* You can now send .mobi files to any mail address you want, it's also possible to store the mail address in a cookie...
* We now use the MailException plugin for Mojolicious so we get noticed whenever something goes wrong
* Fixed some decode bugs
When I added mail support, I experienced some problems that didn't occur on my dev machine.
After two hours of debugging I found the difference. On the server I did install Authen::SASL::XS and on my dev machine this module is missing.
With Authen::SASL::XS I find this message in the log file:
[Mon Jan 7 01:05:21 2013] [error] SMTP auth() command failed: 5.5.4 Syntax: AUTH mechanismat /home/ebook/perl5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.14.2/lib/site_perl/5.14.2/MIME/Lite.pm line 2882
Without it everything works...
I hope I can file a bug in the next days.
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Below the "front lid" there are some interesting changes. We replaced the caching module CHI with the wrapper Mojolicious::Plugin::CHI. The module is quite new. But after some exchange with and bugfixing by (thanks!) the module author this module can now be recommended together with Starman and nginx - as we use it at Perlybook.
BTW: the Perltuts Tutorial ebooks finally get their title and author in the meta information... (I'm actually wondering why nobody ever complained about this).
]]>Another related project I added is EPublisher-Source-Plugin-PodFromGithub. When we have finished that plugin we would be able to convert stuff like the Perl Advent Calender articles into ebook formats.
Due to private reasons I wasn't able to finish that plugin before December started :-(
]]>The error message I got:
Unrecognized character \xCD; marked by <-- HERE after og->debug(<-- HERE near column 26 at script/../lib/PodBook.pm line 43.
Here is the code:
Who finds the error first?
Ps: dusty screens will make it harder!
Greetings
Boris Däppen
But recently I noticed an effect which could also be of interest for "normal" Perl programmers who just work at a the computer and also prefer reading the docs there.
I always found it a bit complicated to read documentation on CPAN. If the author does not give a lot of love to the documentation it's even complicate to browse through all the docs of each module, since there is no auto-generated TOC over the complete distribution (only on inside each modules doc).
But there are even more issues.
See how the documentation of EBook::MOBI looks like on my screen (1920x1080):
This is what you see first. It is a horrible layout, isn't it? You have so much unused space and the TOC is so big that you don't see what you are probably most interested in... a small description and the example in the SYNOPSIS.
]]> MetaCPAN, which is great and always used by me, has basically the same problem. The markup is more colorful but the two issues mentioned stay the same:
Now see how this looks like when you go to perlybook.org and download the docs in the EPUB format. (You should have the Firefox plugin "EPUBReader" installed to have the same view as posted here)
I think there is a great advantage here. First of all you see links (ebook internal) for all the modules containing documentation listed at the left side. Like that you know at the first glance what else there is to read, even if the author did not take care of it. Secondly, the layout is much more efficient. You can see the example directly and scan much more text at once.
There are still downsides... e.g. the POD links point to CPAN instead inside the ebook. Also long lines of code get wrapped, which might confuse. But I thought it might be interesting for some of you guys. Maybe it is already useful now as is or somebody gets inspired by the issues mentioned.
---
Boris Däppen
On that page you can grab the tutorials that are available on Perltuts.com as mobi or epub book.
It was easy to integrate those tutorials: Write a small script that gets all tutorial names, store them in a cache and list them on the webpage. Write a source plugin for EPublisher and that's it!
Thanks to Mojolicious it's very easy to extend the webapp and the script to fetch the tutorial names was written within "a few minutes". For future web scraping tasks I'll use Mojo::UserAgent...
If you have ideas what sources we can integrate, please drop us a line at perlybook@perl-services.de!
]]>This module now got an update (v0.5). Before it was just useful for translating POD into an ebook (which is awesome). But now its even better... you can write plugins for any input format.
So is there anybody interested in the ability for converting e.g. Markdown directly into an ebook? If you feel like such a feature would be cool, you are very welcome to contribute a plugin (for what ever format you like).
For now there is just a plugin for POD. More would be great.
Please see the modules documentation for more information or directly join the project at github. Feel free to contact the modules author (me) if you have questions.
thx
]]>This fixes a bug, concerning some input like e.g. Log::Log4perl.
Because MetaCPAN's autocompletion was used to match user-input to something valid, you always got an ebook about Tie::Log4perl (which is autocomplete-suggestion number one in this case) - so this is fixed now and you will get the book you want.
The downside of this is that the input allows no more typos and is case sensitive too! But that's not a big issue if you use a browser with JS enabled... JQuery will fill up the form correctly with a bit of your help.
Secondly a minor bug is fixed so that you should be able to download your ebook of choice directly from you Kindle Reader if you have some WLAN around. I would like to hear some feedback about this on github or as comments here in the blog. Because on my Kindle Reader (there is no model name written on this thing, I don't even know which model it is) I can now download (which I couldn't before) but - very strange - I can't open the book... would like to hear if others have the same issue.
Thanks
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The reason for this is a quite annoying bug (or missing feature) which displayed content from POD-links (the L tag) as is. Luckily this just occurred for the Mobi-format.
To fix this, we released a new version ob EBook::MOBI (v0.46) and added some minor changes to perlybook.org to allow better support.
Please enjoy!
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