crofflr blog

Year-End Wrap Up

Michael -

2012 was a great year for crofflr. The service gained a lot of new subscribers, which is important for crofflr  because it makes the project financially sustainable.

crofflr is still a small mom-and-pop business and depends on people who are willing to pay for the service (please read Maciej Ceglowskis nice article about the subject). Your one-time fee pays the bills for running crofflr on Googles Appengine and Amazons AWS.

A big Thank-You to all subscribers!In 2012 crofflr saw a lot of improvments in it's background services to make the e-book deliveries more reliable and to simplify the managment of the cloud services that build the crofflr infrastructure.
Here are some of the "visible" changes for users:

  • "Give me something to read" changed it's name to "The Feature".
  • Instant delivery - You can now force an immediate delivery with the "Send my e-book now!" button on the configuration page. Please understand that it can take up to 45 minutes for the e-book to arrive on your Kindle device.
  • Optional periodical format - Beginning with the newer Kindle devices (starting with the Kindle Touch) Amazon broke (please see here and here for details) the support for the periodical e-book format, which lets you manage e-books like magazines or newspapers. This format is a very good fit for crofflr, because it allows you to manage older deliveries as back issues. But on the broken devices all deliveries appear with the same name, what makes them indistinguishable from each other. With the new configuration you can give each delivery a unique name including the delivery date. Just uncheck "Use the periodical format" in gerneral options. Personally I would still recommend the periodical format (Btw. Here is a way to clean up your Kindle personal documents).
  • A solution for too large e-books - Amazon limits the size for personal documents to 50MB, if your crofflr delivery is bigger than this you will receive an email with a download link where you can fetch your e-book and transfer it manually to your Kindle.And these are my plans for 2013:Instapaper support.OPDS support (to support Moon Reader on Android).Archives and redeliveriesEPUB support and email delivery.Please leave your ideas and suggestions in the comments!Happy new year & happy reading in 2013!Michael