TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘site information’ Category

By Paul Biba

We are aware that many of you are getting security warnings about the site. We have both the NAPCO IT team and our friends at WPUgrade.com looking at it and hope to have the glitch fixed soon.

By Paul Biba

If you are making a comment for the first time, then your comment will be held until I approve it. This is to prevent spam. After I approve you the first time your future comments will go up immediately.

We receive about 30,000 spam comments a month, so a spam filter is necessary. If you are not a first-time commenter and your comment doesn’t appear, please email me and I’ll check to see if it has been caught by our spam filter.

By Paul Biba

This can be for two reasons:

1. Because you are a first time commenter. In this case the comment is held until I approve it. This is to prevent spam. After you are approved the then all your future comments will go up automatically.

2. The spam filter caught it. Spam is detected in a number of ways by the filter: an usual number of links in a post, many small paragraphs, words in capital letters, unusual spacing of paragraphs, strange characters, etc. Since the first of the year the filter has caught almost 214,000 spam posts – so you can see it is an unfortunate necessity. I check spam a couple of times a day to see if any legitimate posts are caught. If you are in the filter than it may take half a day before I can get around to plucking you out.

Please don’t double post if your comment hasn’t appeared and I find double, or triple posting awaiting approval or in the spam filter, I usually will delete them all as I don’t have time to compare them to see if they are different. It is far better to send me an email letting me know that your comment is stuck somewhere and I’ll get to it in the next 5 or 6 hours.

By Robert Nagle

Some readers have reported problems with reading TeleRead on their feed reader.  TeleRead changed its URL structure slightly last February and although legacy RSS feeds still seemed to work, apparently some readers report that Bloglines has not been updating after April 20, 2009. 

The best URL for Teleread RSS is currently:

http://www.teleread.org/feed/

(In fact, this URL redirects you to a feedburner RSS feed, but this is more detail than you need to know).

Speaking of RSS feeds, here’s the mp3 for a great SXSW panel discussion I attended in March called Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content (download mp3)  Description: RSS aggregation has reduced the massive ocean of Web content into something more manageable, but we are still left overloaded with information and manual searching. This panel will explore new avenues for finding the Web’s best content, and how this more intelligent Web will affect major media companies, online publishers and consumers. It included people from Techmeme, readwriteweb.  I found this panel one of the most informative at last month’s conference.

(I’ll try to give a longer wrapup about the other panels  for SXSW soon).

By Paul Biba

Well, we hope they are. I’ve had reports from some people who were completely unable to access the site saying that we are now on line for them. If you know of anyone who has had problems please tell them to try again. It could take up to 3 days for a complete propagation of our DNS fix, but in most cases it should be working now.

Our hearty THANKS!!! to Alexander Turcic of Mobile Read for pointing us in the right direction. Nobody seemed to know what the problem could be, so I emailed Alex in case he knew something, and he replied with the suggestion that cured the problem. Shows that the ebook community stands by each other in times of need.

If you are still experiencing problems, or if your connectivity has markedly improved, please let us know so that we can stay on top of the situation.

By Paul Biba

Some readers have reported problems accessing the site.  We’ve checked our server logs and everything seems to be fine on this end.  So we need your help to find out exactly what’s going on.

If you experience a problem leave a comment here.  It does not help if you just say you can’t access the site.  There are too many variables for this to be useful.  Please tell us exactly what the error message you received said.  With this info we can do some diagnostics.

You can help yourself too.  If you have persistent errors getting to the site contact your ISP.  When we changed hosts our new domain was propagated out to all ISPs so they could find us.  Some ISPs may not have received the information, or didn’t properly update their tables.  We can’t do anything about this, but you can call your ISP and ask them to check that they have our  site properly registered.

By Paul Biba

Since January 1 we have received over 32,000 spam “comments” that tried to get posted on TeleRead. The volume of this stuff is simply amazing and some if it is really very clever. As you can see we must use some sort of filtering software or we simply would have to discontinue comments altogether – the spam comments would just bring everything to a complete halt.

We use Akismet to block spam and it seems to be pretty good. Sometimes, however, it will identify your comment as spam and block it. Every few hours I try to go through the blocked spams to see if anything has been marked as a false positive. Today, for example, I found that both of Cheryl Kaye’s comments, along with several others, were marked as spam and I restored them.

I don’t always have the time to do this, and if I miss more than a couple of hours the spams build up to the point where I can’t possibly review them all. If your comment is lost please email David or me and we’ll try and find it and restore it. However, to keep the site manageable I have to delete all the spams every few days, so please accept our apologies if your comment gets caught in our clean up.

