zinepal.com

Here are two nice blog posts about zinepal.com:

1. How a realtor is using zinepal.com to create monthly newsletters
2. Nice interview with me about zinepal.com (towards the end of the blog post)

If you have a good example of how you are using zinepal.com please post it in the comments!

It looks like zinepal.com is finally completely out of stealth mode. There's been a lot of blogging and twittering about the site in the last few weeks and traffic has gone up significantly. It all started with a blog post by Warren Ellis about zinepal.com and then it took off from there. A lot of the traffic also came from European and South American blogs and Twitter users. It's interesting to see a lot of zines being created in Spanish, Italian and French.

I'm pretty excited about all this traffic and the many zines that are being created. It's nice to see a lot of users returning a few days later to create more zines. That is the really important thing, that zinepal.com provides a real benefit so that people will continue to use it in future. Between responding to e-mails and fixing a few bugs I've recently also added the ability to edit the content of individual stories and apply story formatting. Now you can finally insert page and column breaks! You can also change the fonts and colors of each individual story.

Since it's summer I've been pretty busy with other activities, but the last few weeks have really motivated me to keep working on zinepal. I think the most important thing at the moment is to further polish the site and work out the remaining kinks. That is my plan right now and I've collected a good number of issues and suggestions that I want to address over the next few weeks. Adding support for images in eBooks is also on the list.

If you have other suggestions for what I should focus on please let me know!

There haven't been many user-visible updates to zinepal lately, which doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I've spent quite a bit of time cleaning up and tweaking a few things on the backend. You may have noticed the new rich-text editor for the zine introduction. This is the first result of some work to improve the zine creation process. Over the next little while I will be adding support for editing any story in your zine. This will let you fine-tune the automatically formatted content for display in PDF and eBook format. It will also be possible to decorate each story with different fonts, colors, borders, backgrounds, etc. In the end you will be able to create a much more engaging and customized zine.

A few other tweaks added recently: support for more delivery days (now only on weekdays or weekends), more fonts (Impact, Comic Sans, etc.) and scaling of story title font size relative to story text font size. I think polish like this really improves the overall zinepal experience. Some of these changes were requested by users, so if you have feedback, please send it my way.

In other news, zinepal.com has been selected as one of the participants in the 2010 Wireless & New Media Showcase. This is an initiative spearheaded by New Media BC, WINBC and the 2010 Commerce Center to showcase leading BC new media companies during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. I'm very pleased that zinepal.com has been selected to participate in the initiative. Participants will work together to create a showcase and service based on the latest wireless and new media technologies. The aim is to provide visitors, delegates and media attendees with an enhanced experience at the games and "wow" them with a unique showcase and services based on made-in-BC technologies. Stay tuned to find out more!

Last week I added a new feature to zinepal.com: custom images in the page footers. What this means is that you can now insert different images in the footers of all pages. An image can either span the entire page or you can have one image in each column. The idea behind this is that zine creators can now insert advertising into their zines. This is already being used successfully with the kitsilano.ca zine.

The size of the images is either 2" x 7.7" for the entire page or 2" x 3.75" for one column. To determine the size of an image in inches you have to look at the pixels-per-inch or dots-per-inch resolution of the image. Most good image editors will allow you to view this information and also resize images to the size in inches that you need. If you are looking for a good image editor to use on Windows, I can recommend Paint.NET. It's easy to use and works very well.

Along with the advertising feature I've also added zine "templates". Templates allow you to save all the settings for a zine and then later on apply them to another zine. This makes a lot of sense if you spend time customizing a zine with an introduction, logos, fonts and advertising. Just save it as a template and later on you can easily reuse the settings.

You can find both of these new features when you create your zine. I've also added tabs to the user interface on the zine customization page. It makes things look a little bit cleaner and less crowded.

Finally, I should mention that kitsilano.ca has now printed 1000 paper issues of their zine for the month of April. They have been distributed all around the Kitsilano neighbourhood here in Vancouver. This is very cool and I'm excited to see zinepal.com used like this. Hopefully it's a great success and they will print more issues in future.

It looks like the majority of the new zinepal.com users are working in the real estate business. That is a niche market I had not anticipated at all, but it is great to see that zinepal is useful in this area. So, hello to all the realtors! Let me know what you think about zinepal.com and if you have any feature requests specific to your business.

Looking at the various zines that have been created it appears that one common problem is repeated content included at the end of each story. For example, links to related blog postings, signature lines, images from Feedburner, etc. This is fine for the online version since you would only be looking at one story at a time. It doesn't look so great in the PDF since the content is repeated throughout the zine and takes up a lot of space.

I'll probably spend some time this week or next to automatically remove this superfluous content. It should be pretty easy to do and will make zines look a lot better, without requiring any additional work from the user. I'll also look into improving the content flow in the PDF version, so that there aren't as many gaps left by images that don't fit on a page. Since most real estate zines include pictures of houses this also seems like an important improvement. Stay tuned...

I was busy this weekend and added Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket support to zinepal.com. In addition to the PDF format, zines are now also created in Mobipocket format. This eBook file format is fully supported by the Kindle and other eBook readers.

