Month: April 2014

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Devil Music 5.5″ x 8.5″ Paperback Edition

The Devil Music 5.5″ x 8.5″ paperback edition is now available through CreateSpace. This took longer than the ebook editions because I did order a proof copy of the book. You can get it [HERE].

The proof copy of the book arrived on April 9th, 2014. I’m glad we got one, because reviewing it did turn up a few errors which were then corrected before this edition was made available for sale. I also had to go back to the ebook vendors and upload revised files for them (those editions).

Although Custom-book-tique did format the book for us and got the project started on CreateSpace, doing so yourself and filling in the information is fairly easy and quite straightforward:

  • Title information is just the title, subtitle, author, contributors, language, publication date, etc.
  • They do ask for an ISBN, which you can get for yourself. If you do get your own ISBN(s), then be careful to use them correctly (e.g. use the same ISBN on CreateSpace as you use on the application for a certificate of registration from the Library of Congress).
  • The interior and cover are both defined as PDF files formatted for publication. This 5.5″ x 8.5″ Devil Music paperback uses a glossy cover.
  • Although you can review the files and approve the proof of the book exclusively online, I’d encourage you to go ahead and get a PROOF copy and thoroughly re-read it to check for both proofreading (e.g. spelling, grammar) and formatting (e.g. uneven margins) problems.
  • You will also need to provide a book description and author biography (you will need several versions of this information meeting various length restrictions; I’ll write more about them in another blog post later).
  • You will need some keywords for your book here and in various other places. Do not include the author’s name or words from the title since those will already be associated with your book.
  • Pricing … yeah, good luck with that. Devil Music’s retail list price at publication/launch was selected to provide the author with a $1.00 USD royalty when sold through “extended distribution”.
  • I’d recommend using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) rather than publishing to Kindle through CreateSpace.
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Repairing A Hijacked Page

Repaired a hijacked community page.

A family member of mine reached out to me about their site being hijacked. A fake / pirate / knockoff Louis Vuitton website was loading instead of the proper community page. It is a very simple site, but it was created, managed, and maintained exclusively using a proprietary-looking, web-based site construction tool which I had never heard of. Looking at the source of the site, I found this JavaScript at the top, hijacking the site and redirecting visitors.

<script>
	var s=document.referrer;
	if(s.indexOf("google")>0 || s.indexOf("bing")>0 || s.indexOf("aol")>0 || s.indexOf("yahoo")>0)
	{
		self.location="[a fake Louis Vuitton site]";
	}
</script>

Poking around the web-based website tool, I was able to locate direct access to the files for the website. While digging around in the actual files for the website, I was able to find an obfuscated default.aspx file (i.e. some characters were printed directly, most used ASCII character codes, multiple concatenations were made so the characters did not appear in the code in their final output order, etc.) which output that malicious JavaScript and then included the normal/original website index.html page. Removing this file solved the problem.

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Website Security with SSL

Got a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, acquired from Namecheap, issued by RapidSSL, installed on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web server instance hosting Devil Music.

Follow the tutorial How to Configure an SSL Certificate for Apache on Amazon EC2 on splittingelectrons. Also consult the relevant RapidSSL Technical Support articles RapidSSL – Generate Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and RapidSSL – Install SSL Certificate.

* Since the splittingelectrons blog has not been updated in 2 years, I’ve copied its contents into an HTML comment embedded in this post so it doesn’t get lost.

[UPDATE Monday, December 1, 2014]
Beginning next summer (2015), you should look into Let’s Encrypt as your *free* certificate authority!
See “Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web” by Peter Eckersley on EFF.org, November 18, 2014
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-encrypt-entire-web

Sources

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Devil Music EPUB Edition

The Devil Music ePub edition, DRM-free, is now available through Lulu.com. You can get it [HERE].

EPUB is a free and open e-book standard. I can read this edition using Calibre on my Windows PC. I’ve been told it also works with FBReader on Android, Google Books on Android, and iBooks on Apple’s iOS.

The Lulu self publishing project form page is simple enough. Make sure you already got your ISBN if you don’t want to use theirs. Although, as I note in that post, I’d recommend letting Lulu (and Amazon, etc.) provide you with free ISBNs at first and only buy and use your own later if anything you write gets popular. We chose to make Chapter One: Servitude the book preview and simply used the ebook cover as the marketing image.

Additional Reading