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WordPress “Error establishing Database connection” and straight quotes
We’ve recently migrated our websites from 1and1 hosting to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our sites are all Wordpress based. There were a couple of snags in the migration…but with all often performed procedures (we are not the first to migrate a Wordpress site!), most could be solved by RTFM (loosely: read the instructions) and don’t shoot yourself in the foot. One very strange issue came up with the wp-config.php file. For those not initiated into Wordpress configuration, this is the file that tells Wordpress where to find the MySQL DB and what credentials to login with. I had to edit this file to change DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD and DB_HOST due to the move. I had backed up all of the files down to my laptop (a Mac Book Air) and edited the wp-config.php file with Test Edit. Here is the file after edit. If you can see the problem, you have better eyes than I do. Apparently when I edited the file on my MacBookAir, the default quotes, which are curly vs. straight were used. Linux/PHP apparently do not like these, as, after much gnashing of teeth and investigating, changing them to straight quotes cured my “DB Connection” error. Hopefully this will assist anyone else from too much banging their head against the wall during a migration. The other issue I ran into in migration was “unable to create the folder uploads/2015/11” when posting images for this particular post. This is resolved by going to Settings/Media and correcting the upload folder for the new hosting service. Read more…
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In Memoriam: Jean Flynn
Today we are fondly remembering our friend Jean Flynn who passed away this morning.Wife of JoSara author Robert Flynn, Jean was a noted children’s book author (a list of her works and letters can be found here). Her influence can be found in all of Bob’s books as editor and advisor. She was an amazing woman, and a family friend to my wife and I. I first met Bob in 1981 at Trinity University, and met Jean shortly thereafter. My wife met Bob first, and did not meet Jean for a while. As an introduction, I had her read this story. It suits them both well, showing their love of travel, their wit and their boundless love for life and each other. From Growing Up A Sullen Baptist and Other Lies by Robert Flynn (I wish it was published by JoSara, but published by University of North Texas Press). Enduring Love by Jean and Robert Flynn Jean Flynn We have been told numerous times that our marriage should have failed. We are opposites. We view things differently. Robert is a romantic. I am a realist. When two people are so different one always has to compromise. I compromised on a wedding anniversary trip. We gave ourselves a five week trip to Alaska for our fortieth wedding anniversary. Our first adventure was to backpack the Chilkoot Trail, the site of the Klondike Gold Rush. I had envisioned wine by a campfire, the smells of food cooking, and sleeping bags zipped together under the stars By the time I had finished packing my thirty-five pound backpack, I had drunk all the wine and we had settled on freeze-dried food. Our fire was a pork ‘n beans can over a Sterno. It was June, there was still snow and ice everywhere. We were both layered with clothes, the outer garment was waterproof – Bob’s was Goretext, mine was Wal-Mart. The only things I took off at night were my wet socks and rain suit. There were no stars because it never got dark and every time I went to sleep, I was startled awake by Bob blowing the bear whistle in my ear. The third day of our hike, we climbed the Chilkoot Pass, seven miles at a 45 degree angle from the base to the summit. I don’t remember how long it took us because it is an outdoor museum. Read more…
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The many reasons why we are publishing Unburning Alexandria by Paul Levinson
JoSara MeDia is proud to announce that we are publishing Paul Levinson’s newest novel, Unburning Alexandria, the sequel to The Plot to Save Socrates.Targeted availability for the eBook version is the end of April, with print editions later. Why is JoSara publishing Paul’s books? Here’s the short version: I met Paul Levinson on MySpace. We liked each other’s books. Then we met in person. We traded signed books. We kept in touch. JoSara was born. And last year we published eBook editions of The Silk Code and The Plot to Save Socrates. Most importantly, my wife likes Paul, and we enjoy drinking wine, dining and talking about all manner of subjects with Paul and his lovely wife Tina. What better way to There’s more to the story, of course, and we hope it will go down as one of the great episodes in publishing history. But first: Here is a summary of Unburning Alexandria: Mid-twenty-first century time traveler Sierra Waters, fresh from her mission to save Socrates from the hemlock, is determined to alter history yet again, by saving the ancient Library of Alexandria – where 750,000 one-of-a-kind texts were lost, an event described by many as “one of the greatest intellectual catastrophes in history.” Along the way she will encounter old friends such as William Henry Appleton, the great 19th-century American publisher, and enemies like the enigmatic time-traveling inventor Heron of Alexandria. Her quest will involve such other real historic personages as Hypatia, Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe, Ptolemy the astronomer, and St. Augustine – again placing her friends, her loved ones, and herself in deadly jeopardy. In this sequel to the THE PLOT TO SAVE SOCRATES, award-winning author Paul Levinson offers another time-traveling adventure spanning millennia, full of surprising twists and turns, all the while attempting the seemingly impossible: UNBURNING ALEXANDRIA. The long version of the story: My first book, Dusk Before the Dawn, was published in April 2006, and I promptly created a page for my book on MySpace. Yes, you all remember…way back when MySpace was cool and Facebook was still only available by students at certain schools. In December of that year, I picked up and read a copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. Read more…
