I got my BA in English with a concentration in Communications / Media Study. These posts represent my interest in those fields of study, including: Movies, Television, Websites, Blogging, HTML, CSS, Social Media, etc.
Why don’t blog spam filters recognize as spam those generic comments that link to commercial websites? Akismet used to filter all the spam that came into my blog, but now there’s a type it never catches– generic comments linked to a money-making (or even phishing or malicious) websites. These spammers write adulatory comments that don’t address the content or topic of the post. They tell you that you have just earned a new follower and that they will add you to their RSS feed straightaway. They say things like, “This is the best post I’ve ever read on the subject.” Note they say “the subject” without naming it. Sometimes they even write editorial comments that have nothing to do with your blog post. Here is an actual examples taken from a recent comment on my blog:
How risky is blogging really? Blog firings are relatively rare. In a recent survey of 279 human resource professionals by the Society for Human Resources Management, just 3 percent of companies reported disciplining bloggers and none reported firing anyone for blogging. You’re more likely to get in trouble for fooling around online or downloading music at work. About half the companies in the survey said they’ve fired or disciplined employees for Internet use that was unrelated to work duties.
Note I didn’t say anything about “blog firings” or the risk of blogging in my post.
If there’s any risk of blogging, it’s for your blog to be highjacked by people using your publication to promote their get-rich-quick schemes.
This is an excellent post. I have a similar blog myself so I will keep coming back to read more.
And this from a guy who runs a blog about magic spells. At least his comment addressed the topic of my blog post, even if incorrectly.
I’ll add more examples as they come in, which I’m sure they will.
P.S. This is not a paid advertisement, but I do like using WordPress for Android because new comments to my blog show up as notifications on my Nexus One and I can follow the notification to open the app and mark comments as spam if I choose. It helps me stop spammers sooner than if I had to wait to get to a computer and log into my blog’s admin dashboard.
Before I compare websites where you can download e-books in the EPUB format, I should tell you that I just got a Sony Reader Pocket Edition Silver PRS-300SC from my husband on Valentine’s Day. I’ve spent a bit less than a week with my new e-book Reader, but I’ve crammed a lot of reading and researching into the past five days. I’m pretty well versed in typography, and I have been disappointed with the readability of some of the e-books I’ve put on the Reader. Having viewed various books on the Reader, I don’t blame the Reader; I blame the formatting of some e-books. In an effort to find more readable e-book formats, or styles, I went a-searching, and these are the results of my trials.
PDF was not designed for e-books
PDF at default size (S)
First off, I found that PDFs are difficult to read on the Pocket Edition. I discovered this when I went to my local library’s digital download site and downloaded four books by Nicholas Sparks — all formatted in the same way by Warner Books in PDF. The margins were huge, the font size small, and the font face’s x-heights very small. (To oversimplify, x-height is the difference in size between capital letters and lowercase letters. Fonts with small x-heights look classy, but are not readable at smaller sizes.) These books were impossible to read at the default “small” size on the Pocket Edition. Not only that; the printer’s crop marks were visible, which made the margins even bigger since what I saw on my screen included extra margins that shouldn’t be visible to the consumer.
PDF at medium size (M)
I had to set the text on these PDF books to “medium” size to make them readable. That makes the type large enough, but it breaks the formatting. Chapter headings show up two or three pages into the chapter rather than at the beginning of it. Lines occasionally break early or, worse, words break from one line to the next.
No doubt, PDFs like these might be readable on a larger Reader, such as the Daily Edition, but I prefer the compact simplicity of the Pocket Edition, and I think digital libraries should make their digital books look good on smaller devices. Instead of offering PDFs of hard cover books, perhaps they could offer PDFs of paperbacks, because they are formatted to be more readable in small form, where you will find thinner margins and more readable fonts.
EPUB was designed for e-books
Ideally, a text should be readable on any device. I have been a proponent of device independence for years now, and I suppose I knew that PDF was not a device-independent format, but reading PDFs on a small device really made me see it. I suppose that is why the EPUB format was developed with e-book readers in mind. Unlike PDF, EPUB e-books are designed to be readable on screen as opposed to on paper. I notice that, with the EPUB format, I don’t see misplaced chapter headings or lines and words breaking up. I notice the default font faces and sizes tend to be bigger and more readable; for instance, the font sizes are a couple-to-four points larger, and the font faces may have larger x-heights.
