Uptime
It's up again. Knock on wood, I think it will stay that way.
In general, the system is stronger and more disaster-resistant. I am working with not one but two competent database administrators. There will be some glitches, but also significant improvements. I am confident that there is a clear path to scaling this thing up very large.
There are some changes, some temporary, some permanent. Most of the heavy-duty processing has been moved away from the page-display. So it does not calculate the book suggestions when you enter a page, as it did before—although it then cached them. Now it gives you the cached suggestions if there are any, and no suggestions if there aren't. The suggestions are being generated behind the scenes when nothing else is going on. Soon enough all books will have recommendations again. Since they don't do much "thinking" the book pages are much faster.
You'll also notice that the profile page looks different. If it's your profile you get a lengthy list of who shares books with you. If another person's it fronts the list of shared books, something that was pushed down the page before. It doesn't give you a list of that person's list of top sharers. I'd plan to add these other-profile statistics back in soon, but they will be subordinated to the shared books list, which is, I think, the most interesting piece of information.
The profile page currently lacks links to user reviews and the more intensive similar-libraries calculation. These will be back as soon as I decide where to put them. I plan to make the profile a multi-page affair, moving the comments off the main page. Those of you who have dozens of comments will be glad of that.
That's the news. Thank you for all your support. It was so supportive that I plan to make downtime a weekly event. ;)
In general, the system is stronger and more disaster-resistant. I am working with not one but two competent database administrators. There will be some glitches, but also significant improvements. I am confident that there is a clear path to scaling this thing up very large.
There are some changes, some temporary, some permanent. Most of the heavy-duty processing has been moved away from the page-display. So it does not calculate the book suggestions when you enter a page, as it did before—although it then cached them. Now it gives you the cached suggestions if there are any, and no suggestions if there aren't. The suggestions are being generated behind the scenes when nothing else is going on. Soon enough all books will have recommendations again. Since they don't do much "thinking" the book pages are much faster.
You'll also notice that the profile page looks different. If it's your profile you get a lengthy list of who shares books with you. If another person's it fronts the list of shared books, something that was pushed down the page before. It doesn't give you a list of that person's list of top sharers. I'd plan to add these other-profile statistics back in soon, but they will be subordinated to the shared books list, which is, I think, the most interesting piece of information.
The profile page currently lacks links to user reviews and the more intensive similar-libraries calculation. These will be back as soon as I decide where to put them. I plan to make the profile a multi-page affair, moving the comments off the main page. Those of you who have dozens of comments will be glad of that.
That's the news. Thank you for all your support. It was so supportive that I plan to make downtime a weekly event. ;)
posted by Tim at 4:43 AM
33 Comments:
Welcome back online!
What is the list of books you share that appears when you view a profile page when you're not logged in?
They are the books you share with the books that have been recently deleted, actually.
I killed that box, the only right-side green box on the page then. The page looks kind of *wide* without one. I wonder what should go in it. Maybe the people they connect with, if that's been cached.
Welcome back librarything!
I've only been a member for a few days and still missed it while it was away.
re Profile: I'd noticed I couldn't edit my profile or change from private to public. Is this because it's still being worked on?
Good going, Tim. I wish there were a few people with your determination and competence working with ME.
Regularly scheduled downtime seems like an excellent idea.
Keep the faith, baby.
Great work, Tim & helpers. LT rocks.
Fabulous, Tim (& co.)! I'm so glad to see LT back online. Your work way outshines any inconveniences.
The changes and proposed changes to profiles sound (or are) excellent. I'm glad to see at a glance more people who share books with me. Nifty. :)
Ooh, checking out these changes just now, I see that the list of Shared Books on profile pages is now sorted by author. I've been wanting that for a while. Goodo!
The profile page for hailelib is not showing shared users though it says this is being loaded. After time enough to eat breakfast (without leaving the profile) still not loaded. But a minor problem since I can add books again!
Glad to see LT back.
It's nice to see you back!
Just one style problem : in my profile, after the heading Comments from Other LibraryThing-ers, there is a huge amount of white space before the actual comments. So one could easily miss the comments thinking that there were none.
Other than that, the new profile page looks nice.
Thanks for your hard work.
I noticed that on a "long" page (i.e., someone who shared a lot of books with me), I couldn't scroll down past a certain point. I tried a trick that works with some blogs that do the same thing (Typepad blogs, perhaps?), and hit F11 once or twice, and that did the trick.
Glad to see everything back up. Great job.
Hmm, that "long page" phenomenon I mentioned above isn't afflicting me now (only change is that I opened a new browser), so it seems it was anomalous.
Thanks for all your work on LibraryThing!
Editing your profile is back. It won't stay where it is, but it will be there.
A little surprised by the profile page change. However, it looks good :) And, my white-background userpic looks better too :)
What is the list of books you share that appears when you view a profile page when you're not logged in?
Nothing appears then. It's just a profile.
Well done. I can't imagine what it must be like to try to handle your phenomenal growth.
What a great service!
Now, get some sleep! :)
Small (nitpicking) suggestion: have members of your watchlist who share books with you appear in bold.
Tim,
You kid, I cry. Life without LT hardly seems worthwhile. The masses rejoice.
I killed that box, the only right-side green box on the page then. The page looks kind of *wide* without one. I wonder what should go in it.