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Our highly rated Antarctica app
Our newest enhanced ebook Antarctica: Standing on the Bottom of the World, has been available in the Apple App Store for just over a month, and the response from reviewers and readers has been excellent. The app features essays by Texas Literary Hall of Fame author Robert Flynn, with photos, maps, slideshows and links for more research. In its short life, the app has already garnered some excellent accolades: A 5 star rating on the Apple App Store, the highest rated Antarctica app. Read more…
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Author’s Cuts and Software Development: Incremental changes based on feedback and knowledge
If Shakespeare had the opportunity to re-release an “updated version” of one of his plays some years after he originally published it, would he have wanted the opportunity? Would the world want to see it? JoSara MeDia has recently released an “Author’s Cut” of Paul Levinson’s Locus award-winning novel The Silk Code and will soon release additional Author’s Cuts from Paul and other authors. In Levinson’s own words : The Tor edition, like all books brought out by big publishers, went through extensive copy editing. In this new eBook edition, I reinstated a lot of my original wording, which I always liked better. I see such author’s cuts as a major step forward in publishing. The Silk Code is not only available as a Kindle, but as an eBook on Barnes & Noble and all the digital outlets. I spent the majority of my professional career programming, and continue to not only lead a software and services company but to also write iPad and Android enhanced eBook apps for JoSara MeDia and for our non-profit partners. In our software releases, as with most companies, we receive and review customer requirements and release a software solution that takes not only those requirements into account, but also is bounded by time and money. Often everything that is a desired requirement is left out to accommodate either time or monetary limitations. In subsequent releases, we tend to focus on incremental changes, changes that will enhance the existing product, bring it up to date or meet some customer need. Some of this is from customer/consumer feedback, much is from our own knowledge and experience with the product and the industry. The software industry has many names for this: RAD (Rapid Application Development) is the most applicable. The parallels between this incremental software release process and the concept of an Author’s Cut eBook release are many, and there are also several major differences. Some of the parallels are obvious: a writer gets better at his craft over time, as does a coder, and going back and fixing/changing/updating pieces allows them to use improved techniques on a previous release. some writers write for themselves; most coders, and most writers, write for their product to be consumed by others. Read more…
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UNT Digital Frontiers Conference
The Digital Frontiers Conference, held at the University of North Texas campus on Friday, September 21, was a well attended collision of two worlds: the world of the traditional historian with curated collections and the world of instant news becoming history, un-curated and virally spread by social media means. My attendance was mainly to support demos of our solutions done by Kent Calder, Executive Director of TSHA to show the next stage in the digital evolution of the Online Handbook of Texas. More on those solutions later. The Keynote was presented by Michael Millner, the Director at The Jack & Stella Kerouac Center for Public Humanities, Lowell, Mass. Titled “Notes on Re-Occupying the Past, Digitally”, Michael’s description of a public forum on what to do with Kerouac’s remains, and how to listen/use/include the general public opinion and discussion into history and the humanities was a story that set the tone for the conference: Future of Established Online Collections: My friend Kent Calder gave an excellent presentation on the history of the Handbook of Texas, from its idea genesis to its current status as a worldwide digital resource. He showed a couple of our latest enhancements: putting iTunes links in articles that are part of the Handbook of Texas Music, so users/researchers can hear as well as read about the subject of an entry (see here for an example, the entry for Charlene Arthur); and a map of the San Jacinto Battlefield, with links to 360 degree panoramic images (see the demo here). Online Collections like the Handbook need to evolve to include media, location and other interaction to provide a full learning and research experience (IMHO).The UNT staff then walked through a user survey on the Portal to Texas History , an excellent resource that is digitizing newspapers and collections across Texas. Social Media and Digital Communities: This session had several presenters that were not traditional or trained historians, but were either trying to capture a particular history/community or were grabbing history in real time with smart phone pictures and video. I enjoyed and learned from all of the presenters, but Mariette Papi?’s (@MsPapic) presentation of photos from the Occupy movement, and her juxtaposition of those photos with statistics about photos of history being made in the wild. Read more…
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Paul Levinson on Phil D’Amato
