Update: Clearly, we’re down again. John’s working on figuring out why the problem reappeared and how to fix it. Watch for updates on the home page (Abby)

The site is back up, after having being down for a day and a night. An errant script knocked down the “read” database, and when the box crashed, some of the db files were corrupted. This meant the whole db had to be restored from the master db. In addition to the db itself, some of the log files were also affected. Turns our MySQL is a lot more finicky about how log files are handled than I’d ever known, or hoped to know. After a lot of digging around, everything is back the way it belongs, and all that was lost is a night of sleep–no data was lost.

I’d like to apologize profusely to everyone who was inconvenienced. We’ll put more safeguards into place to try to minimize such outages in the future, hopefully.

LibraryThing’s John McGrath has debuted a new site, TagsAhoy, with a wonderfully simple idea: searcing your tags across multiple sites.

Cross-site tag searching is nothing new; sites like Technorati do it all the time. But TagsAhoy searches your tags, not someone else’s. If you tag a lot, it will come in handy. And you’ll wonder why nobody thought of it before.

So far, TagsAhoy searches LibraryThing, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, Squirl and Connotea. More will come, and John has promised tag clouds and other cool features. Pattered somewhat on the spare design of another of his sites, Wordie (“LibraryThing for words,” “Flickr without pictures,” etc.) TagsAhoy is super-simple to use.

We at least applaud the name. It’s clunky in the way “LibraryThing” is clunky. Or was. Now all the “-Thing” names are bought up and my sub-Lovecraftian joke is almost trendy. We confidently predict “-Ahoy” will be the next “-Thing”*, or even “-cio.us”, “-r,” “-ster” and “-Space.”**

John recently moved to New Jersey and will be transitioning gradually off LibraryThing work over the next few months, as we look for a new PHP programmer with systems skills (job announcement to be posted soon). With TagsAhoy and whatever else his fertile mind creates, Abby, Altay and I wish him well.

*Research suggests PornAhoy.com is an expired domain. It sounds like a site for people who enjoy watching naked people on boats very very far away. There’s a market for everything.
**John suggests a site of just Web 2.0 suffixes, ThingAhoySter.

We just added the ability to edit the “Find At…” links that appear in the left-hand column on book pages, under the cover image. The link options include bookstores, book-finding services, publishers, swap sites, and hundreds of library catalogs from around the world. All together there are almost 500 options for ISBN-based services to choose from, and if we missed any, you can add them–the page for selecting links is itself editable.

If you don’t bother editing your links, the default set is selected based on your language–people viewing the site in French should see AbeBooks.fr and Amazon.fr, rather than their .com cousins.

Please let us know if you have suggestions for default links for the non-English sites, or other ways we can improve the links and this page. Given the staggering volume of contributions from LibraryThing members, this has the potential to become a very rich repository of online book services.

The current contents were derived from Wikipedia’s Book sources page. Both it and LibraryThing’s version are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, so contributions will benefit the widest possible audience.

Update: We’ve opened a group, Book links questions and help, for people who want to make updates. We’ll add a helpers log soon.

thingISBNs—all of them—are now available as a single ginormous XML file. This should help people get around the 1,000-calls-per-day limit for using thingISBN API, make it easier to perform local processing on thingISBN data, and—hopefully—allow crazy stuff we haven’t even thought of. For more info see Tim’s full post on Thingology.

As many have noticed, you can now add links to author pages. It’s part of an ongoing effort to give members more control over the site.

We’re still breaking in a new development environment and a related system (Subversion, for the tech-curious) of moving new stuff from development into production. As a result, the author links feature was launched a bit prematurely. That turned out to be not such a bad thing—a bunch of people immediately jumped in and started suggesting improvements, and the feature, minor though it is, was completed faster and better than it would have been otherwise*. Many thanks to everyone who helped troubleshoot, and to everyone who has contributed links.

One thing you’ll notice is that most authors already have a link to their Wikipedia pages, some of which say “unconfirmed” in parentheses. This is a side effect of a script we wrote to go through all the page titles on Wikipedia, match them against all the authors in LibraryThing, and create links. Which works great 90% of the time, but it turns out there are a lot of people in the world with the same name. To us, Alexander Robertson is an author. Our Wikipedia script, though, thought he was a British cop. To rectify this, we had the script say “unconfirmed” next to every author link that hadn’t yet been verified by a human being. So, if you want to be that human being, please check unconfirmed Wikipedia links when you come across them, and either confirm or edit them, as necessary (both options are available by clicking ‘edit’ in the links header).

Adding and confirming links turns out to be quite addictive—I’ve been working through the list of Nobel Prize winners, adding links to the author page of every winner, and reading half the bios in the process. If anyone can suggest other good link sources, please do so in the comments, it would be cool to have a somewhat organized effort to enrich the pages.

* I didn’t actually have anything to add, but I feel like I should throw in a footnote or two. Seems to be LT style.

“You are what you read” has turned into a bit of a mini-meme, with Chuck Close-style book cover portraits popping up all over. In addition to David Louis Edelman’s post that started it all, we have Geoff Coupe’s, followed by two excellent blog posts.

Mark Edon (that’s him at right) posted a Mac-oriented tutorial, including a very useful method for using Safari to quickly download all the images from the “All Your Covers” page.

4:14 has posted an extensive PC-oriented tutorial, replete with screenshots, which also gives guidance on grabbing images, as well as AndreaMosaic tips. And in a new twist, it goes all postmodern by using book covers to make a mosaic of… a book cover.

We love these things. Send in more, and we’ll start a gallery.

We’ve always pushed the idea that your books are you. Well, now you can see yourself on a single page.

We were inspired by two very cool projects: LibraryThing author David Louis Edelman‘s post about creating photo mosaics of himself from his book covers, and a post by Adam of Tailors Today about creating a poster of every book he’s ever read.

In both cases, one of the challenges was dealing with LibraryThing’s 100-cover limit in “Cover view.” So we made a special nothing-but-the-covers page.

The new page doesn’t replace the “Cover view” in your catalog (which remains the easiest way to visually browse your library), but book cover arts and crafts projects like this will be a little easier with everything consolidated in one place.

Check it out, discuss it here and let us know if you do anything as cool as David and Adam.