LibraryThing will be going down for some well-deserved rest at 12am EST. I expect the downtime to last between 30mins and 1 hour.

The site is slow now – we know, and we’re working on it. We got an influx of users today, thanks to the Wall Street Journal article and a Boing Boing reference. Traffic is ridiculously high (almost 15 times normal) and we’re working on adding servers to compensate. Stay with us while we grow over the next few hours!

TIM UPDATE: Go away! Wait, that’s unfriendly. We love you. If you go away, we’ll love you even more when you come back–we’ll kill the fatted calf!

But seriously, things are calming down a bit, but it’s still running past capacity. Don’t despair. Server upgrades are coming. Unfortunately, I can’t just throw money at the problem. But I’m doing that anyway 🙂

A big feature release is coming soon. Until then, sorry for covering all these press mentions, but they’re starting to snowball, I hope.

The Wall Street Journal’s Online Edition just did a long, sympathetic article on LibraryThing, “Social Networking for Bookworms” by Aaron Rutkoff. It’s public-access for thirty days via that URL.

Not to lick the hand that feeds me, but Rutkoff did an excellent descriptive and analytical job, covering a lot of the site and getting past some of the entertaining canards—”it’s about who has the biggest library!” and “it’s about dating!”—to what’s really going on. The nod to the Long Tail was also nice—just what you’d expect from the WSJ.

I’m also learning to restrain my big mouth, avoid controversy and stay “on message.”* I do want to say, however, that the article plays up tags more than I’d want. In the interview as always I try not to claim too much for them. Yes, I’ll show out where tags can help over formal, professionally-determined classification, but I make of point of noting that tags don’t solve everything and, ideally, they support each other. This is, however, a subtle and not very interesting point. So it tends to get lost and, at least in some eyes, I end up looking like a tag-drunk Web 2.0 twit. That’s at least 1/3 wrong.

Oh, and Abby has a last name! As for the two nameless programmers, their identities will shortly be revealed.

*I did, however, swear unintentionally during the interview. The reporter was nice enough not to quote me or to refer to me as “Tim Spalding, an exceptionally foul-mouthed programmer and bibliophile, hostile to subject tags, librarians and apple pie, who runs a dating site.”

The new issue of Poets & Writers has an article on LibraryThing, Strangers Meet in Virtual Libraries, by C. Max Magee (blog). It’s tackles the social side of LibraryThing nicely, drawing on an interview with Tim and with LT user Grunin. I like this part:

“Bibliophiles are easy to spot at cocktail parties. They are the ones lingering near the host’s bookshelves, their heads cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, scanning the collection of books and comparing it to their own.”

I know many LT users are also authors, so I’ll mention that the issue also includes the article The Writer’s Web Site, by Sue Bowness, advising writers on how to get a web site. It’s a good, basic introduction to some of the issues, but—speaking as an ex-SEO guru—the advice about Search Engine Optimization is off-base.

PS: This is Tim, reworking a post of Abby’s as she works on the tshirt issue.

UPDATE: 2:30pm. It’s back up again, albeit a little slow as it builds up a “cache.” No data was lost.

The main server went down last night around 5am. The situation is NOT serious. The slave server never went down, so there should be zero data loss. I also have backups of all the critical data from a few hours before the crash.

I’m waiting to do the restore because turning the slave into the master is something I’ve never done. LibraryThing’s database admin is going to do it, and he’s in California, dreaming untroubled dreams. I’ll wake him up in a half-hour or so.