zinepal.com

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.

I've had some time to add two new features to zinepal.com. One is the "Quick Zine" toolbar button. Using this toolbar button you can directly create a printable PDF of the web page you are currently viewing. It's an easy way to access the useful PDF creation functionality of zinepal.com without having to go through the process of creating an entire zine.

The other feature is e-mail subscriptions for user zines and recurring zines. If you don't like subscribing via feeds this is another easy way to receive new zines as they are created. Try it out now, the e-mail subscribe link appears on all user profile pages and the pages of recurring zines. As soon as a user creates a new zine or a new issue of a recurring zine is published it will be emailed to you.

I've been quite busy lately, but today I had time to finish a useful new feature for zinepal.com: recurring zines. A recurring zine is based on an RSS feed and just pulls stories from the feed. It can be emailed to you at a specified time, for example every morning for breakfast. It's almost like getting the traditional newspaper delivered in the morning.

Recurring zines are very useful if you want to stay on top of someone else's reading. For example, my colleagues are using a recurring zine to create weekly reading material for the lunch room. This is based on a shared feed from Google Reader. One person picks out the good stories, shares them using Google Reader and then every week we have new reading material in the lunch room.

Try it out now, simply search for interesting feeds, click on the "more" link and there will be a new option to create a recurring zine. You can also directly enter a feed URL in the search box and it will give you the option to add the feed to zinepal.com and then create a recurring zine from it.

I've been slowly chipping away at improving the content detection and formatting code used by zinepal. This part of zinepal is responsible for identifying the important content on a web page and intelligently reformatting it into printable form. That is why zinepal.com works for almost any web site or news feed and you don't have to worry about manually formatting your zine.

Figuring out what the important content is and formatting it nicely for the many different web pages out there is a tricky problem. This is the part of zinepal that I spent a lot of time on before actually building the zinepal.com website. I was hoping to only spend a few days improving it, but as usual things took longer than expected. But not to worry, the updated functionality is in place now. It should produce much improved results for most web pages, including better handling of broken HTML, character encodings, floating content, and detection of comments on a page. Next time you create a zine you will be able to enjoy the improved results.

The layout of zines has also been changed a little bit to improve readability. Along with this a few smaller tweaks were made to the website, but overall there are no big user visible new features. However, that is going to change next week when I plan to roll out a new feature that will make creating zines a lot more convenient for many people. Stay tuned.

Today I implemented an updated design for zinepal.com. I think it is much nicer looking and hopefully also easier to use. Of course I am using rounded corners everywhere, just like any good Web 2.0 site should. I've also removed the toolbar button from the top-right corner and instead given it a prominent location on the front page. This is important since the zinepal.com database of news feeds is only just starting to be populated. Until more feeds are added to the database it is easier to create a zine using the toolbar button. More updates are coming over the weekend. In particular I am working on another revision of the page formatting algorithm that should greatly improve its reliability in edge cases.

The beta version of zinepal.com is finally online! This all started when I read a comment on reddit that complained that not many people read alternative online news and blogs. Therefore nobody knew the stories that the reddit user was talking about at the lunch-time water cooler conversations. That got me thinking: how can all the great alternative content that is already online be made more accessible to the average individual?

Yes, there are lots of great blogs for alternative news, but you have to know about them. Many blogs only post good content periodically, so you have to sort through the bad stuff to find something interesting. And what about the people that simply don't read online? Or the commuters sitting on buses and trains that don't have Internet access? After all, not everyone has an iPhone and even if they do, that little screen is not ideal for reading. There are also people like me, the casual readers, that pick up whatever newspaper just happens to be within reach when eating their lunch or relaxing at their favorite coffee shop.

That's where zinepal.com comes in. Imagine a clearinghouse for great alternative newspapers aka zines. No fancy formatting, images or videos -- just great content to read, enjoy, inform, challenge, and ponder. Instead of picking up the one-size-fits-all newspaper, I could be reading a custom zine when I stop by my local coffee shop. When I'm done reading I leave it behind to share with others. Anyone can now be an editor, pick out great content and start building a following of subscribers. Special interest groups can publish zines with stories that support their cause. Local bloggers can put their content in print and distribute it in their communities.

In the end I hope that this will help alternative content reach a bigger audience, in a convenient and easily accessible format. Maybe in future when I'm drinking my coffee and reaching for something to read I will find a zine right next to the regular old newspaper...