zinepal.com Blog

interview with zinepal.com founder

frank — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:30:47 +0000

Hyperlocal101.com has posted a nice interview with me. If you have time give it a read and post your comments here.

new backend now live!

frank — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:38:30 +0000

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.

Happy Holidays!

frank — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:39:54 +0000

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!

zinepal.com pro accounts now available

frank — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:50:53 +0000

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.

back to work

frank — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:43:03 +0000

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.

coming soon: zinepal.com pro accounts

admin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:36:25 +0000

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.

quick update

frank — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:19:22 +0000

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

zinepal on lifehacker

frank — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:00:39 +0000

Last week saw a spike in traffic when an article about zinepal.com appeared on the lifehacker front page. Everybody likes traffic, but unfortunately the site went down for about an hour after the initial wave of hits. I need to spend some time profiling to see if I can find a specific problem that triggered this, but most likely it's just that the server running zinepal.com is pretty small. If traffic keeps increasing I will have to upgrade to a bigger and better server.

lots of eBook improvements

frank — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:37:20 +0000

Most of the people writing about zinepal.com always describe the ability to create PDFs from web content. But zinepal.com has also been able to create Mobipocket eBooks for quite some time. Mobipocket is the eBook file format used by the Amazon Kindle and other eBooks readers. It has been around for a long time and is proprietary in nature. Initially zinepal.com didn't support including images in the Mobipocket eBooks, only text was included. Now zinepal.com has been updated to also include images in Mobipocket files.

two nice blog posts about zinepal

frank — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:40:48 +0000

Here are two nice blog posts about zinepal.com:

If you have a good example of how you are using zinepal.com please post it in the comments!