FeedJournal Blog

How TerPress Uses FeedJournal

2009-11-09T08:25:00.002+02:00

TerPress uses FeedJournal to generate weekly printable newspapers. The PDF newspaper is then freely hosted and embedded on the web using Issuu (other free options include doXtop and Scribd). TerPress is also printed and distributed to institutions, schools, universities, libraries and public locations.
TerPress is an Italian magazine that deals with culture, society, morality, and information on new contemporary languages. It has an editorial staff of 20 people and a constant stream of new visitors.

Only Publish Fresh Articles

2009-11-01T05:30:00.000+02:00

Up till today, FeedJournal Publisher users was limited to specifying a date, without time, when filtering articles from their feeds. For high-traffic feeds this was not inefficient. Also, when automating newspapers publishing, a hardcoded date is not appropriate.

Now, you can specify how old articles to include in the newspaper by entering an number of hours. For example, to include all feed articles published in the last 24 hours, you enter “–24h”. It’s as simple as that.

Let There Be Links

2009-10-25T23:46:00.001+02:00

One of the most requested features since the inception of FeedJournal has been hyperlink support in the generated PDF newspaper.

Now it is available!

Users of both the free FeedJournal Reader service and the commercial FeedJournal Publisher can today select the Show web-style links-setting to render links as blue underlined text. This is the default setting. Users who are primarily interested in a traditional paper reading experience can unselect the check box to hide the links. Regardless of this setting, links are always available in the PDF, and the reader sees the URL targets by hovering the linked text with the mouse pointer.

In addition to links inside the article, clicking the headline links to the web page where the full article is published. And in the byline, the feed name links to the web site where the articles are published. Article and feed links are always rendered as normal text, not as HTML links.

In addition to the new links, today’s update also includes better extraction of metadata for Atom feeds.

The new link feature has required large modifications of the code base, and much effort has gone into testing. However, should you run into any feed or articles where you notice abnormalities, please report them to support@feedjournal.com.

doXtop Press Release

2009-10-07T09:03:00.001+02:00

A new doXtop press release describes how FeedJournal Publisher let clients generate newspapers that doXtop hosts, distributes and adds social features to.

FeedJournal users can host, embed and collaborate on to their generated newspapers using a plethora of third-party services. DoXtop is a leading and professional provider in this area.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure to talk to Paul Caspers, creator of doXtop, about how we can go forward and extend our integration to offer an excellent user experience. When the new Publisher interface will be unveiled later this year, you will all be able to see how all the pieces fit together.

Liberty Newsprint, recently featured on this blog, is a prime example of how content providers are using FeedJournal and doXtop. Please have a look at the press release, embedded below using doXtop.

Individual newspapers deployed on doXtop

Site Update: IE Compatibility (2009-10-06)

2009-10-06T22:32:00.001+02:00

Recent user feedback has helped us to weed out a couple of bugs in the FeedJournal Reader service. Most importantly, a recent update to Internet Explorer, caused the Reader service to fail to generate newspapers.

Another issue caused articles without a publishing date to not be included in the newspaper.

Both of these bugs did not affect the commercial Publisher service. The fixes were deployed earlier today, and are now available to all users.

Change log:

Newspapers could not be generated in Internet Explorer (Thanks, TerPress!)
Include documents that don't have a valid publishing date (Thanks, Gerald!)
Minor design change to the subscription list
Updated to YUI 2.8.0r4

How Liberty Newsprint Uses FeedJournal

2009-07-28T21:28:00.002+03:00

Joel Robinson at Liberty Newsprint kindly set aside some time for me to ask him how he uses FeedJournal to create new print-issues of the aggregated Internet newspaper.

What is Liberty Newsprint?

An experiment in content (news) distribution. I want to see if I can brand a compelling customized newspaper that people would be interested in reading, and eventually, quality content producers interested in contributing to.

What are you using FeedJournal for?

I'm using the FeedJournal application to assemble a variety of daily full-text RSS feeds into the Liberty Newsprint Daily Edition.

How has FeedJournal helped you?

Without FeedJournal it would be impossible to gather daily RSS feeds from the internet in such a readable newspaper format.

How do you plan to use FeedJournal in the future?

Eventually I see using FeedJournal as the application to print anything from the internet on a regular basis. Also, I see it as the application I'll use to customize news and information when I eventually buy an e-reader like the Kindle or any other future e-reader device.

What other ways do you see people using FeedJournal?