If you have a chronic problem with being blocked Akismet has a contact form that you can use to tell them of the problem. I have no idea if it does any good, but it may be worth a try.

By Robert Nagle

For those of you who haven’t noticed,  Calibre, the great e-book management program maintained by Kovid Goyal, now contains a option to automatically download TeleRead posts as an ebook. Calibre has been gathering an impressive list of online publications from which you can choose for free automatic download. Calibre lets you add Custom News Source. Creating one is a little tricky. Select Fetch News –> Add a Custom News Source –> (Give a name and Insert URL at the bottom) –> Choose Add Feed –> On the left side choose Add/Update Recipe. Close the dialog and return to the main interface. Choose Fetch News –> Schedule News Download –> Custom, and there will be the RSS ebook you just created. (By the way, the Add a Custom News Source dialog has an  Advanced Mode which let you configure the output conversion—helpful if you know python.

The cool thing about Calibre is that its ebooks include images (at least on the epub version, which is my default). I included a screenshot below of the desktop viewer, which resembles how it appears on my Sony Reader.

Feedbooks also lets you create  add TeleRead to your subscription (but no images are included) with multiple output options.

In addition, TeleRead now has a Long Articles RSS feed: http://www.teleread.org/category/long/feed/ . TeleRead publishes lots of news and commentary, and it’s easy to miss the longer pieces if you’re not careful.  Therefore, I am tagging our longer pieces as “long” so that they appear on this feed (excluding press releases and linkdumps). (Here’s the feedbook page for the TeleRead Long Articles feed). There’s no voodoo magic  involved. You can filter any TeleRead content by category and simply add a /feed at the end of the URL. For example, the feed for my articles is http://www.teleread.org/category/robert-nagle/feed/

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By Paul Biba

As you can see we have come a long way from a couple of days ago. The site is running much better and, at least for me, is actually faster than it was before. There is still some work yet to do, but we have gotten over the hump and it will get even better from here on. If you see any particular problems please leave a comment here, or feel free to email me. We can’t answer you individually, but we will look into anything you report.

Two kudos.

First, to Brett Fielo, a principal of Webhead Design. Brett agreed to take over hosting the site, and all that it entails, and for his kindness was given a huge amount of hassles and a number of late nights. On top of this, he is not only donating his time as our new sysadmin but is also donating his hosting service, so he’s not making a penny on anything. He’s saving us many pennies as we had to pay for our previous hosting service (but not for Robert Nagel’s efforts as sysadmin, however).

Second, to Robert Nagle, for doing all the free sysadmin work over the years and for taking the time over the last few days to give Brett the benefit of his experience and expertise with the site. Luckily, Robert will continue with us as a contributor, as you can see from his post yesterday.

Finally, a quick “thank you” to Alexander Turcic, of MobileRead, for helping us out by posting about our migration problems and letting you know what was going on. It’s nice to see that we are a community, not just a bunch of internet sites.

By Paul Biba

We’ve sucessfully moved to our new hosting service, but it hasn’t been as simple as we hoped. The gremlins are still doing their best to slow us down, but we are putting up a good fight and hope to banish them soon.

Thanks for sticking with us. This computer stuff isn’t as simple as people make it out to be!

By Paul Biba

If any of our new commenters have experienced a delay in seeing their comments appear, please accept my apologies.  All first time comments have to be reviewed by the moderators, to be sure to keep spam off the blog, before they can appear. To be honest, I had forgotten about this.  From now on all new comments will be checked at least twice a day, and so delays should be minimized.

By Robert Nagle

David Rothman had a heart attack on the weekend of September 25, 2008.  (Read Paul Biba’s initial announcement here).  David will be away indefinitely. This URL  will relay updates about David’s condition.

(By the way, comments are disabled for this post. If you want to wish David good health, you should make a comment on the initial announcement linked above)

(Also, not sure why the sidebar for this page is doing crazy things. Please excuse that for now).

Keep in mind that people at TeleRead may not know the latest information or we may not be in a position to disclose it publicly. But we will do our best to keep you informed about updates.  [If you have TeleRead business which requires action or a response, you should forward it to Paul Biba at paulkbibaNOSPAMgmail.com - TeleRead staff].

• September 30. Initial Announcement.
• October 2. I talked to David Rothman for about an hour. He sounds good although he is still in the hospital and seemed a little less energetic than usual. My guess is that he will be “back” earlier rather than later (in a week or two), but will probably blog much less frequently for the short term. He talked about buying the Dell Mini and was glowing about the wierd gadgets in his medical room. He will probably be moving to a family member’s house today.