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. 😉

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