About a month ago, I thought I had a clever idea: whenever a blog feed wasn’t found by DeafRead, the feed would be automatically turned off. Thus, DeafRead would no longer check the “dead” feed. What I miscalculated is that if the feed wasn’t found, it doesn’t necessarily mean the blog has officially died. It may have been unavailable for that precise moment DeafRead checked it.

The number of feeds subscribed to at DeafRead grows, and many do die from time to time. This was a way to purge the list, keeping the server load light and lean. It is somewhat intensive for the server to check each blog for new posts (last we looked, there are 602 active feeds). Obviously, we do not want to keep checking blogs which have been closed for years in the future.

From time to time, I do this manually; akin to a spring cleaning. The idea to automate this didn’t fare so well. As a result, some blog feeds were unintentionally turned off. This was my mistake.

After the first blogger contacted us about this, I immediately erased the automation code. Since then, two more bloggers have contacted us. After the third, I knew this post was necessary. There may be other blogs which hasn’t seen their posts on DeafRead and may be wondering why. I apologize.

Contact me if you haven’t seen your post(s) on DeafRead in some time, and I’ll quickly remedy it for you!

Last night I removed 23 “completely dead” blogs from DeafRead. They were either closed or the domain name no longer existed under the blogger’s ownership. One example is RidorLIVE.com. Was surprised to see this.

I did some work on DeafRead this morning. Some things here and there. Fixes and improvements. Nothing significant.

Also I improved an script and ran it on the database. It had been more than a year since I performed such a check. Scold on me. It marked more than 130 blogs as inactive. The script checked when a blog last published a post. If a new post hadn’t been published in 6 months or longer, the blog was marked as inactive. Inactive blogs are still checked for new posts every 24 hours however.

DeafRead has 300 active blogs. 13 new ones were approved in the last month.

DeafRead recently published its 25,000th post. 1,118 posts were moderated in March 2009.

Video
Video not working? Watch it at DeafVIDEO.TV

A friend of mine created the DeafRead chatroom at live.yahoo.com by mistake. She was searching for the chatroom that Amy and I experimented with last Friday, and accidentially created the chatroom by the name “DeafRead.”

She and I videophoned earlier today and she mentioned that she received some e-mails accusing her of trying to steal the DeafRead name. I am assuring you — it was simply a mistake and an innocent one. Knowing Arezo for some years now, I know she wouldn’t do it on purpose. There, I hope that helps clear some things up.

I’ve e-mailed Yahoo! asking that the chatroom be transferred to DeafRead. We’ll see if they will or can.

The video chatroom has taken off in a bigger way–beyond expectations. But be sure to find time for your friends and family–that are physically present!

RE: trolls. Those are users that come in and offend everyone. Rudely. I haven’t tested it but I think each user can ban or block another user. The channel moderator isn’t required to do this. Test it and let me know if it works.

Below are the biographies of the DeafRead 2008 Conference presenters. View the program to learn on what they will be presenting. Much thanks to each presenter for undertaking the work of preparing, developing and giving their presentations!

LaRonda Zupp
Zupp is a Mental Health Professional who brings 20 years of experience working with the d/Deaf community across the lifespan. She holds a BA in Deaf Studies, a Masters in Counseling, and additional certificates in Parent Education and Nonprofit Management. Her expertise includes Counseling and Guidance for d/Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Late-Deaf, and Deaf-Blind children and their families, Education, and Support Services for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Seniors. Her professionalism and extensive work in the d/Deaf community, combined with her natural optimism, dynamic presentation skills, and her own personal journey as a d/Deaf individual, makes LaRonda an inspirational and sought-out leader in the Deaf field. In her free time, LaRonda enjoys writing, blogging/vlogging, meeting new people, talking, laughing, storytelling, teaching, reading, nature walks, spending time with family and friends, and exploring mythology and spirituality. She is currently writing a book on her Journey into Deafhood. http://www.earofmyheart.com

Charles Katz
Katz, a native Californian, graduated from CSDRiverside. He attended Gallaudet for his BA, New York University for his MA, and Lamar University for his Ed.D in Deaf Studies. He has written papers on the history of Deaf Studies and the deaf community of Beaumont, Texas. He has presented workshops, lectures, and storytelling all over America in the area of deaf history, deaf studies, and ASL literature. He also maintain several vblogs, most notably on a creative mythology of the deaf experience.

Amy Cohen Efron
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Amy Cohen Efron attended Lexington School for the Deaf before being mainstreamed, starting at third grade. However, it wasn’t until the age of seventeen that she learned American Sign Language. She is currently employed as a school psychologist specializing in prevention and intervention programs at a day school for deaf students in Atlanta. Growing up in New York City and being surrounded by visual images from the media, helped Amy realize that visual media is of paramount importance. That realization propelled her to expand her understanding on how to use visual media to express her views and knowledge about issues pertaining to the Deaf community, such as the widely viewed The Greatest Irony. Amy’s fascination with computers, video and media led her to establish her own blog and vlog, in which she has defined herself as a compassionate individual with a vision. http://blog.deafread.com/abcohende/

Jon-Lenois Savage
Savage was born, raised, and is living in Southern California. He attended mainstreamed schools from elementary to high school. He has the passion to be an artist and an America Sign Language entertainer. He enjoys surfing deaf blogs and other Deaf community websites, and also enjoys meeting new people–nationally and internationally. In his free time, He is constantly looking for a good surfing spot. Once or twice a year, he goes into the desert on a off-road trip with friends. http://www.lenois.com

Adam Stone
Stone has been a blogger since 2001 when, as a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, he was introduced to LiveJournal. He is perhaps best-known for his role as DeafDC.com’s manager from April 2005 to August 2006, where he was key in launching and administering one of the most prolific and widely-read Deaf blogs on the internet. He continues to write for DeafDC.com, and also devotes his writing time to two other websites: Found In Ceylon (www.foundinceylon.com), a blog chronicling his volunteer experience in Sri Lanka, and his personal blog, Found In Blank ( www.foundinblank.com). Originally from San Diego, California, Adam now lives in San Francisco, works as a substitute teacher at California School for the Deaf, Fremont, and is currently applying to graduate school for a master’s in Deaf Education.

