new site design and recurring zines for multiple feeds

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.