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I've been pretty busy lately and haven't worked on zinepal.com that much.

Last week I also found out about the Knight Foundation News Challenge. The Knight Foundation is a not-for-profit group that grants awards to new media and journalism projects through their News Challenge. Unfortunately the 2009 challenge closed on November 1st and I didn't have enough time to apply.

Last year the printcasting.com project was awarded a significant grant through this challenge. The interesting thing is that their ideas are pretty much exactly the same things I am trying to achieve with zinepal.com. Now I really wish I had heard about this challenge sooner.

But at least now I know what the whole concept behind zinepal.com is called: printcasting. :-)

I demoed zinepal.com at Launch Party Vancouver yesterday. Go to the zinepal.com blog to read a bit more about it.

I also submitted a zinepal.com video for their contest. Go here to check it out and don't forget to vote for me.

zinepal.com is my latest project that I've been working on for half a year now. Zinepal enables you to easily create custom printable zines from any online content. While it is primarily intended for blog content it will work with any web page that provides substantial text or image content that can be isolated and reformatted for printing.

The Idea

There are two main ideas that motivated me to work on zinepal.com. The first is to bridge the gap between online media and the traditional paper media. Zinepal enables bloggers to easily make their content available as a printable zine. When readers print the blog zine the content is now reaching a whole new audience. Readers in coffee shops, on the bus, in the park ... all the places the Internet either doesn't go or is inconvenient to use. I mean, who wants to read the newspaper on their iPhone? This can create a viral effect as readers leave behind copies of the blog zine and new readers pick it up. For example, you may find a blog zine from local blogs in your favorite coffee shop, providing you with great alternative content that is relevant to you.

The other idea behind Zinepal is to cater to another group of Internet users. Currently you could broadly classify Internet users as content creators and content consumers. Content creators are the bloggers that regularly write on their blog. The consumers are the readers of blog content and other Internet news outlets. As a creator I may frequently write blog content that is not interesting to a larger audience. The consumers are now faced with the task of sorting through many blogs to find the small nuggets of content they are interested in. For example, some of my friends have hundreds of blogs in their feed readers and have to sort through all the uninteresting content to find the good stuff.

This is where the new group of Internet users comes in: the editors. As opposed to sites driven by popular opinion such as Digg or Reddit, the editors focus on their specific topics of interest and create zines based on this. As a reader I can then follow the zines of the editors I trust. I now have a human filter that does all the work of sorting through blogs for me. The advantage to the editors is the ability to gain recognition and readership for their custom zines, the same way good bloggers gain readership for their blog.

Technical Challenges

The biggest technical challenge for Zinepal was coming up with the technology to reliably extract and reformat content from all the different blogs and websites on the Internet. This was required due to the fact that most RSS or Atom feeds only include snippets of content in the feed. I've spent most of my time so far working on this technology and getting it to the point where it works reasonably well. It's still not perfect and I can think of a few more important enhancements to make, but at least for a start I think it is good enough.

Instead lately I have been focusing on the website part of Zinepal to enable users to actually start using the technology. So please, go ahead and visit zinepal.com to give it a try!

Due to the renewed popularity of File Type Manager (mainly because of Windows Vista) I've decided to make the source code available. Maybe somebody else feels like working on this program some more. Keep in mind that I wrote this when in high school and just learning how to program, so it probably isn't the greatest code. Also it's written in Visual Basic 6. Ugh.

File Type Manager 2.0.1 Source Code

Note that I've licensed it under the LGPL. It includes an ActiveX control that displays the file types, so you could re-use that somewhere else if you wanted to.

Two people in my life have started publishing their own web comics. The first one is my dad, who is publishing his Neatstep comic. He's actually been doing this for over a year now and he keeps refining and redrawing the cartoons. That's because he's a perfectionist ... and he wants them to be perfect. Either way, you can already check them out online at neatstep.com.

The other person is my former roommate Pat who is working on his Terrible Reality comic. He also started that a while ago, but then he went to Peru for a few months and stopped. But now he is back. I'm going to have to take credit for coming up with the phrase "Terrible Reality" that he is now using as the name for his cartoon. Maybe one day he will add a comic that explains the origin ...

Anyway, this is kind of funny since the two comics are both based on the life experiences of the writers, but they could not be any more different. You should check them out, they are both quite awesome.