Jared Evans
Evans hails from Seattle, WA and was mainstreamed all his life. He graduated with a BS in Information Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology. Currently, he lives in Rockville, Maryland and works as a system administrator at Viable, Inc. Evans is also the Public Relations person and developer for DeafRead.com, a filtered blog aggregator. He maintains his own blog, Jared’s Rambling Thoughts, as well. http://jarednevans.typepad.com/blog/

Wayne Betts Jr
Betts, of Mosdeux, has produced films focusing on the deaf community. Working as director of photography (DP) on production sets, he is more than qualified to share with us tips on how to improve vlogs. Currently residing in Los Angeles, California, he attended the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut. He also attended Gallaudet University and Rochester Institute of Technology.

Video
Video not working? Watch it at DeafVIDEO.TV

Hello Long time no SEE!

I’ve made a few posts lately but none of them were vlogs for the past month or so. When you’re busy, vlogs are harder to produce as they take more time. Also, those posts weren’t as important as others, so when I need to reach out to a wider audience, because of its importance, I try to make it into a vlog. So yes, I wanted to make this post into a vlog.

There have been a couple of blogs that had a concern about not being included in DeafRead. We have no reason not to include them–unless. There is one blog that was banned almost a year ago. The blogger harassed in e-mails sent to Human Editors. It was unhealthy for our team. We tried to deal with the blogger–diplomatically. Even during this time, we continued to publish entries by this blogger. But when started receiving harassing e-mails, that was the end. Thus the ban. We continued to receive harassing e-mails some months later from this blogger. Unfortunate.

That’s the only blog that’s been banned in almost two years. Since then, it’s been smooth sailing. There’s been no reason to expel a blog from DeafRead–our tolerance is HIGH. We realize that the moment we start censoring–people will have grounds to question our neutrality and trust. We certainly do not want to go into that direction. We care about DeafRead and know that changing our policy could result in its demise.

We run DeafRead on a dedicated web server. This means a whole server is almost fully dedicated to DeafRead. A server is layered in “racks” in a data center. This single server is quite powerful and is not shared with other websites (that are outside our control)–which eat away at our server demands. Only a few websites run on this server, leaving abundant power to DeafRead.

Here’s the reason why DeafRead requires a lot of server power: the RSS feed fetches that we do hourly. We subscribe to between 450 and 500 feeds. When DeafRead is fetching RSS feeds, it uses a lot of memory and CPU power. If we ran on a less powerful server, it would impact the speed at which you are able to visit DeafRead because the server is slowed down, possibly crashing it.

Our server “guy” let Jared and I know that it was hard on the server when feeds are checked for new entries. So we worked to make the code more efficient and to take less time to execute. When we are checking approximately 500 feeds, it can take as long as 6 minutes. The script is quite fast, but when you have this many feeds, it does take time. One strategy we thought of, to reduce the processing time, was to skip feeds that hadn’t been written in months.

(If your blog was de-activated after being quiet for some months, let us know by e-mail and we can easily re-activate it. We just need to be notified.)

To reduce the number of blogs, we suspended subscriptions to approximately 40 blogs that were “dead” or, rather, on haitus.

We continued to list inactive blogs on our DeafRead Subscriptions page because we still wanted to send traffic their way, although they hadn’t been written to in a while. This page has been re-vamped.

Active blogs appear on the top of DeafRead Subscriptions, and on the bottom, there is a separate section that lists inactive blogs. Currently, there are approximately 153 inactive blogs at DeafRead.

If you write to your blog after a long period of silence, here are the steps to take:

1. Is your blog in the active subscription list? If not, e-mail us!
2. Is your feed working? At your DeafRead Profile, click “Check now”. Example DeafRead Profile
3. Was your entry published to DeafRead Extra? We publish everything–either to DeafRead or DeafRead Extra.
4. If your blog is marked as inactive, wait 24 hours or more. Our new script that checks inactive feeds runs once daily. More about this below.

Regarding #4, it is rare that we completely delete an entry. Since the deletion feature was added, I think there’s been only 2 or 3 entries that was completely deleted. They are extreme cases. For example, pornography will be deleted. We cannot publish pornography at DeafRead or DeafRead Extra.

If your blog is active, the blog’s RSS feed working, and the entry not in DeafRead Extra, and it’s still not appearing on DeafRead, notify us and we will gladly look into it for you!

Here’s the link to the inactive blogs list on DeafRead Subscriptions.

I forgot to add one more thing. Today, I added a new script. Like I said earlier, active blogs are checked hourly for new entries. The new script will check inactive blogs every 24 hours. We are fetching new entries on active blogs each hour as usual; and now are checking inactive feeds too, only once a day.

In this case, if you’ve written to your inactive blog right after this script has checked your feed, you will need to wait a full 24 hour before it is picked up. Also consider the time it will take for Human Editors to login and moderate incoming posts.

So we are now checking ALL feeds, whether they are active or not. Those that are inactive will be checked less frequently–once a day. I hope this solves the issue!

Watch for another post coming sooooon!