Tar Heel Reader » Announcements

Changes at Tar Heel Reader

Gary — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:51:43 +0000

The site has been slowing under the load of ever more books and users so I’ve made a few changes to help speed things up.
First, you may notice that the counts have been removed from the links in the sidebar. It turns out that producing those is very expensive, almost doubling the time to generate each page.
Second, you’ll notice that books written in English now have an English tag. This greatly speeds up showing English-only books. I think I’ve got things setup to make it provide the English tag by default so you should not have to type it in yourself.
I’m working on a new version of the site that will have provide new features and better performance but that is taking longer than I’d hoped and I’ve got other projects that require my attention. Maybe in the summer…

We crashed!

Gary — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:47:47 +0000

The site crashed about 2:30pm on 24 November. We had a report of problems writing books earlier in the day. Perhaps these were related. The site was down for about 1/2 hour but now appears to be working fine.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We are working to improve the software to support the growing load.

We crashed!

Gary — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:40:01 +0000

Something began happening this morning about 9:30AM EDT that caused the system to slow way down and finally I had to reboot it to put it out of its misery. It’s back now. I’m trying to track down what went wrong. I apologize to any of you who lost work. As when using any computer application save early and often.

Update: It appears we were attacked by a computer whose IP address maps back to a school in Ga. I’m trying to follow up with their IT people to see what is up. In the meantime they are being blocked by our firewall.

Search working again

Gary — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 12:47:30 +0000

You should be able to search for tags, authors, etc. now.

Changes to Search

Gary — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:07:54 +0000

We were having some problems with the search facility on Tar Heel Reader so I have made some changes. Performance should be better but we have temporarily lost the ability to search by author name. I hope to get it working again soon.

Language Selection Now Sticky

Gary — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:22:14 +0000

Today I enabled a new feature at Tar Heel Reader. When you select a language in the Books By Language list in the right column you will only see books for that language as you select other categories until you select another language. Your language selection is “sticky” in that it “sticks” after you select it. This is indicated by a little dot and underline on the selected language and the name of the language appears in the title for the page.

For example, if you select the English language link you’ll see the Books category with only English books shown (actually only books not tagged with another language the site recognizes). Then if you select Reviewed Books, you see only English books that are reviewed. Likewise for any of the other languages on the site.

To return to see all languages simply select the All link in the languages list.

As always let me know of bugs you find on the site. I don’t know about problems unless you tell me.

I know of one limitation. The search does properly restrict itself to only books in the current language. I’ll work on that when I get a chance.

Over 500,000 books read at Tar Heel Reader!

Gary — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:01:01 +0000

Yesterday we passed the 1/2 million mark for books read at Tar Heel Reader. These books have been read in 109 countries. I’m excited and pleased to be part of such a successful project.

We are approaching 5000 books on the site (4937 as I write this). Thank you to all the authors who have contributed your work.

The top ten countries in number of books read are:

USA
Canada
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
New Zealand
Korea
Spain
Italy
Japan

You can learn more about where our readers are and see them on a world map here.

Flickr Commons Pictures Added to Search

Gary — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:22:55 +0000

Penny suggested that we should add the Flickr Commons pictures to the search in the book writing wizard here at Tar Heel Reader. That category didn’t exist back when I was writing that part of the code (or at least I didn’t see it). It turns out the addition was trivial. So now your searches will include the huge collection of pictures with no known copyright. Check out the Flickr Commons page for the the list of institutions participating. Thanks Penny for a great suggestion.

Problems with Internet Explorer 8

Gary — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:16:41 +0000

Laura reported a bug in the writing wizard when using Internet Explorer 8. I think I have fixed it.

Everyone, let us know when you see problems.

Attention Switch Users: changes coming to keyboard controls

Gary — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:45:44 +0000

Dr. Gretchen Hanser of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies and I are planning to make changes to the keyboard controls for reading books at Tar Heel Reader. These changes will enable 3-switch scanning and direct access while still supporting the 2-switch scanning compromise we have in place now.

Currently the site uses right arrow (and down arrow, page down, space, N) as the mover and left arrow (and up arrow, page up, back space, enter, P) as a chooser on choice pages (Favorites, and menus like What would you like to do now?) and as go back when reading a book.

The new scheme leaves left arrow as it was but it changes up arrow to always mean previous selection. The other change is that down arrow is always a chooser. With this change a 3-switch user can use right arrow to always mean next selection, up arrow to always mean previous selection and down arrow to always mean choose.

We hope these changes will have minimum impact on our switch users. If you happen to be using down arrow instead of right arrow as your mover, you may need to change your setup. Gretchen will be glad to help anyone who has problems adapting their switch setup.

To summarize, here are the keyboard controls for each kind of page on the site:

Key	Page	Function
left arrow enter	Book 1st page	Choose another book
	Other book pages	Previous page
	Choice pages	Chooser
up arrow	Book 1st page	Choose another book
	Other book pages	Previous page
	Choice pages	Previous choice
right arrow space	Book 1st page	Next page
	Other book pages	Next page
	Choice pages	Next choice
down arrow	Book 1st page	Nothing
	Other book pages	Nothing
	Choice pages	Chooser

We have also implemented keys for direct access to the choices on the various Choice pages. The direct access keys are:

Key	Function
a	Read this book again.
r	Rate this book.
d	Read another book.
1	1 star.
2	2 stars.
3	3 stars.

Gretchen has made overlays for the Intellikeys keyboard to implement 2-switch, 3-switch, and direct access.

Let us know if you see problems with these changes. We plan to implement them on the site next weekend.