For folks who keep hitting my site looking for Kobo Mini battery data

I’ve turned off URL archiving of my tweet history–but I had been getting a lot of hits on one tweet I did about my Kobo Mini and finding a battery for it. This suggests to me that a lot of folks out there are having the same problem I did, which is to say, you have a Kobo Mini with battery problems. So I thought I’d put up a little post talking about what I did. The tweet people kept hitting didn’t exactly have much in the way of useful data, after all.

When I originally got the Mini I saw a lot of weird behavior with it, as described in my Mini vs. Nook SimpleTouch post, and the followup on Mini vs. Nook SimpleTouch post. It had issues with battery life, and would often lose track of where I was with any given book, or whether it had synced stuff back to Kobo’s mothership in case I wanted to pick up reading a book on something else (like the desktop app, or my phone). I eventually realized that a lot of what I was seeing could be traced to a bad battery. A little bit of googling suggested other Mini owners had had the same problem.

The trick is, actually finding a battery to replace the one in my device. I eventually had to have Dara order me one from a seller on eBay. The seller was in Toronto, so it took a while for the battery to actually get to me. But it did arrive and it did work. I’m not using my Kobo Mini much now, but as of the last few times I played with it, it did indeed appear stable. So if you’re having issues with your device, I’d recommend you do a scan through eBay and see if other sellers have batteries available.

Of course, if the only available sellers are in North America and you’re not, I agree that this presents some problems. To wit, the likelihood that you’ll risk postage costs being more than the battery is actually worth–at which point you’ll need to ask yourself whether it’s worth it to try to find a replacement battery, or just get a new device. That, I suppose, will depend on how much you like the Mini as an ereading device.

(You will note that I’m no longer actively using mine; I’m a power reader and I have found that the Mini doesn’t really suit my reading needs anymore. So if anybody wants to buy mine, hey, talk to me!)

All that said… if you do actually find a battery, what then do you do with it? Well, I found it reasonably easy to take my device apart and install the newly acquired battery. So if you’re not afraid to disassemble an ereader and you have the appropriate tools, go for it. I found this tutorial on Kobo surgery helpful.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Dayjob experience coming in handy for my sites

So this is kind of a wacky thing–I’m finding myself able to use a couple of things learned from projects at work in the managing of my own sites. Those of you out there who read me, if you’re running your own sites as well, especially if you’re a fellow indie writer, you might want to consider these for your sites.

One: Google and other search engine spiders care if you have a sitemap.xml file. This is not something that users would normally hit–it’s a file that sits there entirely for the benefit of search engines, so that they can better index your site. I have chosen to address this by installing a WordPress plugin that dynamically generates one of these.

If you’re a fellow WordPress user, you might want to investigate this too. And if you’re blogging on a different platform, such as Blogger, and you have useful data on how to set up such a thing, drop me a comment!

Two: Google also cares now if your site is mobile-friendly, i.e., if you have something better than just the desktop view of your site when people come and visit you on their mobile devices. I am choosing to address this on annathepiper.org, which is still up even though I’m not actively posting to it, by installing the new Twenty Fifteen WordPress theme, which is specifically set up to render well on mobile devices as well as on desktop computers.

I am also currently shopping around for options for professionally designed themes to deploy on angelahighland.com. And I recommend anybody running their own site do the same–especially fellow writers. I’m eyeing Solo Pine right now, as I like their design esthetic, and bonus that they’re also headquartered in Seattle.

If you’ve got the technical and design chops to roll your own theme, go for it. But if you don’t, consider shopping around for a modern, mobile-friendly theme for your site. Think about what you like design-wise, and what features you want in a theme as well.

Other things I’m doing right now of note: as mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing some significant housekeeping of old content. I’m going through old posts on angelahighland.com and annathepiper.org, deleting anything on annathepiper.org that I’ve already copied over onto angelahighland.com, and fixing broken content as well. This is to reduce duplication of content, which will hopefully make angelahighland.com tastier to the search engine spiders as they crawl around the web.

Anybody have other tips to share as to how to spruce up your site for the spiders?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.