TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘site update’ Category

By Robert Nagle

For the next ten minutes I’ll be working on a site upgrade. Should be painless. But might see some funny things. I’ll report back when it’s done.

Update: Everything looks ok. Please let me know if you see anything unusual or nonfunctional. Thanks!

By Robert Nagle

As you know, David Rothman recently had a heart attack. Also, I have been out of the country for the last three weeks, so Teleread has been kind of slow as a result. But I’m back now and will have more time for this blog.

Obviously, filling in for David will be difficult, and I’m not the only one who hopes he comes back soon.

In the meantime, I’ll be the acting editor. If you have any teleread matters you need taken care of, feel free to contact me. idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net

By Robert Nagle

Perhaps the ghosts of malfunctioning websites is infecting everybody, but we at Teleread are experiencing technical  problems. Some commenters have reported errors with posting comments;  we’re getting proxy errors or something like that. Sometimes, you will receive an error message even though the comment has been posted successfully.  We’ve filed a trouble ticket with our hosting service and are investigating. In the meantime, be patient with us. Contact me at idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net if you have any comments being eaten. 

By Robert Nagle

We migrated to a new webserver.  Should be a little faster.  It may take a day or so for things to be completely done. If you notice weird things, please notify me

idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net

By Robert Nagle

Update from Robert: Just to let you know that we are aware of the slow performance on TeleRead.org over the last few days. It involves a problem with the hosting service which we’re trying to resolve. We expect a resolution in 24-48 hours.

Update from David, 2:43 p.m. Eastern: For now the site might be running a little faster. Temporarily at least, I’ve cut the number of home page items from ten to six—although the site in the past has done fine with ten. I’d encourage people to try out the comment features and otherwise help us test the site and provide feedback. Many thanks! We regard our posts as just the starts of dialogues—your comments count, whether not you agree with us.

By Robert Nagle

In other non-Kindle news, I am happy to report that TeleRead now is serving full RSS feeds again. Apparently, during one of our WordPress upgrades, the More/Read Rest of Post hyperlink was preventing RSS readers from seeing entire articles—just the parts until the More tag. But with the Full Text Feeds plugin, we’ve solved the problem.

More site news: We recently installed the WP-Super Cache plugin. That improves site performance by offering cached versions of pages. Interestingly, readers who haven’t commented before are the ones most likely to see this speed boost.

Feel free to let us know about any problems you are having with the TeleRead site. We may not be able to fix it immediately, but it’s good to hear this kind of feedback.

By Robert Nagle

Regular visitors might notice that occasionally for brief moments lasting at most a minute or so, the website will go completely down. It happens more often than we would like, but for most readers, it should happen only rarely. It’s been happening for the last 3 months or so and usually happens near noon.

We’ve been tracking the problem for some time now. The problem is related to open mysql connections which are not being closed properly. We think it’s related to one of our plugins. Once the number of open mysql connections reaches some maximum amount, the mysql database resets with zero connections and starts afresh.

On another note, there are some general performance issues which we are trying to address. Sometimes the main page loads sluggishly, although to be honest, it’s a big page. Apparently, for many similar types of weblogs (engadget, etc) , it’s common for the home page + graphics to contain 500+ KB of data. (the single posts are rarely anywhere that big). (Obviously, if you are reading this through a feed reader, you won’t experience these issues at all). Even though the main page is that big, regular visitors don’t have to actually download 500 KB worth of data each time they load. More often, the graphics from previous loads are already in cache, so the amount of download is substantially less. Running a website involves tradeoffs. Yes, the main page may be a little slower to download, but on the other hand, it’s a long page full of the 12 most recent posts. That is a lot of content!. Obviously, if we wanted to, we could put only two or three posts on the main page, and the site would load as fast as lightning. But we’ve opted for a main page heavy with content than one a fast-loading one. (Feel free to throw in your two cents about that strategy).

In the past TeleRead has used the caching plugin to speed up page load time with mixed results. It’s probably time to reconsider doing that again.

Two other subjects to bring up. We’ll be testing web ads over the next few weeks, and we’ll do our best for it not to interfere with the user experience. We may play around with locations and prominence.

One other announcement about comments. When you make a comment, most of them (say 80-90%) should go live within seconds of hitting submit. A small percentage of comments end up in the moderation queue, but those are approved fairly quickly. If a significant amount of time has elapsed without your seeing the comment go live (maybe 12 hours), chances are akismet has identified it as spam. You should definitely let us know fairly quickly. Use the email links at the top right, and we can rectify the problem immediately. This really has not been a big problem, but when it happens, it is frustrating for all of us.

By David Rothman

The Sony Reader gets yet another look in BusinessWeek. The September 3 issue tells how Sony intends to address shortcomings such as an inability to read DRMed books except in a proprietary Sony format.

The next model’s Adobe software, as we know, will handle encrypted PDF and the IDPF format.

Break ahead for public library patrons

With the new Reader able to read DRMed PDF, perhaps it will be handy for downloading public libraries’ OverDrive books, which, in their Mobipocket incarnations, can be tricky to use, at least on older CE machines.

Let’s just hope that Sony will allow existing Readers to be upgraded via firmware. Anyone have definite answers? BW talks about Sony’s plans to “adopt e-book software from Adobe systems,” but just how inclusive is the term?

Still just a niche product

So far, as BW notes, the present Reader hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm, although Sony for now seems committed to the product and has broadened distribution to include Best Buy and CompUSA, while at the same time running a targeted campaign aimed at frequent travelers. Sony refuses to release sales figures.

Ironically, one of the more helpful boosts may come from the independent Fictionwise, which has begun to offer some books in a nonencrypted Sony format.

Little Fictionwise may well end up with a greater number of Reader titles, at least for now, than Sony’s Connect store, which, according to BW, offers fewer than a tenth the number at an average Borders or Barnes & Noble. Price drops on Connect books would help as well. So would friendlier treatment of small publishers.

Too late for TigerDirect bargain, alas

Meanwhile, over at Engadget, dozens of readers are answering the question raised in the headline, How would you change the Sony Reader? Price, display and format issues are among the common complaints. Too bad the Engadget folks didn’t catch up with the TigerDirect sale last month. At $99 the Reader suddenly became more attractive to me, shortcomings aside.

And of course we know that a forthcoming model will use E Ink’s VizPlex technology, which, with greater effective contrast between text and background and a faster refresh rate, will address display issues. Let’s just hope Sony can drop the usual price from the current $300.