All zinepal.com user profiles now also have a new field to store your Kindle e-mail address. If you enter your Kindle e-mail address, then zinepal.com will e-mail your zines directly to the Kindle device. To set this up either enter your Kindle e-mail address when you create a new account, or when you are logged in click on "My Account" in the top-right and then click on "Edit" to edit your profile.

This is a free service from the zinepal.com side, but keep in mind that Amazon charges a fee for every document e-mailed to the Kindle. If you want to avoid that fee, then leave the field blank and instead transfer the zine to your Kindle using a wired connection.

Kindle testers wanted! Unfortunately I don't own a Kindle, so I have not been able to see what the zines look like on it. I've only tried this out using the Mobipocket Reader application for Windows. If you have a Kindle, it would be great if you could drop me a line and let me know how it's working for you.

Well, it's really been a while since I posted an update. One reason for not blogging is that I've had a real spark of energy lately and have been working on zinepal quite a lot. When I'm coding and tweaking, then there isn't much time for blogging.

I've made many further improvements to zine layout and the zine creation workflow. As I explained in my last post, zines now always use a two column layout. One thing I've done to further improve the visual appeal was to add "Georgia" and "Arial Black" to the font choices. Wait a minute, two more fonts and this is worth mentioning in a blog post? Turns out that choosing "Arial Black" for the story titles and "Georgia" for the main text makes the zines look much better. Little things really make a big difference. I've also tweaked a few other areas, such as not underlining the titles and instead adding a gray line after each story. Story authors and dates are now also shown below story titles by default. Oh, and did I mention that headers are now always kept together with the following paragraphs? All these tweaks and details result in much better looking zines.

This polishing work was prompted by the fact that I really wanted someone to actually print zines and distribute them. All the work paid off in that the first 100 printed issues of kitsilano.ca were distributed to coffee shops around the neighbourhood. This was an experiment to see if there is interest and if the zines would get picked up. Turns out it worked very well and we went through all 100 copies quickly. Next up we will be looking at printing 1000 issues in March and distributing them all across Kitsilano!

To support the larger distribution of zines I'm also adding advertising support to the site. It's still a work in progress, but in future all zine creators will be able to insert advertising into their zines.

The last change that I should mention is the improved zine creation workflow. The front page now features a big text area for directly entering feed URLs. A new zine preview is available so you can customize the zine and see what it looks like, before you create the final version. Adding a recurring zine is now also much easier - you can do it directly from within the normal workflow. You no longer need to use a separate form. Again, while it is not a huge change, it has made the site much easier to use. I've definitely noticed the difference when showing zinepal.com to someone that has never used it before. It's much more intuitive.

Apart from these bigger items I've also put a lot of work into fixing smaller bugs and glitches. Better handling of broken HTML, weird character encoding issues, better auto-detection of feed content, letting users manually select what content is in a feed, and more things like that.

That's it for today. Stay tuned for the advertising features coming soon!

There are some nice updates to zinepal.com this week! First, zines now always use a two-column layout by default. This creates easier to read and more professional looking zines. It works very well for text or text with some smaller images. There is still some work to be done to properly resize large images or handle overflowing text, but overall it now works very well for all common cases.

The other change is that the full zine formatting options are no available for ad-hoc zines, in addition to recurring zines. For example, this means you can now add a custom logo to your ad-hoc zines! Overall this is a very good change since it allows casual or new users to utilize all of the zinepal.com features.

The next task is to further improve the two-column zine layout and make some tweaks to the zinepal.com site layout. Stay tuned!

Also: here is a short video of me pitching zinepal.com at the Mobile Monday Vancouver event in November 2008.

I've been out of town and quite busy lately, but I have added a few new features to zinepal.com.

First, it is now possible to create a recurring zine from multiple feeds. Simply enter the feed URLs and zinepal.com will merge the feeds for you and sort the stories by date. It will then select the newest stories from all of the feeds. This allows anyone to create recurring zines from multiple feeds, without using an external feed reader to first merge the feeds.

Another change is the ability for users to specify whether RSS feeds include full or only partial content. When adding a new RSS feed users will be prompted with this question. Unfortunately this is required since there is no way to tell if the content "description" in the RSS feed is the full content or only a snippet. Luckily for Atom feeds this can be determined automatically.

The web design for the "Create" area of the site has also been overhauled. I think it's now a lot easier to create a zine for first-time visitors.

Finally, I will also be presenting a short pitch on zinepal.com at the Mobile Monday Vancouver event on November 3rd. MoMoVan is organized by the BC Wireless Industry association and takes place the first Monday of every month in fall/winter. I will post a blog entry about the event when I have time next week.

Last night zinepal.com presented at Launch Party Vancouver. Launch Party is a business networking event for the tech industry. For each party a few local startups are selected to demo their wares to the attendees. It turned out to be another great evening and I had a great time demoing zinepal.com - with lots of good feedback from everyone that stopped by. Overall it was a very invigorating experience and has renewed my commitment to keep working on zinepal.com, so expect more new features coming up in future.

Custom Logos and Link Options

One set of new features added recently are custom logo and link options. When you create a recurring zine you can now specify your own logo, a link for your logo and you can also hide the default title and page header. This is useful for bloggers that want to create a more custom look for their zines. The kitsilano.ca zine is a great example of this.