Zinepal Blog

I haven't written a blog entry for too long, so here is a quick update. I'm busy working on re-designing the Zinepal website to make it look more professional and also address a number of usability issues. This is a pretty big job as I'm starting from scratch and cleaning up a lot of bad web design. Because of this I also can't release parts of the re-design once as they are done, it has to wait until the end when everything is finished. I'm getting close, so hopefully in a few weeks the new site will be live. Stay tuned!

There were some problems with the zinepal.com server earlier this evening. I had to roll the database back to an older backup from 12 hours ago. This means all zines that were created, new users that signed up or any other changes that were made in that time frame have been lost. Everything is ok again now and it should not happen again. My apologies for the problems, I hope this did not cause anyone a major inconvenience. If a zine that you previously created is now missing, then that explains why. Unfortunately you will have to re-create your zine if that is the case.

Over the weekend I launched the zinepal.com affiliate program. The program allows you to earn a commission for new Pro Account users that you refer. It's very easy to use and all you need to get started is a free zinepal.com account. Check out the affiliate program details to find out more.

I've also added a few new features recently, the main changes are:

• customizable page size and orientation
• customizable number of columns
• improved ePub output with proper table of contents listing
• increased maximum number of stories for Pro Accounts from 25 to 50

That's it for now. A few more features are coming soon!

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:

• Springwise: a nice article about zinepal.com
• Wired: the Italian edition of Wired writes about zinepal ... Google Translate does a decent job with this article
• Bloggingtips.com: use zinepal to rebadge your blog content

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:

• zinepal.com API so you can integrate the PDF and eBook creation functionality with other web sites
• one column layout and custom paper sizes
• cover pages and table of contents

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.