The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

Are you on LinkedIn and love FeedJournal ? Now you have a chance to express your love by joining the brand new FeedJournal LinkedIn group ! This way you can showcase the FeedJournal logo on your profile page, engage in forum discussions, and connect with other users of the service.

A small but often requested feature has been added to FeedJournal Publisher . It is now possible to define e-mail recipients that will be sent new issues of generated newspapers as attachments. Please try out the new function and let me know how it works. This feaure is available to all FeedJournal Publisher Gold members.

Recently, the submission deadline passed for Google's 10 to the 100th contest , with a stupendous $10 million in the prize pool. More than 100,000 ideas to change the world were received. My entry has the extraordinary goal of saving the human race from extinction. Here's my idea. As a background, let's take the Fermi Paradox . It asks why we haven't had contact with alien lifeforms, despite our belief that alien civilizations are common in the universe. One theory trying to explain it is that a Great Filter stands in the way of the evolution of civilizations, causing their annihilation before reaching a stage where they are able to communicate with other civilizations. Such a filter could be either behind us or in our future. If it is in our future we need to mitigate its risks and prepare for it. Regardless if you believe in the Filter or not, the fact is that a number of existential risks pose a danger to our existence as a species. Some philosophers are estimatin...

Robin Good's Master New Media site took a deep look at FeedJournal today. Daniele Bazzano is writing about his experiences using FeedJournal Reader and Publisher. In a well-researched review he also pits FeedJournal against the competition.

Last week, UK newspaper giant The Guardian took the bold step of introducing full articles in their RSS feeds. This first in the industry is a very welcome move to FeedJournal Reader users, who have struggled to include full news articles in their personalized newspapers. Finally, there is a reliable news source to hook up with to get news in FeedJournal format. Let's hope that more major news sites follow their lead! All sections of The Guardian are provided as RSS feeds. You find the feed URL in the Webfeed link to the top right of each web page (see image). Alternatively, you can add "/rss" to the end of any URL from The Guardian to get the to the full RSS version of that section. For example, the URL for the World news feed is http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/rss . More information about The Guardian's RSS feeds is available here . Users that sign up for a free FeedJournal Reader account will automatically see The Guardian's World News section in their sub...

Newspaper Association of America has an interesting article on their site about personalized newspapers. The article is long, but interesting and well worth the read. It obviously focuses on delivering a printed newspaper to your door. While FeedJournal leaves the printing part to you and your own printer, it is great to see the subject being treated in this way. The article is available online . How would you like to see your personal newspaper designed, printed and delivered?

I realized that I haven't posted during September so an update is due. From FeedJournal 's perspective, I hope to be able to post exciting news soon. There are a couple of interesting collaboration projects in the works that could turn out really well. Stay tuned! On the personal side I am getting ready to play the upcoming online chess tournament T37 for the Poisoned Pawns team. Wish me luck!

Definition: "Software as a service [...] is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. " (Wikipedia) Software as a Service (SaaS) can be a very attractive model for software vendors. Here, I share my experiences of transforming the desktop application FeedJournal to use the SaaS model. FeedJournal was born into this world as a .NET desktop application; a fruit of Microsoft's Made In Express Contest that ran in 2006. After the contest (First Prize, thank you Microsoft!), I took some time off to learn ASP.NET and port the application to the web. The port itself wasn't too cumbersome; most of my time was spent learning the development platform and web development patterns. Today, FeedJournal Publisher employs the SaaS model throughout, and users can run it from their web browser, or by using a REST API. Below, I count 10 obvious benefits that came from this transition: 1. Fear the Hacker ...

It's been quiet around here lately. The reason is that I've been on a 3-week long vacation in Sweden, visiting family and friends. I am back home now, and eager to get started working on FeedJournal again. I'm grateful for all votes, comments and suggestion that have been streaming in to the UserVoice page I set up before my vacation. A lot of people want to get their new issues automatically by e-mail. I'm sitting on the fence on that one, because it will put a lot more strain on the web server and I will risk winding up with a lot of wasted bandwith if people sign up with temporary e-mail addresses and then just forget about the service (which I do myself, all the time). The current architecture for FeedJournal Reader also make good use of the client browser for fetching feeds; logic that would need to be moved to the server. On the other hand, FeedJournal Publisher already implements all the feed handling server-side so it's not that I would need to reinvent t...

It is now dead-simple to request and vote for the FeedJournal features you want to see added to future updates. The top requested features can be voted on from both the Reader and Member Services pages. Head over to FeedJournal's UserVoice page to add your own suggestions, cast your vote for what to add next, or just browse around the submitted feature requests. I will make sure to use this input to decide which features get implemented next.

Sarah Lane over at popSiren had the good taste of recording a video review of my FeedJournal Reader service earlier this week. She had solely positive things to say about the RSS newspaper and I certainly appreciate the exposure! I'll keep the video embedded on FeedJournal's front page for a while - I think it can be a good way of presenting the service to new visitors who prefer to watch a video instead of reading about it.