Any large to medium sized company that writes newsletters or has a bulletin board from a variety of sources would do well to use FeedJournal Publisher. FeedJournal could definitely help order and manage the flow of institutional information in a much more timely and efficient way. If you work for a large company think of how many e-mails you get about things that you'd rather read in an easy to read, up to date, RSS newsletter. For example, lunches, the company picnic, party, retirement... the list is long.

Private newspapers

2009-07-12T22:15:00.001+03:00

A week ago, Stuart contacted me to ask if it is possible to generate newspapers with the Publisher service that are not hosted on FeedJournal. He was concerned about the privacy of his clients’ proprietary information.

Thanks to Stuart’s suggestions, it is now possible to disable FeedJournal hosting of PDF files by simply deselecting the check box Host on FeedJournal in the Publisher management interface. This new feature is immediately available to all users of the FeedJournal Publisher service.

HP’s New Web-Connected Printer & FeedJournal

2009-06-24T21:38:00.001+03:00

How can you use HP’s new computer-less printer to get your FeedJournal newspaper?

That was the first question I asked myself when I read the press release for HP’s innovative new web-enabled printer, with the outlandish name “HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web”. I still don’t have a definite answer to the question, but I am eager to make it as easy as possible for FeedJournal users to get the latest version of their personalized newspaper.

HP’s strategy of launching Tabbloid suddenly becomes a little bit more clear, even though they have a long way to go until they will have something similar to FeedJournal’s offering.

HP says in their press release that developers can distribute applications for the printer using HP Apps Studio, but it will not be available until the end of 2009. Attempts to contact HP have been fruitless so far. Hopefully they will offer an early access or beta program soon.

Too bad for HP, since it will give the competing printer companies a chance to catch up with their own web printers and newspaper generating software.

Site Update: Member Services (2009-06-13)

2009-06-13T22:45:00.001+03:00

We have rolled out an update to FeedJournal Publisher, adding two new settings in the Member Services configuration interface for Gold members (Thanks, Matthew!):

Option to hide feed source name in article header
Option to hide submission date in article header

The Real Estate Market

2009-05-26T22:56:00.001+03:00

When real-estate agent Ryan Shaughnessy posted an article about FeedJournal on The Lafayette Report I was very pleased. But I didn’t expect a torrent of 80(!) comments on that blog post from other real- estate agents who were enthusiastic about how FeedJournal could help them.

The article is Customers with No Internet Access? Convert Blog Content to Printed Newspaper with FeedJournal. It gives a great overview of the FeedJournal service from the perspective of the real-estate professional.

Now, the question is: How can I cater for this looming market apparently full of opportunities? I will put on my thinking-hat and see what I come up with. If you have any suggestions, please share them!

In the meantime I have rolled out some small bug fixes for FeedJournal. The most important one is a bug fix for the image caching algorithm, which caused some images to not appear, if they were too small for another user’s paper format.

FeedJournal API Enters Private Beta

2009-02-26T23:54:00.001+02:00

A FeedJournal API is now available for private early beta testing. With the API, it will be possible to quickly build a white-label web site using the FeedJournal engine to generate newspaper PDF files from any RSS feeds. The API also gives you access to an engine and database for user management.

The beta release of the API is available from today to a limited number of strategic partners. If you would be interested in using or reselling such a solution, you are welcome to contact me.

E-Book Reader Optimized Newspapers

2009-02-16T20:25:00.001+02:00

One of many interesting user comments and feature requests accumulating at FeedJournal’s UserVoice page is to better cater for e-book readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, iRex iLiad and Sony Reader Digital Book devices. With today’s update to FeedJournal Reader it is even easier.

Those among us who read our FeedJournal newspaper on an e-book reader are prime examples that FeedJournal does not have to be consumed as a “dead-tree” newspaper.

Today’s update provides optimized page sizes for the most popular devices. Just log in to the Reader service (or create a free account if you are not yet registered) and set the newspaper page size to be optimized for your e-reader model in the Edit Profile page.

I plan to soon roll out many more features targeting e-book readers, so make sure you vote for the features that are most important to you!

If your device of choice is not listed, please let me know and I will add it ASAP.

For your reference, I am including a table of the optimal full-screen reading pixel resolutions for the most popular e-book reader devices. I never managed to dig up a similar table myself in my research, so I hope it will be of use to someone.

