zinepal.com - create custom printable zines from any online content
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!
