busy behind the scenes

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!