Gadget	Optimal Width (pixel)	Optimal Height (pixel)
Amazon Kindle	525	640
iRex iLiad	768	940
Sony Reader	584	754

Site Update: Basic Publisher (2009-02-08)

2009-02-08T22:52:00.001+02:00

I have rolled out a new update for FeedJournal Publisher, fixing a bug in the free basic level service:

Relaxed the URL validation, where feed addresses with non-standard characters produced errors (Thanks, Nico!)

Site Update (2009-02-06)

2009-02-06T00:50:00.001+02:00

I have rolled out a new update for FeedJournal Reader, improving the GUI and layout. These are the major changes:

Improved parsing of non-standard feed URLs (Thanks, Robert!)
Added web and feed URL to the web interface (Thanks, Tony!)
Repositioned the delete button so that new users won’t have to hunt it down.

In addition, I also updated the blog post links on the feedjournal.com to post to this blog.

New FeedJournal LinkedIn Group

2008-12-29T21:35:00.000+02:00

Are you on LinkedIn and love FeedJournal? Now you have a chance to express your love by joining the brand new FeedJournal LinkedIn group! This way you can showcase the FeedJournal logo on your profile page, engage in forum discussions, and connect with other users of the service.

FeedJournal Publisher Does E-Mail

2008-12-08T22:36:00.000+02:00

A small but often requested feature has been added to FeedJournal Publisher. It is now possible to define e-mail recipients that will be sent new issues of generated newspapers as attachments. Please try out the new function and let me know how it works.

This feaure is available to all FeedJournal Publisher Gold members.

Master New Media Reviews FeedJournal

2008-12-01T21:52:00.000+02:00

Robin Good's Master New Media site took a deep look at FeedJournal today. Daniele Bazzano is writing about his experiences using FeedJournal Reader and Publisher. In a well-researched review he also pits FeedJournal against the competition.

Full Articles from The Guardian in RSS Format

2008-10-28T09:18:00.000+02:00

Last week, UK newspaper giant The Guardian took the bold step of introducing full articles in their RSS feeds. This first in the industry is a very welcome move to FeedJournal Reader users, who have struggled to include full news articles in their personalized newspapers. Finally, there is a reliable news source to hook up with to get news in FeedJournal format. Let's hope that more major news sites follow their lead!

All sections of The Guardian are provided as RSS feeds. You find the feed URL in the Webfeed link to the top right of each web page (see image). Alternatively, you can add "/rss" to the end of any URL from The Guardian to get the to the full RSS version of that section. For example, the URL for the World news feed is http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/rss. More information about The Guardian's RSS feeds is available here.

Users that sign up for a free FeedJournal Reader account will automatically see The Guardian's World News section in their subscription list.

If you would like to further filter a feed, I recommend third-party web services, such as FeedRinse to only view articles that contain a specific keyword within a feed.

NAA on Personalized Newspapers

2008-10-07T23:13:00.000+02:00

Newspaper Association of America has an interesting article on their site about personalized newspapers. The article is long, but interesting and well worth the read. It obviously focuses on delivering a printed newspaper to your door. While FeedJournal leaves the printing part to you and your own printer, it is great to see the subject being treated in this way. The article is available online.

How would you like to see your personal newspaper designed, printed and delivered?

Finishing September

2008-09-29T15:16:00.000+03:00

I realized that I haven't posted during September so an update is due. From FeedJournal's perspective, I hope to be able to post exciting news soon. There are a couple of interesting collaboration projects in the works that could turn out really well. Stay tuned!

On the personal side I am getting ready to play the upcoming online chess tournament T37 for the Poisoned Pawns team. Wish me luck!

10 Benefits of Building Software as a Service (SaaS)

2008-08-28T22:03:00.000+03:00

Definition: "Software as a service [...] is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet." (Wikipedia)

Software as a Service (SaaS) can be a very attractive model for software vendors. Here, I share my experiences of transforming the desktop application FeedJournal to use the SaaS model.

FeedJournal was born into this world as a .NET desktop application; a fruit of Microsoft's Made In Express Contest that ran in 2006. After the contest (First Prize, thank you Microsoft!), I took some time off to learn ASP.NET and port the application to the web. The port itself wasn't too cumbersome; most of my time was spent learning the development platform and web development patterns. Today, FeedJournal Publisher employs the SaaS model throughout, and users can run it from their web browser, or by using a REST API. Below, I count 10 obvious benefits that came from this transition:

1. Fear the Hacker

"FeedJournal will not be reverse-engineered!"