When I download EPUB books from the Greater Phoenix Digital Library, which offers books from OverDrive, I don’t know what I will get from book to book. One is readable at default size while another is more readable at medium size. EPUB books from OverDrive offer the benefits of the EPUB format I listed above, but there is no standardization. Still you can get some good EPUB books. At the time of this writing, though, the selection of EPUBs is limited; there are only 653 EPUB titles while there are 15,831 PDF titles.
EPUB from Google Books
When I download EPUB books from Google Books, I notice typographical anomalies due to OCR scanning errors. (OCR stands for optical character recognition, a program through which a scanned image of text is run to convert it from a picture of text to actual text.) Due to these uncorrected OCR errors, nonsense characters may appear on the page, lines may be broken in strange places, and letters might be missing here and there. Free, yes, but not very readable. On a positive note, Google offers a way for readers to report scanning errors so they can improve Google Books for the public good.
Finding my favorite EPUBs
EPUB from Feedbooks on Reader
I actually made my greatest discovery while away from my Sony Reader. I had my Google Nexus One smart phone with me (as always) and I searched the Android Market for a good e-book reader. Being unimpressed with FBReader, I downloaded Aldiko and was blown away. Not only does it have a great user interface and even a way to download free and paid books directly in the app; it has a partnership with the best EPUB library I have found yet— Feedbooks. I downloaded an EPUB book from Feedbooks to read on my Nexus One and I loved the formatting. Very nice and clean. Interested to see how Feedbooks EPUB books would look on my Reader, I downloaded a few and put them on. Gorgeous! Almost every book I’ve downloaded from Feedbooks has the same formatting, or I should really say, style. Seeing the same style across multiple titles might bore some people, but I appreciate the beauty, dependability, and readability of the Feedbooks style. In addition to being an EPUB resource, they are a publishing platform, and they “consider that the structure of a text is very important.” It’s all about structure, baby! Not presentation. Yet, by offering EPUB books with solid structure (XML) and readable style (CSS), they make for a very nice presentation. I might even think of publishing something with them. (P.S. Feedbooks did not pay me to write a glowing review of them.)
I also discovered Smashwords through Aldiko. Like Feedbooks, it’s a place to get both free and paid e-books (in EPUB and other formats) and it’s also a publishing platform. I don’t like their site as much, though, nor do I like the style of their EPUB e-books. It seems fairly similar from book to book, but it’s not as elegant and readable on my Reader as the e-books from Feedbooks.
Classic EPUBs from the source
EPUB from Gutenberg Project
When I looked at the first pages of the EPUB books I downloaded from Feedbooks, I saw that most of the texts were actually from The Gutenberg Project. So I went to the source to see how I liked their EPUB downloads. Their downloads page for each title says the EPUB download is, at this point, “experimental,” but I found the e-books I downloaded to be just as readable and error-free as those from Feedbooks. They just didn’t have as pretty a style, in my opinion. Still, it’s not so much about style as it is about readability, for me, so I consider Gutenberg a good place to download EPUB books.
Speaking of EPUB books, there is actually a site called epubBooks, and went there to download a couple of books as well. I was surprised to find that they did not have A Room with a View or even anything by E. M. Forster, but they did have Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as did every other place I went to. I found it to be error-free, at least in the first pages I viewed, and simply styled. I don’t like their site navigation as much as others, but I still consider it a decent place to look for EPUB downloads.
A one-stop shop when you need it
The last place I went to download EPUB books, ironically, was the Sony Reader Store [closed March 2014]. One of the reasons I wanted a Sony Reader is because I am a cheapskate* who would rather borrow books from the library than pay for them. Unfortunately, the Sony Reader Store does not have any free books. They do, however, have two different editions of Frankenstein for 99¢ or less (and, inexplicably, some that cost even more). I don’t see any reason to pay for an electronic book in the public domain that I can download free elsewhere, but the Sony Reader Store does make for a seamless process of browsing, downloading, and installing e-books in my Sony Reader Library. It’s probably ideal for people who are not comfortable with downloading and file management, because the Reader Library application takes care of that for you when you buy books from the Sony Reader Store.
EPUB by MobileReference
For the sake of good reporting, I plunked down $1.94 for two editions of the same book— one published by Mobile Reference and the other published by B&R Samizdat Express. The publication by Mobile Reference was formatted just like all the others: flowing text in a font readable in the default “small” size on my Sony Reader Pocket Edition. The publication by B&R Samizdat Express, on the other hand, was styled with a font size that was unreadable in the small size, and it had bigger margins than any of the other editions I had downloaded.
