiple times for a coupl of books (The Devil's Cup : A History of the World According to Coffee isone of them). In addition the search by Book does not seem to work. If I do a search on "Devil" I get "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America but not "The Devil's Cup : A History of the World According to Coffee".
i said see a blog, but i meant see an bug. blogging is now too much of a focus for me
i might be expecting to much of the search with my expectation of plural or possessive to be taken into account. I didn't really think of that until right now but the double listing seems odd
Somewhere in the early '90s, Miller's & Swift's The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing convinced me that "they" is perfectly acceptable as a third person singular pronoun. I don't remember much else about their book, but it's worth reading for their discussion of that subject alone.
I have to confess that it's unlikely that I'd find time to do anything with them myself in the near future, but in principle I think the idea of exposing some LT web services is a very cool one. :)
lookslike the double reporting issues on the search is fixed. thanks. Norm
language said ". . . appertaining thereunto". There's a phrase I haven't used lately. I am hoping to try it out on someone real soon now! ;)
Hey, is it possible to have the image style for the blog widgets be configurable by CSS? The book image is always floated right and it looks funny in my blog. Thanks!
Sure. If you choose "don't style" it you can control it with CSS to your heart's delight. There's a good tutorial on styling the blog widget at http://nofancyname.blogspot.com/2005/12/styling-librarything-blog-widget.html.
Just FYI, http://feedicons.com/ seems to be the happening thing for feeds.
I don't know if it is just my blog, but my random books shown doesn't seem to be changing. How often Are they supposed to change?
BTW, I love how easy it is to enter titles, and seeing all my pretty book coveres lined up in rows! Neat program.
Melora
Tim, are there any plan to set up a BBS/Forum for LibraryThing?
RJO
Not sure this is the forum but I too have noted that the "random" books displayed in the widget on my blog have been static for 24 hours.
-Bruce
You guys don't miss a beat, do you? Okay it's back with a ten minute delay between changes. Thanks for the tip.
might be an odd request but on the profile can you calculate a cost/value of the library based off of Amazon? My wife leeps telling me to get rid of all these books so I'm looking for any justification :)
server crash I think when logging in.
All LibraryThing Books
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 65 bytes) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/catalog_bottom.php on line 916
Sorry, I can't compute a value. Amazon requires prices be refreshed every 24 hours but no more than once per second. The server load would be enormous and there are too many books to do it every day.
RE: computing value
A value drawn from Amazon would be inaccurate in any event. Obviously, books on our shelf are used books, so drawing the value from new books on Amazon would give a distorted picture. Nor would it account for condition.
Well, the value would be useful for insurance purposes. If your house burns down you get the value to replace new, not the value to replace used or the sale. Insurance seems to me about the only "use" of a value field, although there's a naval-gazing appeal.
A nice statistic could emerge from the date of purchase and the price—the present value of your books if you'd invested the money instead. :)
i hope you do have a good backup strategy in place. i just paid for the lifetime membership, and have put in many hours cataloguing, and seeing things like
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/home/virtual/FILESYSTEMTEMPLATE/.mysqlsock/mysql.sock' (111) in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/response_search.php on line 610
- fatal error (1)
makes me a tad nervous.
Gregor: I understand your concerns. Here's the deal:
(1) I have a full data backup every day.
(2) My number one focus right now is scaling. Indeed, if you just got that it's because I've got a MySQL guru helping me to optimize and he need to restart with a different configuration. Hiccups are likely, but the end result will be a much more stable site.
(3) You can backup your own data to CSV.
So, I'm committed to keeping your data safe. Is your data 100% safe now? No. But I'm working on it.
A nice statistic could emerge from the date of purchase and the price—the present value of your books if you'd invested the money instead. :)
Ick, that would be quite frightening indeed. I think I'd prefer to be literate and ignorant of the costs rather than have more money and be ignorant of books.
I am having widget problems. All 3 widget codes - when cut and pasted into my sidebar skew the entire sidebar. The line breaks somewhere in the title of th 1st book and pushes the entire sidebar down to the bottom of the page. I doubt it is a width issue. I am willing to try some custom css code if someone knows somw that is more stable, but I would need a pointer as to where to find it. Or was this some kind of temp glitch?
I LOVE the idea of this thing, tho'!
Update on the widget thingy - I erased the bit of amazon code at the end of it, which seemed to take care of it.
Before that I tried to sign up for one of their associate #'s and filling in that box, but that didn't help.
FYI....
About the blog widget: I saw that some users have the Random books from my library one in their profile page on LibraryThing. How did they do it? I would like it too. Thank you
I've just noticed a disturbing change in the search mechanism - I can only search my library. There is no longer an option to search all libraries for books or tags.
This is not good.
lilithcat,
This was intentional and will be only temporary. See Tim's newest post on "Performance / Two new features."
He says: "I've temporarily disabled all-catalog searching while I work on database speed. These searches were taking up a large percentage of database power."
A momentary sacrifice that I, for one, am happy to make. (Right now I'm mainly interested in cataloguing new books!)
Thanks, chemekke, I'd posted that last night, and saw the new thread this morning. I was glad to see it's only temporary, and, like you, am happy to accept short-term losses for long-term gains.
we can try to work together on your mysql problem.
I am currently involved with such design for the other start up
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