Publisher Gets Images in Free Service

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.

Using FeedJournal #3: How to Publish Anything

This is the third post in a series on how to best take advantage of FeedJournal Reader. Today, I describe how you can select any text to be published in the next issue of your personalized newspaper.

If you are like me, you are probably receiving links to interesting online articles from a multitude of sources: e-mail, newsletters, ads, feeds, etc. I find that more and more relevant and interesting information is becoming available online, but I usually don't have opportunity to read it at the time of discovery. I would like to file it away and read it later.

The simplest strategy would be to bookmark the web page and browse my bookmarks once I have some time available. I could use my web browser's bookmark feature, an online boomarking service like Furl or del.icio.us, or use Instapaper. Provided I am online, these solutions allow me to access the relevant articles, but they don't allow me to read the article uninterrupted.

As I often touch upon in my blog, there is a fundamental problem with reading long texts on a computer. I suggest printing the articles on paper so you can concentrate fully on the reading task at hand and thereby use your reading time more effectively. A more bulky, but interesting, alternative to paper is of course the e-reader devices, which are doing an excellent job of emulating the experience of reading printed material.

If you decide to go the route of printing your reading list, you might find FeedJournal Reader a very attractive solution. It's a service, which allows you to subscribe to news feeds and periodically publish them in a personalized paper.

To make your paper even more valuable, you can mark any text not in your subscription list to be published in the upcoming issue. Below is my preferred recipe:

Ingredients (all free): One Google Notebook account with the browser extension (optional) and one FeedJournal Reader account.

Scenario: You have browsed to an interesting article but have no time to read it right now.

Instructions: Select the text with the mouse, right-click on the selection and choose "Note this (Google Notebook)". The text have now been saved to your Google Notebook account. Make sure it is added to a section marked as shared, as it enables RSS feeds from the notebook. Grab the feed URL from the public page of your Google Notebook and subscribe to it in FeedJournal Reader. Once you subscribed to that section's RSS feed, any additional entries you add to Google Notebook will be automatically published in FeedJournal Reader.

Another solution I have been successful with is Evernote 2.0 which replaces Google Notebook's functionality in the scenario above. Evernote is still in invitation-only beta mode, but looks very promising since it offers client applications for both web, Windows, Mac and mobile platforms. I have invites to share for accessing Evernote beta, so just let me know if you would like one.

UPDATE (Apr 24, 2008): As Ken Lawrence correctly pointed out to me, the Evernote solution does not work for FeedJournal, because it cuts off the notes if they are too long. This correction only invalidates the last paragraph of my blog post. Using the suggested Google Notebook service works as advertised. Thanks, Ken!

FeedJournal Adds Multilingual Support

Experimental support for additional languages is now available in FeedJournal Reader!

You set your language in "Edit Profile". This update adds support for the following encodings: Eastern Europe (Latin 2), Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Windows Baltic and Vietnamese. The right-to-left languages have not been tested yet so there are probably still some issues with them. Please let me know how it works in your language!

Using FeedJournal #2: Google Reader Integration

This is the second post in a series on how to best take advantage of FeedJournal Reader. Today's post describes how you can integrate FeedJournal with Google Reader, the most popular web based RSS reader . As I pointed out in the previous article, you'd rather keep feeds with shorter articles in your old RSS reader.

Still you will daily run into articles in Google Reader that you wished would show up in FeedJournal Reader. To do that, simply tag the article with "to FeedJournal" in GoogleReader.

To set up articles with this tag to be automatically published in the next print issue of FeedJournal, you have to make the tag public. This setting is available in "Manage Subscriptions" below Google Reader's subscription list. Click on the Tag tab and toggle the tag's state to public. This makes the "view public page" visible. At the bottom of the public page's right-hand column is a link to the RSS feed. That's the RSS feed you need to subscribe to in FeedJournal Reader.

Once you've made the tag public and subscribed to it, you can keep tagging articles in Google Reader to make them appear in your next print-edition of FeedJournal.

Good Luck!

Bug Squashed In Generate Newspaper

Today's update to FeedJournal Reader includes a fix for an annoying bug which occurred sporadically. Error messages about trying again after you hit the "Generate Newspaper" button should now have been rooted out. The update also includes some site optimizations to Reader.

I am currently probing the market for a more reliable web host; so if you have positive experiences from an ASP.NET + SQL Server hosting company I'll gratefully lend you an ear.

