Internet Book Clubs at Z Book Club

Webinar with Barbara Quick (Vivaldi's Virgins) & Laurel Corona (Four Seasons)

2008-12-13T03:51:00.000-08:00

The Gift Of Vivaldi: Music and the Pieta

Join us for a Webinar on December 16

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/890048119

Venice, Vivaldi, music, romance. One of the most intriguing and inspirational figures in musical history. One of the great cities of the world at the height of its power in the world. Two of the greatest stories ever told about them both. Please register to attend this unique online presentation by two best-selling authors of historical fiction about Vivaldi. Barbara Quick, author of 'Vivaldi's Virgins,' and Laurel Corona, author of 'Four Seasons,' present an evening of delight as they talk about Vivaldi, Venice, music and romance. There will be live presentations by both authors and by a third speaker and that will be followed by a moderated question and answer session.

This exclusive webinar will take place ONLINE at 6PM PST (9PM EST) on Tuesday December 16th. After you register you will receive reminder emails and instructions about how to access and participate in the webinar.

Title:		The Gift Of Vivaldi: Music and the Pieta

Date:		Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Time:		6:00 PM - 7:30 PM PST

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista

Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer

Interview with Jeff Rivera, Author of Forever My Lady

2008-11-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

I got a chance to talk with Jeff Rivera, author of Forever My Lady. The following is the transcript.

ZBookClub: What can you compare Forever My Lady to?

Jeff: Many people actually compare Forever My Lady to Romeo and Juliet or an Officer and a Gentleman. It's a love story, it's a coming of age story and it's something that people in Nebraska or people in the Bronx seem to enjoy. In fact, I've received emails from people as far away as Russia and Pakistan about the book.

ZBookClub: You won the Mahogany Media Award for this book. Why do you think that is?

Jeff: Actually, I had no idea that the book was even nominated so I was blown away and so grateful. It's my first writing award so you know what they say about the first ...

ZBookClub: You have been receiving excellent reviews with Forever My Lady, over 100 that I found online so far giving it 4 to 5 stars. What do you think it is about your novel that has struck a chord?

Jeff: I am so happy to hear that people are enjoying the book. As an author to hear that your book has made people cry and laugh throughout the book really feels good. That's when you know you've connected with them. I think what's struck a chord is that people know what it's like to be in love with someone or to want someone more than anything like the main character Dio. I mean, after all, Jennifer is all that he's got when everyone else misjudges him and has since he was a kid. So, when when finds out that she plans on marrying someone else I think their heart is torn out just like his.

ZBookClub: How did you get this book published?

Jeff: It was a long journey that began when I was 19 years old. I tried to make the story a screenplay but Hollywood wasn't getting it so I decided to self-publish it as a novel, though I'd never written one before. I remember reading Nicholas Sparks books to get motivated and Luis J. Rodriguez's Always Running for inspiration. Then, I sat my butt down and forced myself to write for 3 months and finally I finished it.

ZBookClub: Where can we get Forever My Lady?

Jeff: You can get a copy on Amazon.com, www.JeffRivera.com or your local bookstore.

ZBookClub: Thanks a lot Jeff for taking the time to speak with us. Goodluck with your book and your future endeavours.

ebook blogging

2008-05-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it seems like my ebook on traveling Paris by Train is getting some readership. After posting an article on getting to Versailles from Paris by train, traffic to the site has been steadily increasing. So much so that I've decided to move it onto its own domain: ParisByTrain.com, so that it has visual weight. By visual weight, I mean the effect that the domain has on people looking at Google search results. When a Google users are returned search results, they use all information they have available to them to make a decision on which site to visit. With all other things being equal, a site with a domain name relevant to the subject matter is likely to get more clicks and readership than another site with a completely unrelated domain name.

Having said that, I keep on Mac OS X technology blog on the domain installingcats.wordpress.com which has nothing to do with the subject matter of the material, yet it gets pretty good readership. This leads me to believe that the effect of keywords in the domain itself, has limited effectiveness or Googleweight.

If you're interested in trying your hand at writing an ebook, one blog post at a time, BookTickler.com, is free to anyone wanting to setup a blog/ebook of their own. (By request only at this point).

