Thanks to Leah Zeldes for the suggestion — the Recent Additions page can now display new titles for a single Category (like “Science Fiction” for example). Simple? Pretty much. Useful? Seems like it could be — tell me what you think!
Things weren’t as bad as I originally though — at first I thought all the hard drives (internal AND external) were dead; it turned out that just the internal was completely gone, the externals were OK after a little work. Then I thought I’d somehow turned off my daily backups, leaving me with a month old database to restore from. That wasn’t the case, I’m glad to say. A little work restoring individual applications, and some hassle with java (wouldn’t work until I applied the system updates OS X was holding in the background… duh), and just about everything is OK again. Even spent a little time adding the books that showed up on Project Gutenberg during the week!
I’d like to thank everyone who wrote in with encouragement. Knowing that you enjoy the site and find it useful makes the effort worthwhile. Some of you also wrote in with suggestions for improving the site — keep them coming!
It’s a long, sad story, but I’m tired so I’ll make it short: the hard drive crashed, almost took the external backups with it, and the restoration isn’t complete, but at least the database, source files, and PHP scripts were salvaged. The long wait for the new drive to be delivered was pretty irritating and got me thinking about what I’d do with my time if not working on Manybooks.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in!