What to Do If a Digital Scholarship Website or Application Goes Down

Yesterday, the DigitalKoans weblog at the Digital Scholarship .org mirror was brought down by the host service without prior warning. It is now back up; however, given that this issue may not be fully resolved, this may be a good time to review what to do when a Digital Scholarship mirror site or application goes down.

Digital Scholarship has two websites: http://digital-scholarship.org/ and http://digital-scholarship.com/. The sites are mirrored with two significant exceptions: only the .org site generates the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog RSS feed and the .com DigitalKoans does not include comments. Also, most DigitalKoans RSS feed subscribers use the FeedBurner .org feed rather than the .com feed.

So, what should you do if a mirror site, say the .org site, were to go down? For website access, simply switch to the .com site. For DigitalKoans, use the .com DigitalKoans website. If the down time exceeds one day, subscribe to the .com DigitalKoans feed if you don’t want to check the website daily for important service announcements.

Here are the major .com URLs:

You can get full access details about the Digital Scholarship mirror servers and feeds at:

Unless further technical issues emerge, I anticipate that DigitalKoans will become active again on Wednesday, and that I will release a new Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog and version 4 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography on that day.