Paris to Versailles by Train

2008-05-09T03:02:00.000-07:00

Along the themes of books, I've decided to write a little one of my own: A Practical Paris Train Guide... basically, how to get to around Paris and surrounding sights using the excellent train network in France. Since I'm living here and have learned (the hardway) the in's and out's of the complex and at times, convoluted system, I thought I'd share some knowledge I've gained from this experience.

So far there's only two articles: Paris to Versailles by Train and Paris to Fontainebleau by Train, but more are coming soon. This online ebook on taking trains in Paris will evolve over time, one blog post at a time.

Site Ups and Downs

2008-03-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like I was a bit quick in saying the site is all shiny and new and zippier. Along with the newly installed xml reader technology is a nice little memory leak that is wreaking havoc every 3 to 12 hours depending on traffic.

Just start a ruby garbage collection GC.start after parsing the XML string you say? Welcome to segfault land! Next visitor... us!

Right now we're using god to monitor and restart the site as necessary until we track down and squash the little memory leak bugger. The great thing about god is that it's easy to modify and update to suit your specific server monitoring needs.

For example, god is set to use SMTP for sending out notification emails for mongrel_rails process starts/stops, memory and cpu conditions. But, if you're a GMail user, you're forced to send email via SSL SMTP. So, your choices are to load up the smtp_tls ruby library or override some methods in the God::Contacts::Email class to use sendmail instead. I chose the latter (cause I'm lazy and sendmail rules).

Within your single.god (or other god config file) add the following to use sendmail for notifications:


God::Contacts::Email.delivery_method = :sendmail

God::Contacts::Email.server_settings = {:location => '/usr/sbin/sendmail', :arguments => '-i -t -f this_is_god_calling@zbookclub.com'}

Hot load your config or restart god and you're set to receive emails from god. I guess he's getting technical these days...

Faster Book Club Site

2008-03-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

As you might have noticed, performance on the site has been sluggish since... well, forever. Today we've published an update that should speed up the loading of all the book pages.

The book information you see on the site comes from Amazon Web Services. This data is retrieved on-the-fly so that you, the reader, will see the most up-to-date information. This book data is sent as an XML document and we have to process those results before we show it as book information, such as the title, author, description, etc. This processing was previously handled by hpricot, which is a dream to program with, but, the drawback is sluggish performance compared to bare bones XML Readers such as libxml-ruby which is crazy fast, and which we're now using.

Enjoy the faster book site and do let us know if you find any nice juicy bugs for the dev team to squash at feedback -at- zbookclub.com.

- Ben

Online Movies at Z Movie Club

2008-01-19T18:10:00.000-08:00

Oh Happy Day!

The sister site to Z Book Club has been launched!

Introducing Online Movies Club at Z Movie Club. Z Online Movies Club is a place to find, discuss, review, share, comment, blog, browse, discover movies online from anywhere in the world.

Have a look at the site and find some movies online to talk about.

We'll soon have our rental and online movies partners setup at Z Online Movie Club to make it easy to find, rent and watch movies online, all from your computer.

Doubtless there are still some kinks and quirks to iron out at Z Movie Club. Don't hesitate to contact us at feedback -at- zmovieclub.com to let us know of something that needs attention.

Happy Online Movie Clubbing and have a great day all,

Ben

New Book Club Groups

2007-12-20T21:29:00.000-08:00

I'd like to introduce a few of our latest book club groups here at Z Book Club.

Hailing from the wintery northern climes of Canada is the Muskoka Lakes Library book club group from Ontario, Canada. Being a Canadian myself, I'm always happy to see some folks from home representing.

The latest group started on Z Book Club Groups is a gender equality / human rights book club group entitled WOMYN. Here's an exerpt from the group creator:

This book club is for those ladies and gentlemen who favor gender equality as a vital facet of human rights. The book 'WOMYN' serves as a forum of discussion for the preservation and advancement of gender equality worldwide.

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Hai Ying and our latest book club group members at LadiesAndGentlemen.ZBookClub.com.

From the international book scene we have the Paris Book Club Group from... yeah, no surprise here, Paris, France. Being located near Paris myself I had a chance to meet Courtney and her crew from the Paris Book Club Group and they are a gas. Drop by their book club site at ParisBookClub.ZBookClub.com and let them know what you're reading.

If you'd like to start your own book club group, don't hesitate to send in a request.

Happy book clubbing and Merry Christmas to all.