How about the Leave your comment box? Currently it's at the bottom of the page, which requires extensive use of the PgDn button whenever the user has more than a handful of comments.
I don't see any reason it couldn't go on the right side of the page - much like the Leave your comment I'm typing this into at this very moment!
Okay, here's a weirdness: I just looked at my brand-new profile page and saw a long scroll of people I share books with. Cool. so I clicked on one with whom I am supposed to share 17 books. (I clicked on the number "17" beside the username). The person's catalog came up with the note at the top "You do not share any books with (username)". I tried this twice. I am logged in, it knows who I am. But I'm not showing shared books when I actually get to a user's catalog.
I
Currently it's at the bottom of the page, which requires extensive use of the PgDn button whenever the user has more than a handful of comments.
{blush}
OK, I know I can use Ctrl-End to get to the bottom instantly. But you know what I mean! Putting Leave your comment at the top of the Comments section, where the newest comments are, is more user-friendly.
Addendum to previous: it works fine if I click on the username itself, though; then I get the user's profile with a list of shared books.
I have a feature request. I'm echoing what another user said a week or so ago, before The Great Downtime.
i don't much care about the social features. They're nice but they're secondary. What I really want is to be able to search my catalog and find what I'm looking for. So I need two things: no, three things: (and the Comfy Chair!)
a) I should be able to find books with a combination of terms. So if I look for "John Girard" I should get ONLY those books written by "John Girard", and NOT a list of every book I have written by either someone with Girard in his name OR someone with John in his name.
b) you could put in an option for "or" rather than "and" in the above search, but "and" should be the default.
c) Ideally a search function would let me search on author, title, publisher, date of publication, and comments. When I've put things in the comments that tell me where I put the book, or which graduate student I've loaned it to, I would really like to be able to type in "Billy Bob Gradstudent" and find a list of all the books I've loaned Billy Bob this year.
You can divide it up if you want. By which I mean, you could have different fields for author, title, publisher, year, and comments, and I could fill in as much or as little information as I wanted, and choose "and/or" beside each field. But the default should be "and". Or you could have a pull-down menu for what terms I'm searching on (plus an optional "advanced search" function that let me search on more than one field at once.)
If you get the impression that I want to be able to search my own books in pretty much exactly the way I search the university library catalog, that's exactly what I want. A mini-university catalog search, with added comments. Is this doable?
Thanks,
LB
How about the feature for getting suggestions based on your whole library and similar libraries? Is that gone? Will it be back? It's one of my favorite things (a replacement for the nearly-gone, much-beloved Alexlit).
I may need to occasionally hire a LAMP sysadmin for consulting. If either of the two competent ones that you're working with are interested in that kind of work, maybe they could post their contact info? Or contact me at the Email address listed at the Web site linked to my name.
Really like the changes on the profile page, it looks much fresher and I like seeing more people I share books with.
I'm also hugely grateful for the option of putting the dates in European format. Trying to think like an American was just far too confusing.
LibraryThing being down is never an issue for me because it always comes back so much better, but I have been itching to add the books I bought Monday, and update the ones I finished reading.
Dear Tim,
Echoing LBowman, I hope you are still working on the search feature. Jim and I catalogued our library in the hope of being able to manage it and find things in it. We looked forward to a search engine that would be analogous to what is found in a library.
It's enormously frustrating to type in an author's name (first and second) and get 500 books, some with the first and some with the last name.
And senseless.
Or to type in a full name and get nothing when you know you have a book -- because the engine is too accent sensitive.
Jim has shown me that if I type out just one name as long as that name is unusual in some way (it has an odd spelling), then only can I hope to find a book through using search.
As it is the search engine is not helping me find books. I'm in the same position I was before I catalogued my books only that my memory of them is now fresher.
As I wrote last time, being able to seach the comments would be a great help.
I don't know if you can search library catalogues this way nowadays. When I used to go to large libraries, there was just the
card catalogue. I imagine though that the software in a place like (say) the Folger Shakespeare (where I used to go frequently) will now allow people to find books in all sorts of ways through the software.
What else is a catalogue for but to be able to find books in the database.
Anyway thank you again for all you've done so far. Jim and I are almost finished cataloguing our library.
Chava
celeste said: I'm also hugely grateful for the option of putting the dates in European format.
Eh? I seem to have missed that. Where can I change that option? That's one setting I'd really like to modify.
(Cheers, celeste!)
I'm facing problems with 'Books Shared' as well (though it's possible that the person I was looking had multiple copies; someone else commented on it).
Aside from that, saw this error:
Warning: join() [function.join]: Bad arguments. in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/profile.php on line 630
none
Something interesting has happened to the Top tags field on the Profile page. It's now being populated by a series of numbers, for instance: 50, 42, 34, 33, 32, 32, 31, 28, 27, 26...
Not complaining, just letting you know!
Haha! Glad to have the site back.
Also, the burt sienna color is growing on me. I think I actually like it now!
Woo-hoo!
Great. Thanks for all your hard work over these last few days.
Oh, just one small thing (not sure where to mention this): when I do a blog widget with links from book covers to amazon it goes to .com, even though I searched with .co.uk. Any way to change that?
Okay, that goes on the list. Thanks!
I sort of miss the 'adjusted for libary size' and 'adjusted for book obscurity' features. If it makes it faster not to have them, I understand. But they were appreciated!
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