Two of my recent articles on .NET/Java interoperability have been published by the software development press. The first article is " Deploying an ASP.NET AJAX RSS Reader on Linux ". Here, I describes the simple steps required to deploy an ASP.NET AJAX application onto an open Java platform, such as Linux. It was published in .NET Developer's Journal and can be read online . The second article is " Integrate your SharePoint environment into the open standards-based WebSphere Portal platform using the Visual Studio IDE " (try to make that longer!). It discusses .NET/Java interoperability in an enterprise environment where SharePoint and WebSphere Portal co-exist. A solution is given for integrating Microsoft SharePoint sites inside IBM WebSphere Portal. The article was translated into German for dot.net magazin's 6.2008 issue . That translation is to the best of my knowledge not available online. The original English article is available however; both in th...

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...

With an e-mail address for your mobile phone you make it simple for friends and web services to reach you. Here I'll show you how to create a new e-mail address that will forward all messages to your mobile phone using SMS. It will not cost you more than one single SMS to set it all up. SMS is a great technology in many ways. It works on the most ancient of phones; it does not require a data plan and an SMS message is typically free to receive, depending on your operator. While some cellular operators provide a free e-mail to SMS gateway, most don't. The biggest problem is that it costs money to send SMS. Below is a method of working around that cost. I am aware of three different web services that offer free worldwide SMS notifications to registered users: Google Calendar, Jaiku and Twitter. ICQ used to offer it, but they now charge money for their SMS service. I investigated the different offerings to see if their infrastructure could provide public free access to sending ...

Once upon a time I wrote a desktop application named ContentSpy. It let you monitor web pages for changes, and notified you as updates became available. When I recently heard of the new Google App Engine being launched, I figured I would take a stab at porting ContentSpy to that platform. I am happy to report that I stopped my endeavors, after stumbling upon ChangeDetection , which offers exactly what I envisioned, for free! Another good thing coming out of this discovery is that it won't distract my focus from working on FeedJournal ... According to Alexa , ChangeDetection has been online since 02-Nov-1999. On the other hand, their Alexa history is only available since last summer. Wayback Machine doesn't have any historical records either. Technorati 's oldest indexed post referencing ChangeDetection is from December 2007, so I assume it's a new service. Besides, I can't imagine it having escaped me for that long! Anyway, ChangeDetection is wonderful in many way...

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...

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!

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 t...

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.

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 .

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 "G etting 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: 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 subscr...

It's been an interesting week. On February 19, the brand new FeedJournal Reader service launched and created a small buzz, boosting my daily unique visitor count to 10,000. Seven days later the traffic is still up there, and I thought it's a good time to do a retrospective to see which lessons could be learned form this experience. What I did to promote the release: - Sent a press release with pr.com. - Submitted suggestions to major Web 2.0 blogs and media. - Notified 30 powerful sneezers. - Blogged about it Before the release I always imagined the press release would be my strongest card for generating buzz. I figured print media should be interested in a technological innovation related to their field. As far as I know, the press release was only picked up by one source (online) plus Google News , so that was a big disappointment. I suspect pr.com might not be the best service for publishing press releases. I chose them because I knew Google News would pick it up, and I...

Just a quick note to let you know that image support is re-enabled with yesterday's update and everything seem to be working well so far. Next up here on my blog, will be a post reviewing the FeedJournal Reader release. During the weekend the site was blasted with traffic, and I with e-mail; I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to learn from that experience. After that I plan to run a series of posts describing how to best take advantage of FeedJournal, and how it integrates with different 3rd party services.

I wasn't prepared for the massive amount of traffic influx that suddenly hit FeedJournal Reader yesterday. I know that some of you ran into errors due to the heavy load, and I apologize for that. As a temporary measure I disabled image support in FeedJournal Reader. But don't worry, images will return soon! I am working hard to find a new and better scalable solution.

The time has come for FeedJournal Reader to get rid of its private beta scaffoldings. All users are now able to try the free service I've spent many nights on. Welcome in! I dislike beta tags so I am not sticking that label to FeedJournal Reader, despite it being a young solution. While I consider it to be stable, I will closely monitor how my web hosting provider handles up-scaling the traffic. The launch doesn't mean that I am planning to start to go to bed early. Far from it, I'm eager to continue working on new features for both the Reader and Publisher services. So please keep those feature requests, bug reports and comments coming. I'm committed to make FeedJournal a first-grade solution, both in terms of usability and usefulness - and I won't be able to do it without passionate users. A big "Thank You" to the testers for their comments and encouragement! Here's the press release : FeedJournal Reader Launches Free Service for Generating ...