FeedJournal, Booklet Style

It's great fun to monitor Technorati for blogs posts talking about FeedJournal. There are some innovative usages out there and one of my favorites is from Nik Codes, who outlines how he uses FeedJournal in the restroom! Don't worry, the link is safe for work.

"I printed out Coding Horror and it really did feel like Jeff Atwood in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times."

Nik also mentions how he uses BookletCreator for folding FeedJournal into a nice booklet, a great suggestion which I'll be sure to add to the FAQ.

Using FeedJournal #1: Choosing Feeds to Import

This is the first in a series of posts describing how you can make FeedJournal into the newspaper you always wanted. Future planned posts in the series are "Filtering Active Feeds", "Sending Any Web Page to Your Next Issue" and "Getting Full Articles from Summary Feeds".

My RSS subscription list weighs in at 105 feeds today, which I believe is a normal number. How do I figure out which feeds will benefit from being moved to FeedJournal Reader?

To get to the answer, I ask myself 4 questions to see if a feed belongs in my regular RSS reader or in FeedJournal Reader:

1. How likely am I to be interested in reading a random article in this feed?
   I subscribe to this feed for a reason. If I am not interested to read all stuff in the feed, it typically means that I am digging for gold, waiting for that golden post to arrive. If that's the case, I would be better off reading it in Google Reader, and when that golden post shows up I may tag it, and subscribe to the tag in FeedJournal.
2. What is the length of articles published in the feed?
   If the articles are too short it might not be ideal to have them printed, as FeedJournal really shines when it comes to reading longer articles, uninterrupted. If the posts are short, odds are you will be able to read them with equivalent comprehension in your electronic RSS reader.
3. How urgent is it for me to read new items in this feed?
   If the feed contains alerts that I need to act on ASAP, I want to have them in my regular RSS reader, using a priority tag/folder, instead of wasting time printing them and maybe reading it half an hour later.
4. How likely am I to be wanting to follow a link to get more information?
   If the feed contains short summaries or referencing other resources on the web, like a new software patch or a forum post, I should be reading this on a computer. Expert geeks might want to look into wrapping such feeds with Yahoo Pipes and move the linked content into the actual feed - to have it ultimately served to FeedJournal.

These four questions can serve as rules of thumb for identifying feeds which might not be ideal for subscription in FeedJournal Reader. Feeds which pass these questions, will serve as excellent news sources for your print edition, and soon you might start to consider these bloggers as journalists.

As an example I will describe how I picked out which feeds to move from my Google Reader account to FeedJournal Reader. First, I divided my 105 feeds into categories:

• Niche blogs (Blogs specializing in subjects close to your heart): 36 subscriptions
• Friends' blogs: 6 subscriptions
• Local content (local bloggers and newspapers): 5 subscriptions
• Product blogs (software and service updates): 30 subscriptions
• Ego searches and my blog comments: 16 subscriptions
• Discussion fora: 6 subscriptions
• Alerts of new media (podcasts, video blogs and torrents): 6 subscriptions

Your feed subscription list can probably be categorized in the same sections. Let's examine the characteristics of each category:

Niche blogs is the largest category, hosting one third of all my subscriptions. These are the primary candidates for FeedJournal. As FeedJournal will print a maximum of 8 articles per feed in one issue (a limitation which will soon be history), you should ask yourself if you could afford to miss an article or two if the feed is very active. An excellent solution to feeds with too heavy traffic, no matter if you are reading them on paper or not, is to route them through AideRSS, a free service that filters out less popular articles from any feed.

Blogs of friends I want to keep up with is usually an excellent group to use with FeedJournal. It's very neat to have your friends' blog entries in your morning (or evening) paper!

Local content also works very well to have printed in your newspaper, especially if you're reading FeedJournal on public transportation as it might be fuel for conversation. You might also run into the blogger and break the news about her promotion to journalist!

Product blogs, ego searches, forum alerts and media alerts typically have content that requires access to a computer. These feeds normally belong in your RSS reader's subscription list.

As you can see, about half of my regular feed subscriptions (47/105) are candidates for being moved to FeedJournal, where they will have a better life. They will be printed on quality paper where they will have an imtimate tete-a-tete with the reader, without interruptions from e-mail, IM or twitter alerts. And, it's better for your eyes.