The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

It is about time that FeedJournal gets a blog of its own, instead of being squeezed in here, on its founder’s personal blog. Although subscribers could use the label feed to subscribe only to FeedJournal related posts on my blog, I feel that it is better to niche the content in it’s own blog. My main reason for putting it off as long as I have, is the post frequency – I simply haven’t posted enough to warrant two separate blogs. My aim is to invite other FeedJournal users and enthusiasts to share their experiences with the service on the new FeedJournal blog, to help keep the content fresh there. New posts on the FeedJournal blog, will automatically be published in new FeedJournal Reader issues. The new blog is available here . Here, on my personal blog, I will continue my personal musings and random non-niched posts. Don’t expect more than a couple of posts a month here. All FeedJournal related stuff will go into the new blog.

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.

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.

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...

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.