April 2012
1 post
ReadBeam will be open-sourced soon.
Fellow ReadBeamers,
I do have good and bad news:
Let’s have the good news first: The ReadBeam software will be open-sourced on GitHub in the next few weeks. Maybe this may help technically inclined peeps to set-up their own version of a hosted and simplified ReadBeam service. Details will be made public on the ReadBeam blog in a few days time.
Bad news: I’ll stop the press at the...
March 2012
1 post
Sign-up failed / No eDocs today
Dear Beamers,
tonight we reached an important milestone with ReadBeam. We reached the maximum monthly limit of our email provider. This means I would need to pay more for sending emails. Not being able to send email means a few things: You won’t get any eDocs and signup doesn’t work as well, because both requires sending out emails.
Things will immediately work again on sunday,...
February 2012
1 post
About to unleash the next release
This is basically a maintenance release (“Freezing Cooper”):
Fresh off the mill: Adopted Bootstrap 2.0 from Twitter to make things more responsive on your Kindle or iPad.
My favorite Apple quote: “General stability and performance improvements”
Due to new hardware things have stabilized significantly. Your cherished morning read should now be ready on time.
Please let...
January 2012
3 posts
Kindle Touch - Can't remove personal documents
Some users with a brand spanking new Kindle Touch wrote in to let me know that they are unable to delete ReadBeam documents from their Kindle.
This is not a problem of calibre or ReadBeam per se, it seems to happen once you mail personal documents via Amazon to your Kindle Touch.
One user (thanks Rainer!) just sent me a workaround: If you login to your Amazon Account and “Manage your...
Citius, altius, fortius
I am currently in the thick of migrating to the new server. When you read this you will be most probably already working on the shiny new hardware.
Signup has been reenabled on the new system, please go ahead an get yourself something to read for the weekend.
Please be considerate though, keep yourself to a maximum of three eDocs, so that everybody can use this machine and the conversion delays...
"My morning paper arrives too late"
In the last few weeks ReadBeam.com has been swamped by new users. This led to ever growing conversion times. Just converting all the morning eDocs currently takes between four and seven hours.
To alleviate the problem I have temporarily suspended signups.
I will take measures to have ReadBeam again send morning papers in the morning - one will be switching to a freemium business model. Thats...
November 2011
3 posts
Missing Index in News Sources
After digging around I just found an interesting tidbit about why - sometimes - the index in the Kindle files for news sources is missing:
It sounds like you are getting the book reader, and this would be because the EXTH[501] field of the metadata is not set to NWPR (for newspaper). The latest release of calibre fixes this. HOWEVER, if you email the mobi to your Kindle, Amazon will overwrite...
Ebook Reader Vergleich (Comparison) →
ReadBeam 0.99 Release is Imminent
Yes, we are approaching ReadBeam 1.0, but before we do, I have reorganized the backend - again. The changes are getting easier on the users though, for most of you things should simply get faster and more reliable.
For now I scrapped charging money for the service - setting up the payment infrastructure is a major hassle - so, enjoy! Instead I have introduced the concept of computime, which is a...
September 2011
1 post
ReadBeam 0.95 is going live in the next few hours
The next disruptive release of ReadBeam is about to go live. Currently I am doing final testing to remove the most obvious bugs; I’ll leave the others for you :). It may take a few hours until the new version (you know it when you see it) goes live at your end of the net.
The internal data structure changed, so your subscriptions went south. Please just log-in and recreate your...
August 2011
3 posts
Email outages / quota exceeded / CDN hosting
The release of 0.9beta worked sufficiently smooth. Since the release the traffic on the site has doubled and caused all different kinds of challenges:
Gmail, my current email provider, locks the account from time to time. Obviously some automated system gets triggered to avoid suspected abuse. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of mails (approx. 1GB daily!).
The new possibility to download...
0.9beta is live!
While the changes are percolating through the internet, I’ll go out and have a barbeque now. Fed up with sysadmin for today. Enjoy your private recipes!
Some newly modified recipes are gorgeous - try ‘Ars Technica’ if you are into tech or ‘The Atlantic’ if you are into - whatever. Many thanks to Darko Miletic for all the hard work.
A letter from the president*
Dear Subscribers,
many moons have passed since I pulled the private recipe feature in ReadBeam. Tomorrow you’ll get this great feature back.
I’ll take the site offline this afternoon. When it is back online tomorrow you will be able to subscribe to absolutely completely anything you can imagine:
Subscribe to any blog or newspaper I have never heard off - and get yourself a nice...
June 2011
1 post
Things are coming along...
Even if it takes some more time. I’ll take the opportunity to update some internals in the process and this takes more time than anticipated. So, please stay tuned!
May 2011
1 post
Private Recipes Going Strong
Just a heads-up from the development room. Private recipes are going strong, I expect to release them by the end of next week. This will be a major step ‘cause it enables power users to really do as they please with the powerful ReadBeam engine.
Before the release I will move a few libraries to new major versions. Besides that we are all set. Stay tuned!
April 2011
5 posts
Custom Subscriptions delayed
As you’ve probably already (not) seen on the site, custom subscriptions are not yet ready for prime time. I’ll let you know once I am about to roll out the new release to the testers.
CDixon Experiment: Blog in Kindle Ebook Form →
There is an amazing amount of useful, free information available on tech blogs for fledgling tech entrepreneurs (this list is a great place to start). I think sometimes we techies forget that this wealth of content is unknown to the non-startup world…
Private Sources - aka 'Hosted Calibre'
Being able to add and edit your own recipes has been crucial for many of my users over the last months at readbeam.com. End of last week this feature was pulled because abuse has happened. I guess this has been unavoidable all along since my first implementation was quite naive.
In a short while I will re-release this feature as a paid service. You will be able to add and edit your own recipes...
I am sorry for the mess-up!
Right after I released V2 end of last week, sending out subscriptions broke. It took me until yesterday to get things moving again. I am sorry for the mess-up.
So, by now everything should be running smoothly. I’ll be working on private sources next.
Feed your Kindle or iPad
ReadBeam lets you subscribe to online content. Imagine getting automatic updates of your favorite blogs or news sources or even your daily on your Kindle or iPad.
Either select one of the public sources, there are currently over 25 worldwide services to choose from or create your own recipe (see here for inspiration: https://github.com/readbeam/recipes/) and do what ever you like with it.
Even...