Hi, Megan here with a new screencast for you! Some of the books available for borrowing from Open Library require Adobe’s Digital Editions program. This screencast will help make sense of installing it on your computer and getting started with it. You’ll also see how you can return books once you’re done with them. Happy borrowing!
Tag Archives: Updates
Stability Improvements
The openlibrary.org website used to become unavailable for short durations whenever we deployed new code. This was a due a problem in lighttpd fastcgi handling. Now we switched to gunicorn, a brand new web server in Python, and that solved this problem. Code deploys are now very smooth and this is a major step towards improving the overall stability of the system.
Unscheduled maintenance (is over)
Open Library is doing some maintenance. Back in a bit.
09:35AM: And we are back.
Improved Set Up for Developers
Over the last few months, a handful of the developers at the Internet Archive have begun working more closely with Open Library code, where previously, the project was more isolated and had really only been worked on by the core team of, well, two: Anand & Edward. Apart from more fun collaborating with colleagues across the Archive, this increased exposure of the Open Library code base has been profoundly useful for the project. Apart from the very useful fresh perspectives and questions, it’s also led to an improved toolset for getting a developer’s instance of Open Library up and running on your local machine – so important when you’re trying to find your way around a new system.
The cherry on top is an install script for Linux, written by Raj Kumar, on top of the awesome work done by Michael Ang (Mang) to prepare for our recent Lending launch. The updated docs are here:
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/setup
This is a bit of a milestone for us – making the codebase more accessible and easier to work with is something we’ve wanted for ages, so it’s nice to see it well on its way.
Today's Downtime (is over)
We’re going to bring OpenLibrary.org offline at around 3PM Pacific Time to upgrade our database server. If all goes according to plan, this upgrade should take approximately three hours. We’ll be replacing our old spinning platter disks with modern solid state drives as part of a broader effort to improve the overall performance and reliability of the Open Library system.
We’ll post updates if they come to hand.
6PM UPDATE – Looks like it’s going to take a wee bit longer than expected to get everything copied over. And by “wee bit,” we mean another hour or so from now. If the database decides it wants to move slower, we’ll update again. Thanks so much for your patience!
7.45PM UPDATE – And, we’re back!