- Ben

Faster Page Loading

2007-12-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

With AJAX everywhere these days it's easy to build web pages that are tipping the scales at 350Kb size or more. The crazy thing is that is mostly text within Javascript and CSS files. 350Kb may not seem like a lot these days with all of our fancy DSL and cable Internet connections, but it still adds up when you're talking about page load times. Our patience for web page load times has scaled along with the speed of our Internet connections. An acceptable 8-10 seconds to load a home page in the days of dial-up connections is now probably around one or two seconds.

In light of this trend, I've taken a bit of time to reduce the time it takes to load web pages at Z Book Club.

The first part included activating Gzip compression to the javascript and stylesheet files. Even though gzip compression is handled transparently by all modern browsers, you still have to at least turn it on within Apache, by telling Apache which file types to send compressed if the requesting browser is capable of handling Gzip encoded files.

The second part involved moving some javascript libraries to the bottom of the page. Yeah, I know, sounds stupidly simple, but it works. Web pages load in a top to bottom format and web browsers will load and display HTML page elements as soon as it can. By moving the rather chunky Prototype, Scriptaculous and tooltip Javascript libraries to the bottom of the page template, page load times have dropped by about 2 seconds.

Next up will be implementing Page caching within Ruby on Rails itself. This is a huge boost in efficiency, but also requires a lot more work than the above. After that will be Apache page caching using mod_cache and mod_mem_cache.

RSS Feeds for Internet Book Clubs

2007-11-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

We've finally gotten around to implementing RSS feeds for the home page book clubs. So now New Book Clubs and Most Active Book Clubs are both available via RSS feeds. Just look for the little orange RSS chicklets beside the list names. In addition the home page is setup with autodiscovery RSS links. Each book club page will get their own RSS feed on the next publish.

Internet Explorer CSS Problems Fixed

2007-11-03T02:57:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, the joys of working with a non-standard's compliant browser are about as fun as pulling teeth. Thanks to Microsoft's vision that they are the biggest baddest software maker around, they develop a philosophy that "standards don't matter... we are the standard". This play works ok as long as one's dictatorship of the browser market holds, but when all of a sudden a new player enters that grabs more than 1/3 of the market share in a scant few years... you've got a problem! But, don't worry, free markets have a way of correcting the 'sitting on laurels' certain large companies tend to do. What other words shall we use to describe that... hubris perhaps?

We've implemented some hacks and fixes to have Z Book Club be a little more display friendly with regards to cross-browser display issues due to poor CSS support by Internet Explorer.

Earn Money with Amazon Associates Program

2007-10-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

We've just added the ability for our users to add their Amazon Associates ID to their Internet Book Club account at ZBookClub to earn referral revenues whenever someone arrives at Amazon's various sites via their book club. We've also added a how to earn money with Amazon Associates writeup that goes through all the basics of setting up an Amazon Associates account as well as how to put it to use with book clubs at ZBookClub.

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New Look New Feel

2007-10-17T02:21:00.000-07:00

We've just completed a round of changes to the look and feel of our internet book club - ZBookClub and are looking forward to the response from our online reading group users.

The first major change is the presentation of the site. Gone is the plain white background and the squared boxes everywhere. Now it's blues and CSS rounded corners (thanks to Alessandro Fulciniti).

The second major change is the interactivity within an online book club. Before the comment / thoughts form was stuck at the bottom of a conversation. When the discussion gets heated and the posts come pouring in, the comment form gets pretty far down the page. It's also a hassle to go back and forth between the form and the comment that you want to reply to. Now a reply form is available at every comment and also at the top of the book club for those general thoughts you have, not in reply to any particular post. For example see the internet book club - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Play around and see how it works out for you. If there are any issues with your web browser and operating system combination, please do let us know. For you tech heads out there everything was accomplished through AJAX, scriptaculous, and the prototype javascript library. I never thought I'd say this, but developing javascript functionality is no longer a hair pulling experience. Sam Stephenson for president.

Nearly forgot, profile pictures can now be added to your account as well. Just head on over to your user page (click on your email address on the top right hand corner) and find the Edit Profile link on the left. From the Edit Profile page you can change the default profile photo to whatever you please. The picture will be cropped and resized to fit.

That's about it for now. Why not start an internet book club now?

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