Guest Post on SFSignal SFSignal published this morning a guest post from JoSara author Paul Levinson detailing the background and bio of Dr. Phil D’Amato, main character of the recently published author’s cut of The Silk Code. An excerpt: Phil D’Amato’s Story With JoSara MeDia’s publication of my “author’s cut” ebook edition of The Silk Code, I was especially pleased with SF Signal’s invitation to provide a biography of the novel’s central character, Dr. Phil D’Amato. The short take on his life and times is that he’s a forensic detective with the NYPD, with an interest not only in DNA, but in subjects ranging from prehistoric history to quantum mechanics. As of his last appearance in my most recent Phil D’Amato novel – The Pixel Eye in 2003 – he’s very happily married to Jenna Katen. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves… The impetus for Phil D’Amato’s conception goes back to 1994, and a brief article I had published in Wired – “Telnet to the Future?” – in which I made the case against the possibility of time travel (travel to the past invokes paradox, travel to the future negates free will). Jack Sarfatti, a physicist, wrote to me, taking exception to my conclusion. But in our correspondence he did allow that Stephen Hawking had a “chronology protection conjecture,” which held that even if time travel were possible, the universe would not allow it, and would put forth physical obstacles to time travel to protect itself from unraveling, which would keep the world “safe for historians”. In my warped brain, this instantly suggested a more sinister scenario – what would the universe do to scientists who might discover a mechanism of time travel, and build a device to do it? I wrote “The Chronology Protection Case” as a science fiction murder mystery, with the universe as the ultimate suspect and Phil D’Amato as the principal investigator. But Phil might have had a short tenure, had it not been for Stan Schmidt’s response when I sent the short story to Analog. Stan liked the story, but wondered why I would kill off such an appealing character, as I had done with Phil in the first draft. The result was “The Chronology Protection Case” novelette, which was published, with Phil surviving, in Analog in 1995. Read more…
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Paul Levinson’s The Silk Code Published as eBook by JoSara MeDia
New “author’s cut” edition available in multiple formats August 25, 2012 (NEW YORK CITY, NY and HOUSTON, TX) – JoSara MeDia and Paul Levinson are pleased to announce the availability of the Kindle and ePub editions of Levinson’s first novel, The Silk Code, published by JoSara MeDia. The Silk Code, originally published by Tor Books, won the Locus Award for best first novel of 1999, and reached #8 on the Locus paperback Best Seller list in February 2001. The novel received praise from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and reviews in dozens of other places. Levinson is especially excited about this new edition because it is, as he calls it, an “author’s cut” of The Silk Code. “The Tor edition, like all books brought out by big publishers, went through extensive copy editing,” he explains. “In this new eBook edition, I reinstated a lot of my original wording, which I always liked better.” Levinson, who was President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 1998-2001, believes such author’s cuts are a major step forward in publishing. The Silk Code is not only available as a Kindle, but as an eBook on Barnes & Noble and all the digital outlets. Levinson, a prolific author, has published 4 other science fiction novels, and 7 non-fiction books, translated into 12 languages around the world. His latest, New New Media, has just come out in a second edition from Pearson. He appears often as a media commentator on PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and Fox News. The Silk Code Kindle edition sports a new cover, created especially for the novel by Joel Iskowitz, whose designs have appeared on stamps around the world, US coins, and NASA murals. Levinson says he chose JoSara MeDia because he “wanted for The Silk Code a savvy, small publisher, unencumbered by baggage from the pre-digital age.’ JoSara MeDia has published other award-winning authors in multiple formats, including print, eBook and enhanced eBooks in the form of iPad and Android applications. JoSara MeDia also works with non-profit organizations, such as the Texas State Historical Association, assisting them with strategies and solutions to get their content available in these multiple formats. Read more…
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Robert Flynn: How I became a writer
Robert Flynn, author of Jade: Outlaw and Jade: The Law, is interviewed at PhD In Creative Writing on how he became a writer. An excerpt: 5. What would you say in a short letter to an aspiring writer? Be patient. Paul Baker told me that it took ten years to be a physician. When students asked if they could write I told them that ten years in the future if they were writing they were writers; if they weren’t writing, they weren’t writers. The reward of writing is writing, just as the reward for being a Marine is being a Marine. There is no guarantee of “success” unless you define it as writing as long as you can think. Discover your resistances to work. We all have them. The most common one is fear of failure. If you never begin the poem, never finish the story, never mail the manuscript to a publisher, you can pretend you haven’t failed. Read more…
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Author Larry Ketchersid’s John Carter Primer video
Joining the written primer he wrote for SFSignal.com, Larry expands the John Carter Primer into this seven minute video. It was used as the introduction to the New York Review of Science Fiction meeting where the Anthology Under the Moons of Mars edited by John Joseph Adams was reviewed and red. Read more…
Books, eBooks, apps, audiobooks and whatever else we can get our hands in
