Hyperlocal101.com has posted a nice interview with me. If you have time give it a read and post your comments here.
Over the last few weeks I've been hard at work cleaning up the zinepal.com code and making it more robust. This work was completed last week and the site is now running on the new backend. The transition went pretty smooth with only a small hiccup affecting the delivery of recurring zines. This has now been fixed and everything should be back to normal.
The cleanup work took longer than expected, but now that it is done I can add new features much more easily. I'm planning on rolling out some often requested features over the next few weeks. The zinepal.com API is also still on the roadmap. Stay tuned.
The only user visible change with this transition is better support for eBook readers. When editing your user profile you can now see a new "eBook Reader" tab. On this tab you can specify your eBook reader e-mail address, the file format you would like to receive for your eBook reader (ePub, Kindle/Mobipocket or PDF) and whether you would like to only receive zines at your eBook reader e-mail address. This should help all the people that previously received zines on both their user account e-mail address and their eBook reader e-mail address.
Just a short blog post to wish everyone happy holidays. It's been quiet around here lately as I've been busy working on some new features. I hope to have them ready for launch sometime in January. I recently also moved zinepal.com to a new server. The move went quite well with only a small hiccup during the process. The new server seems to perform a lot better, so I am happy with the result.
That's it for now. Happy holidays!
Just a quick blog post to let everyone know that zinepal.com pro accounts are now available. All existing users have received a free Pro account until December 1st. Thank you to everyone that has already purchased their Pro account for future use.
At the moment I am working on rejigging some of the zinepal.com internals. This means there likely won't be any new user-visible features for the next little while, but once I'm done it will be easier and quicker to add features in future.
I'm doing this work in preparation for launching a zinepal.com API. The API will enable developers to call zinepal.com as a web service and turn HTML content into PDFs and eBooks. This will make it possible to easily integrate zinepal.com functionality into other web sites.
That is all for now. More to come in future.
I'm back from vacation and coincidentally it has also started raining on the west coast. Looks like I'll have more time to spend on zinepal.com in the coming months.
Thank you to everyone that took the time to respond to my poll about zinepal.com pro accounts. I appreciate all the insightful comments. On average most people thought that $6/month is a fair price. I will use this as a guideline and also offer a discount when you pay for a year in advance. The first month will always be free to new users.
I've started working on the payment integration and hope to launch the pro accounts in November. At that time all existing accounts will receive a one month grace period until their functionality will be limited to the free feature set. During the grace period you will be able to pay for more pro account usage time. Even if you don't pay right away, all your account settings will be saved. If you then upgrade to a pro account at a later time, everything will be as you left it.
That's it for now. Stay tuned!
To help me cover the cost of running and developing zinepal.com I've decided to introduce zinepal.com pro accounts in the near future. The idea is to charge a small fee for some of the premium features of the site while keeping the basic functionality available for free. Check out the pro account page to find out the exact difference between the free and pro accounts.
To find out how many people would be willing to pay for a pro account and what you think is a fair price, I have set up a web poll. If you like using zinepal.com and think you may be interested in a pro account, please take a minute to let me know what you think is a fair price. It would be very helpful to get feedback on this.
Right now I plan to offer the pro accounts on a monthly fee basis with a discount if you purchase for six months or a whole year in advance. As for timing, I will be out of town for much of October, so I don't expect to start with the pro accounts until sometime in November.
In other news, I've created a zinepal.com users group over at Google Groups. The Help page now provides a link to that group. I think this is a better way of running the Help section and hopefully users will be able to help each other, as I don't always get around to responding to e-mails right away.
I haven't written a blog entry in a while, so here is a quick update. September saw another good increase in traffic with a few nice articles written about zinepal:
It's always great to see zinepal in the news and it keeps me motivated to work on it. Along with the articles came quite a few e-mails asking about my future plans for the site. I haven't worked on it too much over summer, but here is a list of features that have been requested frequently and that I hope to add soon:
Recently I also finished a small update that fixes a few bugs in the PDF generator that caused zine creation to fail. Hopefully that is the last of them and the generator should be more reliable going forward. I've also made it possible to add links to advertising images and updated the PDF generator to use a higher resolution for images.
Finally, the site has seen a pretty big increase in traffic and I had to upgrade the hosting plan. To offset some of the costs of running the site I'm planning to introduce zinepal.com pro accounts soon. More on that in another blog post later this week.
Last week saw a spike in traffic when an article about zinepal.com appeared on the lifehacker front page. Everybody likes traffic, but unfortunately the site went down for about an hour after the initial wave of hits. I need to spend some time profiling to see if I can find a specific problem that triggered this, but most likely it's just that the server running zinepal.com is pretty small. If traffic keeps increasing I will have to upgrade to a bigger and better server.
Speaking of increasing traffic, after the lifehacker article there were two other nice blog posts about zinepal.com:
Other than the recent press things have been pretty quiet around here. There are a few features queued up that I need to finish, so stay tuned. Once it starts raining in Vancouver in fall I will be more productive.
Most of the people writing about zinepal.com always describe the ability to create PDFs from web content. But zinepal.com has also been able to create Mobipocket eBooks for quite some time. Mobipocket is the eBook file format used by the Amazon Kindle and other eBooks readers. It has been around for a long time and is proprietary in nature. Initially zinepal.com didn't support including images in the Mobipocket eBooks, only text was included. Now zinepal.com has been updated to also include images in Mobipocket files. This is a nice improvement, since the Kindle does support grayscale images.
Another new feature is support for the ePub file format. ePub is an open eBook file format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is the eBook file format used by the Sony eBook readers, such as the Sony PRS505 and Sony PRS700. Owners of Sony eBook readers and other ePub compatible devices and software should be very happy about this new feature.
In summary, zinepal.com now supports the following file formats - with text and images in all of them:
If you are using an eBook reader please leave a comment to let me know how it's working for you!
Here are two nice blog posts about zinepal.com:
If you have a good example of how you are using zinepal.com please post it in the comments!