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Interesting statistic

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:32:20 +0000

1. Windows: 290,087 visits
76.21%

2. Macintosh: 38,234 visits
10.04%

3. iPhone: 21,635 visits
5.68%

4. iPod: 16,685 visits
4.38%

What’s interesting to me is that the combined iPhone and iPod traffic is actually greater than the Macintosh traffic (by 0.02%). That’s a lot of handheld devices!

What happened?

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:27:26 +0000

Wow, that was lousy. Disk errors started to show up last week — but they were sporadic and it seemed on several occasions that they’d been fixed, only to pop up in another place. By the time I’d resolved to replace the hard drive and started to shop around, the folks at my co-location facility had already headed home for the weekend. That wasn’t great (I’ll admit, I didn’t ask them to escalate the issue), but they did have good replacement drives on hand for sale at cost, and Monday morning they plugged a new drive in. A few hours later the site and all of the files (90+ GB) were in place, and the site was back… except for a few problems.

One of the things I’d done when trying to fix the reported disk errors was update the OS, which usually isn’t a problem — but this time it looks like it messed up wine, the Windows non-emulator that manybooks uses to run mobigen.exe, which generates Mobipocket (.mobi & .prc) and Kindle (.azw) files. Luckily, Kovid Goyal’s Calibre can generate mobipocket and other formats; it’s a bit slower than wine+mobigen.exe, but it’s pretty reliable and easy to work with. I can recommend it for desktop use, and encourage you to donate towards its development (I have!).

Site errors

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:50:57 +0000

Several folks were kind enough to let me know that the site wasn’t working today — disk errors were interfering with file downloads. The errors have been resolved, and everything should be back to normal!

Width

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 04:47:58 +0000

One last change for the day: the maximum width of the page has been reduced to 820 pixels, from 960. Seems a bit cramped to me, but it may work better for some visitors — we’ll see how it goes over the next few days.

Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe (ePUB)

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:43:14 +0000

Quite a few ePUB formatted titles have had the wrong contents — namely “Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe” by Sabine Baring-Gould; I’ve never been able to get a file to reproduce the problem, so I’ve taken the drastic step of deleting every ePUB file that’s been generated to this point. Hopefully, along with the Calibre upgrade, the problem is resolved, and folks will get the file they’ve asked for… or at least I’ll have a clean slate to track down the issue!

Thanks to everyone that’s written in to let me know about this.