So right as the final sprint for the Simone Wood Award, 2009 was underway a series of major failures occurred with our server. We are still trying to piece together what happened, and we will try to keep you informed. It involves multiple systems having multiple problems, and is proving a Gordian knot to untangle. So much like Alexander the great we took a knife to the knot, and the site is back to accepting books for publication.

We know that some people have not had their books properly upload over the last few days, so we are asking that they re-upload their books. We are going to give a grace window for the affected users over the weekend, allowing them to upload during this week until Friday, and accept them into the contest.

Further details on how this is going to affect the contest will be posted by Wednesday. We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing.

Labels: awards, contest, news, Simone Wood, site outages

Another site update on Sharing Books has gone out, and some users may have had a minor interruption of service around 9:30am PST. This update brings the following things to the Sharing Books website:

• Cleaner, quicker, and in theory more accurate search using quick search and advanced searching features on the site.
• Some improvements to some backend processes.
• For our Volunteer Librarians your navigation should now cease it's magical disappearing act.
• New and improved buttons for us administrators of the site to download your book and text versions of your book without having to download from the frontend of the site or the DB directly!

Not the most exciting of updates I know, but these changes do let us get into a cleaner, quicker workflow on administration of the site. That means our book creators should be getting faster turnaround times for ISBNs and the like. It also means we can start moving faster with anyone we strategically partner with, getting them content in a much more timely manner.

Labels: new features, news, site outages, site upgrades

Just a heads up to everyone, there has been an update to the site this morning. You may have noticed that there was a brief interruption of the site around 9:00am PST. The following things were fixed/addressed:

• at some point in the past users were able to upload books without the nessesary text version of their books. This has been corrected and all future books will require a .txt or .doc or .docx version of the book in addition to the pdf.
• some administrative tools on the back end were updated, letting us track things a bit easier.
• ISBNs will now carry forward when you edit your book, meaning if you make an update or a change there will no longer be a lag time between approval and ISBNs being applied. The donation page at the back of your books will still have a lag period, unfortunately.
• Advanced Search was cleaned up a bit and should be giving better search results. Quick Search still is having issues for the moment, and may not return 100% accurate results.
  

As usual if you find any bugs or problems please report them so we can track down issues and clean them up.

Labels: development, site outages, site upgrades

Just a notice to everyone on the site we have made some physical location changes to our database that runs the back end for most of the site. There was a brief interruption of site service this morning while that happened. You should not see any major change in site performance, but if you do, or if you find something broken, please send a bug report or email.

Labels: site outages, site upgrades

From the hours of 9:00pm PST to 12:00am PST the Sharing Books site was down. The outage was due to server related problems at our host company. The problems have been resolved, and from what we can see there has been no loss of data. We apologize to our users who experienced an interruption in service, and we are looking further into what caused the problem so that we can prevent it in the future.

If anyone is missing data, or having problems with their user account please contact us at team@sharing-books.com

Labels: site outages, support