My Interview in Silicon Republic

I was recently interviewed by Ireland's leading tech news service, Silicon Republic, regarding the upcoming launch of FeedJournal's web service. The article is published online (see below) and is well worth a read. It talks about the future of traditional media and my visions for FeedJournal.

Direct link to online article: Bespoke newspapers on the way

Read My Blog as a Newspaper/Magazine

Starting today, I am offering my latest blog posts as a free magazine in PDF format. You will find the link to this blog's FeedJournal magazine in the left sidebar. Print it and read it wherever you like; during your commute, in bed or anywhere else where you prefer to be offline and rest your eyes from the computer screen.

As soon as I publish a new post the magazine is updated. The oldest post is pushed out to make room for the new one.

Even if reading my blog posts on paper does not excite you, you might be thrilled to know that the same service will soon be available to all bloggers and other content providers who want to offer their readers the opportunity to enjoy the newspaper/magazine format.

In the coming days, I will publish information about how you easily can integrate and customize this service with your own RSS or Atom feed. Available customizations include logo, font selection, number of columns, page size, limits on articles, multiple feeds, deep linking, content filtering, etc.

Keep your eyes on this blog!

FeedJournal 2.0 Build 186 Released

Build 186 of FeedJournal 2.0 has been released. It contains the following changes and bug fixes:

• Publish button was not working in all configurations.
• Output folder is now defaulting to My Documents.
• Warning when attempting to publish an empty newspaper and helpful suggestions how to solve the problem.
• Changed position of dialog buttons.

Click here to download the file.

FeedJournal 2.0 Build 185 Released

The last FeedJournal builds contained a mean bug where the database was not found when opening the application from the Start menu or via the Desktop shortcut. Thanks Boris for pointing this out!

FeedJournal displayed an ugly database exception "No such table Issues", which is the first table it tries to access.

The bug is now fixed and there is a fresh build #185 available for download. Click here to download the file. Thank you Adamantium and Henrik Blomgren for kindly providing installation file hosting.

I will soon be going on vacation for a couple of weeks, but the development will continue even if you will notice a temporary hiatus in blog posts. Right now I am focusing on implementing an improved HTML parser for generating even better looking article layouts. And of course, web development continues and I will very soon be able to offer custom RSS newspapers over web services.

You will see it first on this blog, where a PDF newspaper with all the latest blog posts will be free to download. If you are a blogger or any other type of content provider and see yourself in need of such a solution please contact me!

FeedJournal.com Status Report

A while back I decided to port FeedJournal into a web application and offer it at feedjournal.com. The decision was greatly inspired by the user community who strongly voiced their opinion about choosing the web option. I had a vote here on my blog a month ago and a very large majority voted in favor of the web. The two most important factors were:

1. Not having to install the application locally
   
2. Cross platform availability
   

I am happy to announce that the development is well underway and going smooth. Due to the fact that the code base is C#/.NET 2.0, my choice of technology has naturally fallen on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server. As is a standard these days, I plan on including some AJAX in the interface to improve the user experience.

Users can expect a launch sometime this year. I plan to roll out features incrementally and having an early release with a basic feature set. The idea is to early on grow a strong user base who will influence FeedJournal's direction and future.

On the development side of things I am so far impressed with the development speed using ASP.NET. Together with Visual Studio and SubSonic for auto-generation of the database layer I am very satisfied with my work environment.

FeedJournal's progress will be posted here, so please sign up for the RSS feed and you will be sure to be first to know when the site will be operational for printing your own newspapers. The Windows version of FeedJournal will of course continue to be available as before.

Two major question marks at this stage are web design and hosting. I'd be happy to receive ideas from my readers to guide me in these decisions.

New FeedJournal 2.0 Build (#184)

A new version of FeedJournal is available for download!

What's new in this version:

• Improved installation program.
• Improved support for Atom 1.0 feeds.

Download the build from FeedJournal's download page.

Note about Blogspot/Blogger feeds:

If you previously had issues with Blogspot's Atom feeds you should try the new build. If you are using Blogspot's new feed URLs (ending with "posts/default") please use the workaround outlined in the FAQ.

FeedJournal as Desktop or Web Application

I have recently been approached by various users who would like to see FeedJournal as a web application where there would be no need for installation. Of course, as a web site it would also be easier to have a community where news feeds are sorted by for example popularity.

I am still sitting on the fence about this, so I would like to hear your opinion, please vote for your preferred option.