By Vasudev Ram
Saw this today, via this tweet by John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb:
API Developer Weekly, as the name suggests, is a weekly about APIs for developers, sponsored by LaunchAny and Casey Software.
From their site:
"API Developer Weekly is a weekly newsletter that is hyper-focused on the business, design, development, and deployment of APIs for web and mobile apps."
Just signed up for it and will see how interesting it is, over the next few weeks. I've been working on designing and implementing APIs for a while now, and also evangelizing them to some extent - see here, for example:
Winners of Bit.ly API Contest announced
The people behind API Developer Weekly are also coming out with an API Design Book.
If you want to try it, you can sign up for it here:
API Developer Weekly
- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises - Online Python training
Contact Page
Showing posts with label e-zines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label e-zines. Show all posts
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The Startup Magazine, Magcloud-powered, launching August 2011
By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com
Saw this on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com)
The Startup Magazine - http://thestartupmagazine.com/ - is to launch in early August 2011. As the name says, it is a magazine about startups; it will consist of interesting startup stories. It will be on sale in both digital and print format. The print format will be created using the Magcloud ( http://www.magcloud.com/ ) magazine print-on-demand service by Hewlett-Packard that I had blogged about earlier, here:
Start your own magazine with MagCloud, a cool new Hewlett-Packard startup:
http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2008/08/start-your-own-magazine-with-magcloud.html
Excerpt from the Startup Magazine front page:
[ The special issue of Hacker Monthly, "Startup Stories," was a smash hit. You, our readers, loved it and now you want more.
So we figured, why not make a new magazine out of it? Think of it as a monthly dose of "Founders At Work" or "Do More Faster." Wouldn't that be something?
We are hard at work making this happen, with a set deadline of August 8th, 2011. If you run a startup and have a story to tell, drop us a line. Otherwise, enter your email below so we can tell you when it has launched. ]
Hacker News thread about The Startup Magazine:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733797
Posted via email
- Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Start your own magazine with MagCloud, a cool new Hewlett-Packard startup
Did you ever wish you could start a magazine of your own? on any topic - in some area where you have skills or knowledge, on a personal hobby area? Or on any topic at all?
Now you can - all you need to be able to do is to create a PDF of the content.
MagCloud.com is a cool new startup by Hewlett-Packard that enables you to publish your own magazine.
Anyone can create a MagCloud reader/subscriber account. This type of account only allows you to view previews of magazines on the site, and to subscribe to magazines (which are delivered to you by post).
You need a MagCloud publisher account to create magazines. Publisher accounts are by invitation as of now, but anyone can apply. All you have to do is upload a PDF of your magazine to their site. The rest - printing, mailing, subscription management - is taken care of by them. (At present they only deliver to U.S. locations, but are planning to ship to other areas too.)
Magazines are printed and posted to you by MagCloud. They use their own HP Indigo printers to Print On Demand (POD).
They have some stipulations about the way your PDF should be created:
- One is using high resolution images, of 300 dpi (dots per inch).
- Another is that you have to use a specific size of "bleed" - a printing technical term - its something like margins around the edges of the content - in your PDF.
At the least, Adobe InDesign and Scribus (a free and open source desktop publishing software that can output to PDF) are supported as software to create PDFs. Other software may work too.
And, if your magazine is text-only, you may find my xtopdf toolkit for PDF creation, which is free software, to be one of the quickest and easiest ways of creating a PDF for your magazine (at least if you are a little computer-savvy and can use a command-line - you don't have to be a programmer).
All you need in order to use xtopdf is Python and the open source version of the ReportLab toolkit (version 1.17 or higher, but use the 1.x series, as xtopdf is not yet tested with the 2.x series of ReportLab).
Download Python from here (version 2.2 or higher).
Here is a guide to installing and using xtopdf on Windows. xtopdf works well on Linux too (in fact it was developed on Linux, and only later tested on Windows). Basically, all you have to do, on either Windows or Linux, is these steps (in brief):
- Install Python if not installed already
- Install the ReportLab toolkit; follow the instructions given in its README or INSTALL or similarly-named file to see how to install it, and to make it visible to Python.
- Install xtopdf (see its README file for how).
Then you can try out the individual programs that come with xtopdf (such as PDFBook.py mentioned below).
xtopdf even comes with a program (written using its own API), to create simple PDF books - look for the program called PDFBook.py in the xtopdf download .zip or .tar.gz file. PDFBook.py lets you create a PDF book from a set of text files, each of which could represent one chapter of the book (though it is not a restriction that each separate file should represent one chapter). So you could use it to create a PDF for your magazine for MagCloud, that consists of a set of text files, where each file contains an article created by one contributor. As long as you can ensure that all their articles follow the same layout decided by you, the end result will look consistent.
Based on my initial interaction with MagCloud, they seem to be quite enthusiastic and responsive to potential issues or questions of users. For example, some initial questions that I had were answered quite quickly.
Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
Now you can - all you need to be able to do is to create a PDF of the content.
MagCloud.com is a cool new startup by Hewlett-Packard that enables you to publish your own magazine.
Anyone can create a MagCloud reader/subscriber account. This type of account only allows you to view previews of magazines on the site, and to subscribe to magazines (which are delivered to you by post).
You need a MagCloud publisher account to create magazines. Publisher accounts are by invitation as of now, but anyone can apply. All you have to do is upload a PDF of your magazine to their site. The rest - printing, mailing, subscription management - is taken care of by them. (At present they only deliver to U.S. locations, but are planning to ship to other areas too.)
Magazines are printed and posted to you by MagCloud. They use their own HP Indigo printers to Print On Demand (POD).
They have some stipulations about the way your PDF should be created:
- One is using high resolution images, of 300 dpi (dots per inch).
- Another is that you have to use a specific size of "bleed" - a printing technical term - its something like margins around the edges of the content - in your PDF.
At the least, Adobe InDesign and Scribus (a free and open source desktop publishing software that can output to PDF) are supported as software to create PDFs. Other software may work too.
And, if your magazine is text-only, you may find my xtopdf toolkit for PDF creation, which is free software, to be one of the quickest and easiest ways of creating a PDF for your magazine (at least if you are a little computer-savvy and can use a command-line - you don't have to be a programmer).
All you need in order to use xtopdf is Python and the open source version of the ReportLab toolkit (version 1.17 or higher, but use the 1.x series, as xtopdf is not yet tested with the 2.x series of ReportLab).
Download Python from here (version 2.2 or higher).
Here is a guide to installing and using xtopdf on Windows. xtopdf works well on Linux too (in fact it was developed on Linux, and only later tested on Windows). Basically, all you have to do, on either Windows or Linux, is these steps (in brief):
- Install Python if not installed already
- Install the ReportLab toolkit; follow the instructions given in its README or INSTALL or similarly-named file to see how to install it, and to make it visible to Python.
- Install xtopdf (see its README file for how).
Then you can try out the individual programs that come with xtopdf (such as PDFBook.py mentioned below).
xtopdf even comes with a program (written using its own API), to create simple PDF books - look for the program called PDFBook.py in the xtopdf download .zip or .tar.gz file. PDFBook.py lets you create a PDF book from a set of text files, each of which could represent one chapter of the book (though it is not a restriction that each separate file should represent one chapter). So you could use it to create a PDF for your magazine for MagCloud, that consists of a set of text files, where each file contains an article created by one contributor. As long as you can ensure that all their articles follow the same layout decided by you, the end result will look consistent.
Based on my initial interaction with MagCloud, they seem to be quite enthusiastic and responsive to potential issues or questions of users. For example, some initial questions that I had were answered quite quickly.
Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises
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