Category: Uncategorized

We’ve released the Tightrope resources

Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our the “Security for Changemakers” course! Our six-session course is designed to equip students aged 16-18 with the skills they need to stay safe while advocating for change in their communities. We recognize that many of the young people we work with are passionate about creating […]

Why are kdp books ‘currently unavailable’

We’ve published almost 300 books on Amazon’s kdp platform, and more and more regularly we see this on books we’ve just published: “Currently unavailable” This is really strange: Amazon uses a print-on-demand (POD) system, which means that when a book is ordered, it is printed and shipped directly from the printing facility. This is a […]

Databases

White Water Writers effectively runs as a publishing company, so one of the most important tools we use is our database of books. It may not be the most exciting part of our work, but it plays a vital role in making sure that our project runs smoothly and efficiently. Over the past couple of […]

Update to the Open Voice Factory

The Open Voice Factory has had an update, the start of a few we have planned over the next few months. It should be invisible to users – it’s mostly been changes to the internals so that things work more efficiently. Mildly worryingly the above paragraph is directly copy-pasted from our last blog post about […]

Tightrope

We are working on a new project called Tightrope. It’s goal is to get more young people interested in Cyber Security by talking about what Cyber Security really is, and showing people how little of it needs a keyboard and how much of it needs empathy, understanding, and imagination. We wrote six lessons with A-level […]

Google Ads

Our use of Google Ads has been extremely uneven: one project does astonished well, another does very badly. We’re starting to wonder if it’s a great idea. We received a Google Ads grant about two years ago; it gave us up to $10,000 worth of ad credit a month. Since then we’ve spent over $1,000 […]

Open Voice Factory Update

The Open Voice Factory has had an update, the start of a few we have planned over the next few months. It should be invisible to users – it’s mostly been changes to the internals so that things work more efficiently. In detail – some time ago we added some code that allowed OVF to […]

“Currently unavailable” on Amazon KDP

We had an interesting bug recently. One of our books was published by Amazon KDP, but it appeared as ‘unavailable’ immediately after publishing. This is very strange. Amazon prints books like ours on demand when they are ordered: they can never be out of stock (or even ‘in stock’ for that matter: stock is meaningless). […]

Infrastructure

Over the last few months we’ve moved all our online projects away from Dreamhost and over to Amazon Web Services. It was a steep learning curve of various sysadmin tasks but we had outgrown Dreamhost by some margin and had dealt with enough poor customer service to make it satisfying to leave. There have been […]