My initial reason for turning to the web was purely technical. FeedJournal was (and still is) unique in the way it automatically orgainizes articles in a slick newspaper format. I was worried that someone would reverse-engineer, copy and rebrand my invention as a competing product. It is particularly easy to reverse-engineer .NET and Java applications, because they are distributed as intermediate byte-code and not as machine code. By providing a free demo download of FeedJournal, the stage was set for any evil hacker to play copycat.

By instead deploying the application to a web server, the binaries are never exposed to the end-user. This is a huge benefit for anyone who does not trust the power of utilities to obfuscate byte-code. Now, my build process is also simpler because I do need to run the application through an obfuscator on each build.

2. Fear the Cracker

"FeedJournal's registration system cannot be cracked!"

Many people will never pay for software. And not because they opt to use free software, but rather because it is relatively simple to get hold of pirated copies. Sadly, it is often more simple to use pirated software than to hop through the loops of registering a product legally.

Some people argue that pirated software is beneficial for the industry. They claim that pirated software gets exposure that will generate more sales. Be that as it may, I take my chances by eliminating the risk of anyone cracking my piece of software by using the SaaS approach. No cracks or keygens will work to gain illegal access to FeedJournal. And even if it such a crack would be possible, I can easily patch the security hole for all users at the same time. No old crackable versions would be available anywhere.

3. Finance

"The monthly sales are stable!"

Having users subscribe to use a product is very attractive from a financial point of view. The earnings become less erratic and it is also more attractive to users who only need to use the service for a shorter amount of time.

Charging subscription fees for locally installed software is not practical. Many software vendors instead charge a running support fee, which seems to be working quite well for larger companies. On the other hand, support still costs money for the organization and it doesn't fit in with the attractive software utopia where you build a product once and sell it forever.

But, by having the software hosted on your server, it suddenly becomes acceptable to charge a subscription fee for access. This is perhaps the most attractive aspect of SaaS from a business perspective!

4. Usage Statistics

"I know how many users generate a newspaper each day, and which functions people use!"

For a desktop application, you know how many users have downloaded and registered your product. But it is more difficult to know how many people have installed it and actively use it. Ping-back solutions, where the application secretly sends a message to the author's web site, is frowned upon and can be disabled by users with a firewall.

For a hosted application you will get a huge amount of statistics at no cost at all. It doesn't matter if you host it on your own server farm/basement or use a hosting provider - you are guaranteed to have more data than you could shake a stick at. This data can of course be used to improve your marketing focus (where are my users from and from which sites did they arrive?) and product development (which features are most popular?).

5. Catching Bugs

"If something bad happens in the software, I'll be the first to know!"

Software is difficult to write. Sometimes things go wrong and the application throws an exception. If the user sees an exception, he will obviously think less of the software and perhaps stop to use it. When desktop applications crashes, the author will find out about it only if the user takes the trouble of submitting a bug report. Even if the user submits a report, it is likely to miss the detailed information the developers require to pinpoint and squash the bug.

A hosted application can easily catch and log all exceptions directly to the server. Additionally, you could send exceptions to an e-mail or instant messaging address to be notified right away. This ensures that you have a complete image of all problems in your software, and it will be easier to assess which bugs affect users the most.

6. Deployment

"Prospects can start to use the software within 20 seconds of landing on feedjournal.com!"

The barrier to entry for a web application is of course much smaller than that of an equivalent desktop application. No download and installation of the product are required. Simply register a new user account and you are set. Also, dependencies can cause problems in desktop applications, where different applications require different versions of the same DLL or framework. All of those headaches are gone in the SaaS world. Additionally, it is much easier to manage and deploy resources (fonts, images, etc.), because they only need to be installed on the web server.

And, as a big bonus, you don't need to worry about users running ancient versions of your product - the product is only installed on the server and the vendor updates it whenever he wants!

7. End-User Configurations

"Linux or Mac? No .NET/Java framework installed? I don't care!"

FeedJournal can be used by anyone with a modern browser and PDF reader. In short, basic software that is available on all desktops configurations.

FeedJournal was initially available as a Windows .NET application. It wasn't long until requests started to pour in for supporting Mac OSX, Linux and older Windows versions. It is difficult enough to develop software for one platform, who needs the headache of supporting a multi-platform product?