"Getting Things Done" (GTD) tells you that keeping your inbox empty reduces stress. I like that. However, continuously removing and filing incoming items requires effort, especially if you're getting lots of e-mail. I've been toying with an alternative solution lately; one where you don't have to actively file e-mails but still get the benefits from the GTD process. My idea is that instead of your e-mail client opening the inbox by default, you instead go to a custom view with all your unread and starred/flagged messages. That way you will only see e-mails that are action items. By using this approach, e-mails will automatically disappear from the list as soon as you've opened them. If you need to follow up on an e-mail you simply star it and it will be visible in the start view until you remove that star. GMail does not officially support saved searches, but there are simple ways to make this work. Basically you can save a search as a browser bookmark and ...

Those of you who follow the FeedJournal updates in the discussion forum know that quite a few updates have trickled in lately. The most significant of those is probably the free inclusion of images for all users of FeedJournal Reader. I was initially toying with the idea to try to charge money for image support, but have since come to my senses. The feedback from the private beta testers have been very positive and the ride has been surprisingly smooth so far. I expect to launch the service within the coming weeks. The features I want to get in before are: Global image switch when generating your newspaper (handy when you want to save ink) JavaScript optimizations So, all in all, we're very close to a launch - crossing my fingers!

Are you on Facebook or Bebo ? With the help of FeedJournal you can now use those platforms to widen the reach of your blog. Share a  newspaper edition of your feed on any of the major social networks for free! To get started, simply visit FeedJournal Publisher , fill in your feed URL and follow the instructions on how to add the application to your Facebook or Bebo page. As previously announced, FeedJournal already has installers for iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Piczo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, plus a generic JavaScript snippet. Technorati Tags: facebook , bebo

Reading long articles on a computer is painful. Writing them can be even more painful. The problem is the constant interruptions and alluring distractions the computer brings. An e-mail alert here, and ad there, and then there's that cool flash game I furled this morning. My solution for uninterrupted reading is to print articles, preferably in FeedJournal format. The offline alternative to writing is of course a success-story, implemented by all authors of the past. Good old pen and paper. The problem is that sacrifices are made when writing offline: I type faster than I write; I get more pain in my hands from writing; spell and grammar check are unavailable. That's why I have been looking for a way to write uninterrupted and still use the computer. One option would be to choose a word processor's full-screen mode, to limit distractions. It has proven to be a poor option for me. Microsoft Word is not designed very well for that mode of operation and there are redundan...

How frustrating it can be to have a phrase dangling on the tip of your tongue, unable to find the right way to finish it! I wish there were a search engine that could answer questions like: What is the most common preposition after a specific verb? How do people typically finish a specific phrase? Which words usually lead up to this end of a sentence? Well, now there is! I built Phrase Finder where you can enter a part of a phrase and find out what are the most common word combinations before and after that phrase. You can search up to 6 leading words and 6 trailing words after the specified phrase unless the clause or sentence finishes before. To get the results, I parse and analyze the top 1,000 hits from Yahoo Web Search. As a bonus, it's pretty darn fun to play around with, especially if you're a word geek.

"Is FeedJournal a threat to newspapers?" That's the most common question people ask when they first hear about FeedJournal . As I see it, FeedJournal is not a threat by itself, as much as the blogosphere it represents. Readers today have seen the light in the form of the blog; fresh thought-provoking content from their favorite writers are just a mouse-click away. They don't care if the writer is a journalist at NY Times or someone with a free Blogger account. What they do care about is that the content is niched, relevant and fresh. If the readers on top of that has the opportunity to interact with the article and its author by comments - so much the better. Blogging means different things for different people. One important, and significantly large, group of bloggers write regularly, and on topic. These are the writers who are willing to take on the new role of the independant journalist. The smaller the niche, the larger the chance of keeping your readers. With t...

Monitoring reactions of FeedJournal Reader's beta testers is very interesting. This is a project I've been living and breathing for two years now, and it feels great to make it available again. FeedJournal had a short life as a Windows desktop application during the 1st half of 2007. This was subsequently removed in order to pave way for the web solution, which today is called FeedJournal Reader. That decision was made as a result of a blog poll, which showed a strong preference for a browser-based product. Along the way of finalizing the first version of FeedJournal Reader, I noticed some interest among bloggers and content providers to publish their articles as a PDF newspaper. As such a solution would be much simpler and faster to implement, and would offer a theoretically easier way to generate income via subscriptions, I decided to take a detour in the development work and offer FeedJournal Publisher first. Today, FeedJournal Publisher is a healthy baby. Many blogs ta...

A few days ago, FeedJournal Reader became available to a select group of devoted beta testers. The service, which is free, generates a newspaper with the latest content from your favorite feeds. The beta has been received very well so far. As expected, some minor bugs remain to be squashed before the service will be publicly available. In order not to keep you in too great anticipation of what to expect in FeedJournal Reader, here's a rundown of the basic functionality: Simple and Intuitive AJAX interface for adding and removing feeds from your subscription list. Categorization, although it does not yet effect the final PDF. Quick selection of articles to publish: "Everything since the last issue", or "all articles published during the last X days". A checkbox to override individual articles to include or exclude from the newspaper. Newspaper customization of paper size, paragraph count and margin size. Image support is disabled for new users. I am sti...