Tar Heel Reader

We are having network issues that are causing the site to go slow and crash. The IT wizards have been notified. Hopefully it will be remedied soon.

When we moved to the new server a bug was introduced that prohibited searches for short words from working. I have fixed that now.

Our image search at Flickr is timing out. The problem appears to be on their site.

Try writing books later.

The code for self registration has changed. Please email us at tarheelreader@cs.unc.edu to get it.

We are developing browser-based games that are designed to be accessible to players with a wide range of physical and cognitive abilities. You can help us improve these switch-accessible games by letting your students play them and giving us feedback. All the games have been tested in the Google Chrome browser on laptops, desktops and ChromeBooks but they are unlikely to work on iOS devices.

In Space Defense you will guess the move that will block the alien spaceship

In Switch Tetris you can play Tetris with two switches and no time constraints. On each turn the
computer allows you to choose between the best and worst move.

In Crawler Game you will explore a dungeon collecting treasure and defeating enemies (soon). This game is a work in progress.

Please give these a try and give us your feedback by completing this form

I had to move Tar Heel Reader to a new machine and some problems cropped up in the process. There were issues with downloading books as PowerPoint or EPub and uploading images. I believe these are fixed.

There is some issue with the way we use Flickr for images. Search goes very slowly if it works at all and sometimes even if the search succeeds it fails to display the resulting images.

I’m working on it but I am currently at a loss for any idea about what is happening.

Update: 3:50PM Friday Maybe it is working now?

The first book posted on our site was Jimmy Choo Shoes published 10 years ago by Karen. Happy Birthday Tar Heel Reader!

Several people have reported trouble logging in to the site. After entering their username and password they just get redirected to the page to login again.

I don’t know why this is happening but clearing your cookies appears to cure the problem for most. You can find instructions here: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/clear-cache-cookies-specific-website and at several other sites on the web.

We are moving to https://tarheelreader.org from the old http://. If I have done things correctly it should just work but there will, no doubt, be issues with the transition.

I have configured it to be as permissive as I know how for the transition. I plan to gradually tighten it up over the next few weeks .

If it fails, try refreshing the page with Control-F5 or shift and the refresh button. Restarting your browser may help.

My hope is this change will fix some of the problems a few of you have been having with logins.

Some users are having problems writing books. I currently think the problem originates at the picture repository Flickr. I’m working on it.

There is some new problem with login. I don’t know what it is and don’t have time to look at it now.

Maybe clearing the cache on your browser will help.

We passed the 10 million books read milestone on January 7th at 7:35 PM EST!

Congratulations Tar Heel Readers!

Help us celebrate reading 10 million books by telling us about how you are using Tar Heel Reader with your students. Please use this Google form.

We switched servers and the operating system software underneath Tar Heel Reader this morning. I think everything is working but please report any problems that you encounter.

I introduced a bug in the write page with a change that was supposed to be innocent. Thanks to a report from one of our users, I have now fixed it.

You’ll likely need to reload the page twice to fix the problem. The issue is the way pictures appear when you click on them to zoom them up.

The hotmail email service hates Tar Heel Reader and throws our messages away without notifying us or you. This results in me getting inquiries from new users who have attempted to sign up but never got our password message.

I have modified the registration process to reject hotmail addresses. You’ll need to use some other provider to sign up with us.

The changes I made to implement big fonts may be causing problems for some users. I don’t understand what is happening so I am stepping back to the state we were in before 24 February to see if the errors go away. I apologize for the issues with “parse error” some of you have been seeing.

Those who need big fonts can still use them at http://test.tarheelreader.org.

I’ll do my best to get them working again on the production site.

Based on a request from a teacher, I have implemented an experimental large fonts feature for readers who can’t quite see the text in our normal format. To activate the feature press the z key (that’s zed) while reading a book. It will cycle through three font sizes and then back to normal. In this mode you’ll first the the normal page layout, then when you go to next you’ll see a version of the same page with large fonts and a small picture. Selecting next again will take you to the next page again in normal format. I think of it as a bit like the book doubling in length with pages devoted to pictures and pages devoted to text.

I’d appreciate your feedback on this design. How does it work for your students? What could be improved?