EPUB by B&R Samizdat Express
*Actually, when I just have to have it the day it comes out, I’ll buy a book and donate it to the library after reading it. I’ve donated a lot of books to the library over the years, but mostly I just borrow nowadays. Speaking of donating, if this article helped you make some money-saving decisions, then please consider donating a dollar or more to my blog. Thanks!
WordPress for Android was released on February 2, and I downloaded it from the Android Market today for my Nexus One. Now I’m posting a blog entry with it. It looked like it hung just now when I tried to select Categories, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty. Oh– I just realized I just had to click the refresh button to the right of Categories and I got a list to choose from. Not bad!
Too much hype has been made about Google Voice being free. As a poor sap who just got a bill this morning for $140 *over* my regular monthly bill from T-Mobile, I can tell you that Google Voice calls are not free. Google Voice calls are calls to an intermediary phone number (in my case, one in Palm Springs) that count against your plan’s minutes. T-Mobile charged me for every minute over my “included” minutes. And I went way over my minutes because I thought that my Google Voice calls didn’t count against my minutes. Boy was I wrong.
Upon further investigation, I found that you could use Google Voice to make unlimited calls if you added your GV number to a carrier plan that allowed you to make unlimited calls to a select few numbers— plans like My Circle, Friends & Family, A-list, and MyFaves. I don’t know about other carriers, but guess what? T-Mobile doesn’t offer MyFaves anymore. So your only option for “unlimited calls” is a more expensive unlimited calling plan. And if you pay for that, then what’s the point of using Google Voice?
Google Voice provides some advantages over calls made the regular way, such as the ability to record calls (with the other party’s knowledge), the ability to send and receive SMS (not MMS) without it counting against your text limits (if you don’t already have an unlimited text plan), the ability to receive voice mails over the Internet and have them transcribed for you (as long as you don’t mind that Google is mining your messages for consumer data about you), and the ability to have both your cell phone and home phone ring when someone calls your Google Voice number. All those features may be worth it to you if you understand that Google mines every word in your phone calls, text messages, and voice mails. But as a way to save money? No, sir, no, ma’am. Google Voice calls are NOT free.
Google Voice is not a VoIP service. If you want that, get Skype. That’s what I might do now that I’ve learned my hundred-and-forty-dollar lesson.
Did this review help you? Did it save you $140? If so, would you reward the time I took to write this for you by giving me a small donation of even $1? I work hard on these blog posts and I do them without sponsorship from tech companies or advertisements. If you like, please give.
Tonight, after posting the participant’s review of my workshop this morning, I see that there are no comments on the blog post and no “Likes” or comments on the Facebook post. My first thought is “people thought it was obnoxious.” Self-promotion can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. You want to win people over, but you risk turning them off in the process. I don’t know if I ever strike the right balance when it comes to talking about my accomplishments or promoting my work. Lately, I fear that some of my status updates have been boldface brags; e.g., “New blog post: Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop http://bit.ly/zWrno” (tweet), “I’m happy that 24 people came to my workshop in Phoenix, five of them all the way from Yuma and four of them all the way from Tucson.” (tweet), and “New blog post: Speak & Spell II a Successful Workshop http://bit.ly/171bC9” (tweet), especially the fact that I shared my teacher evaluation scores. Ugh.
What may or may not be apparent is that I have felt shame and failure in my life, and there have been a few times I doubted I’d ever achieve anything. When I do manage to do something good, my feelings of past failure and inefficacy drive me to shout my achievements from the rooftops. “See! I’m not a complete failure! I DID something!”
Perhaps it is the fact that there have been so many times in my life when I have felt paralyzed into inaction. I’ve wanted to do many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t believe in myself. Now, when I finally do things that I’ve only been dreaming of doing for years, I feel… well… vindicated! Especially when other people didn’t believe in me, either. It’s like, “How do you like me now?!” Well, maybe not very much, I fear.
What good does it do to shove my success in the faces of people who doubted me? Are they really going to “like me now”? Or are they just going to resent me for rubbing it in their faces that I succeeded in spite of them? My fear is that they are going to resent me as much as I resent them. Resentment begets resentment. The thing to do is forgive everyone for everything, starting with myself.
from my 
Daniel Greene 