A web application still needs to pay attention to different web browsers on various operating systems, but these problems are tiny in comparison - especially when using cross-browser libraries such as JQuery or Yahoo UI.

8. License Registration

"The serial number will never again be caught by the spam filter!"

FeedJournal Publisher users don't have to worry about registration, because registration is automatic on payment approval.

Anyone who had to deal with the business end of product registration knows that as soon as registration keys need to be handled, the headaches grow. Users mistype the serial, they copy and paste the wrong section, or generally need someone to hold their hand while registering the software. Using SaaS, you eliminate the step where the user registers. Simply provide a PayPal link and set up some simple automatic or semi-automatic flow where the user's subscription expiry date changes accordingly.

9. The Multi-Computer User

"Users can generate their newspaper from any Internet café!"

It is more and more common that people use multiple computers during the day or week. Perhaps they have one or multiple computers at home and another at work. These users do not want to buy one end-user license for each computer, but they would still want to access the software from multiple workstations. Again, SaaS solves this problem that would require some hard thinking from the developer of the desktop application.

10. Always Connected

"The end of 'Cannot connect to the Internet' problems!"

There is no longer any need to handle issues with end-users behind proxies or firewalls. As soon as they can access the web, they can use your web application. You know that your application will always be able to access online content.

In summary, the Software as a Service architecture and business models can be very attractive choices for people trying to make a living from building, maintaining and selling software. Saas is not a model that fits all applications, but you should keep it in mind for your next software product!

Back from My Vacation

2008-08-10T22:03:00.000+03:00

It's been quiet around here lately. The reason is that I've been on a 3-week long vacation in Sweden, visiting family and friends. I am back home now, and eager to get started working on FeedJournal again.

I'm grateful for all votes, comments and suggestion that have been streaming in to the UserVoice page I set up before my vacation. A lot of people want to get their new issues automatically by e-mail. I'm sitting on the fence on that one, because it will put a lot more strain on the web server and I will risk winding up with a lot of wasted bandwith if people sign up with temporary e-mail addresses and then just forget about the service (which I do myself, all the time). The current architecture for FeedJournal Reader also make good use of the client browser for fetching feeds; logic that would need to be moved to the server. On the other hand, FeedJournal Publisher already implements all the feed handling server-side so it's not that I would need to reinvent the wheel here. I see the benefit of e-mailed issues for Kindle users especially, but I need to spend some more time thinking through the solution.

This week I plan to improve the handling of unavailable feeds in FeedJournal Publisher. Today, as soon as a request to a feed URL is not responding, I simply abort the generation because I considered an incomplete issue to be undesirable. However, this approach has disturbed some of the gold members, and I am now going to keep generating the issue while reporting unavailable feeds in the return message.

Vote for FeedJournal's Future

2008-07-01T22:20:00.000+03:00

It is now dead-simple to request and vote for the FeedJournal features you want to see added to future updates. The top requested features can be voted on from both the Reader and Member Services pages. Head over to FeedJournal's UserVoice page to add your own suggestions, cast your vote for what to add next, or just browse around the submitted feature requests. I will make sure to use this input to decide which features get implemented next.

popSiren Gets Her Hands on FeedJournal

2008-06-19T00:20:00.000+03:00

Sarah Lane over at popSiren had the good taste of recording a video review of my FeedJournal Reader service earlier this week. She had solely positive things to say about the RSS newspaper and I certainly appreciate the exposure! I'll keep the video embedded on FeedJournal's front page for a while - I think it can be a good way of presenting the service to new visitors who prefer to watch a video instead of reading about it.

Publisher Gets Images in Free Service

2008-05-18T23:21:00.000+03:00

Images are now freely available in FeedJournal Publisher, allowing any blogger or content provider to generate a great-looking PDF out of their latest writings. This feature was previously reserved for paying Gold members, but is now free for all to use!

At the same time, the FeedJournal subscription model got simplified, only one paid subscription option is now available: Gold. I found that the Silver option only served to confuse potential customers. The new model is more in line with FeedJournal's focus on simplicity.

The Publisher page has also been improved to better showcase the newspaper layout. Today, PDF publishers have the luxury of choosing between at least two brilliant solutions for embedding PDF content on their web site: Scribd and Issuu. As they both offer very competitive packages for the same unbeatable price (free), the choice is tough. Issuu offers a slightly sexier experience, but Scribd on the other hand have a good programming interface for automating the upload process. I chose to use Scribd for embedding my blog's newspaper as an example.