Reading Library Books on Bluefire Reader: Updated!

In November, before Overdrive came out with software for the iPad and iPhone, I told you how you could use Bluefire Reader to read your library books, thanks to a Javascript bookmarklet developed by Greg Williams. Someone on Twitter recently noted that the script that Greg developed was no longer working, I forwarded that to Greg, and he has now kindly posted an update.

For some reason, I can't select just the script on that page when I'm on the iPad, so I created a standalone page that contains only the script itself. You can open that page, select all that text, and paste it into your bookmark on Mobile Safari.

Full instructions for creating the bookmark can be found on the original post.

And many thanks to Greg for all the work he's done on this. We are all in your debt, Greg! (Follow or thank Greg at his blog or his Twitter.)

Everything's up again!

My web host, MediaTemple, had a severe outage between Monday and Wednesday in which all web, email, FTP, and SSH were offline. That meant I couldn't access email and visitors to my websites were greeted with an ominous and confusing Forbidden 403 error. It was extremely frustrating to say the very least.

What on earth would first-time visitors think? What it made me think was that I needed to be really careful not to put all my eggs in one basket, not on my own computer, not on Google's computers (which hosts this blog as well as my emergency gmail account), or on MediaTemple's.

I'm going to work out some strategies in the next few weeks to figure out how to react to such downtime in the future. Because it will happen again. Suggestions welcome.

Thanks for your patience.

Web site and email are down

Just wanted to let you know that both my web site and email are non-functioning due to problems with my web host, MediaTemple. It's really frustrating. I've never really had this happen before for such a long period of time (over the course of the last three days, including the last 12 hours straight). I've been communicating with people via Twitter but what do you do when your whole web site goes down? It makes me think a lot about redundancy, and not putting all my eggs in one basket. This blog is up because it's hosted at Google (as part of Blogger).

I'm not at all sure this is due to egregious behavior by MediaTemple. On the contrary, I've been pretty happy with them. And the thought of moving again is just such a hassle. But I will definitely be looking for ways to spread my digital presence among different providers and physical locations in order to lessen the impact caused by these probably inevitable circumstances.

If you're trying to get a hold of me via email, now you know why I haven't answered. Try Twitter!