Tizra Blog

How LAB-AIDS is using the new widgets . Tizra now offers a Widget viewing mode that lets you embed your content in just about any standard web page just by inserting a little blob of HTML code.  It's great for letting users "leaf through" samples of your content without interrupting what they're doing...whether that's perusing your online book catalog, reading a review, or as you'll see below, enjoying a fascinating blog post like this!  It enables you to disseminate promotional samples widely via viral or conventional marketing campaigns, and to make the online shopping and buying experience as seamless and integrated as possible. For example, say you were a well-known Tizra customer like LAB-AIDS . You could give bloggers a simple snippet of code that would let them show their readers a thumbnail-sized sample of one of your beautiful books like this... All that's needed to embed the above sample is a little blob of code like this... <iframe s...

Do you use RSS feeds? Then you know how useful they can be when you want alerts to newly published online information that applies to you: professionally or personally. This kind of targeted, agile publishing is exactly what Tizra is all about and, as you'd expect, we offer simple yet flexible features that let you get the most relevant updates out to your most interested users. In case you're unfamiliar with RSS, it's basically a way of formatting information so that people can subscribe to and view it in feed reading software ( Details from Wikipedia).   RSS  means users   save time  because they're notified of anything new at their favorite sites without needing to visit them. Tizra RSS feeds can be linked to from the homepage of your Tizra site, or any other web page. By default, Tizra sites include an RSS feed that updates subscribers every time any new Document is added.  For example, here's a feed that'll update you any time Columbia Univ...

The Super Tagger feature gives you superhero-like powers to update -- in bulk -- the metadata properties of the content you manage in Tizra, including Documents, Excerpts, Collections, Virtual Collections, Static Pages and Offers. It also gives you the all too human power to change your mind, make mistakes, and learn as you go.  Because it lets you make large-scale changes after you load your content, you no longer have to worry so much about getting your metadata just right beforehand.  If you suddenly realize you'd like to bundle your recipes by main ingredient, or your conference papers by first author's organization, you don't have to start over, you can Super Tag them! It can be especially useful for educational publishers working to make use of the new metadata standards being proposed by the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative  and the Common Core State Standards Initiative . For example, one of the proposed LRMI standards is to include the typical age r...

Tizra's new iOS reading interface lets you reach the fast-growing iPad audience with all the power of Tizra, including its well-established ability to help you publish to iPads in just seconds. Our Why Tizra is the Ultimate iPad Publishing Platform Top Five List! Great reading experience --  A newly enhanced mobile web interface that's optimized for iOS touchscreens, with quick page flips at the swipe of a finger, and specifically tuned search and navigation. Amazing flexibility --  Unbundle & remix content to create new products. Sell chapters, articles & topical collections. Always up-to-date --  New content is instantly available on users' devices. No waiting for apps to sync. No App Store Middlemen --  Keep 100% of your revenue...and skip the slow approval process. No Custom Software Costs --  Tizra's iOS reader is regularly upgraded by Tizra at no additional charge to our subscribers. No need for expensive, unreliable custom code! The...

We've been talking a lot about features lately.  Now, how to use some of them in real life. Say you're a publisher of textbooks or other teaching materials.  You're good at selling to schools, but you need an efficient and secure way to get digital products into the hands of students after the sale.  Tizra gives you a number of ways to get this done (in addition to built-in ecommerce for self-serve credit card sales), but today we'll focus on a new option built around the batch account loader, which makes it as simple as copy and paste.  Note that second and third steps below only need to be done the first time you set up… 1. Add and Tag Users Use the new batch account loader to load and tag email addresses for the students who should have access (if you don't have emails, there are other options we'll cover in future posts).  Pick a tag that's short and easy to remember.  For example, if you want to arrange access to a book called Knowledge 101 ...

Like a lot of web companies, we learned some hard lessons from the Amazon Web Services outage of a few weeks ago.   We didn't lose a single byte of data, but we resolved never again to put one service provider—no matter how large and diversified—in a position where its failure could cause a serious interruption in service for our customers. As promised, we 've now finished setting up automated data backup and redundant server infrastructure in facilities maintained by a completely separate company:  Softlayer Technologies .  Like AWS, Softlayer maintains the high security and reliability standards we require, including SAS 70 Type II Certification and PCI DSS Compliance.  And their Texas location adds geographic diversity to the Virginia and California regions Amazon gives us access to. This is in no way the end of our efforts to improve reliability and security.  We'll keep refining backup, failover and recovery processes to ensure not only that our c...

The downtime brought about by the massive failure at Amazon Web Services has now agonizingly stretched well into a second day, causing us to question practically everything we thought we knew about hosting web applications. Lurking behind it all is the nagging anxiety that maybe we should go back to a simpler time, when men were men, and ran their own machine rooms.  Then come the flashbacks, and we remember what that was really like.  All it took was a careless backhoe operator… The truth is that for all the pain and, yes, embarrassment, the answer is not to turn back the clock.  The answer is, as it almost always is in these situations, to use this experience to build something better.  Something that leverages the best of the new tools, with a deeper understanding of their risks. Another way to put it: Don't fire the sysadmin while he's trying to fix the servers.  Keep cool and get the crisis resolved, then do a full post-mortem to squeeze every drop ...