This is a short message from the Engineering Dept.:
If you’ve already got an account, you might remember that we only asked you for an email address when you signed up. We hate long signup forms, and wanted to keep things as quick and simple as possible.
One of the things we’ve noticed from the beta programme is that lots of people want to collaborate on newspapers and to produce something in a group or a team. This sounds like a great idea and something we’re planning on supporting in the future.
But if we’re going to do that we need a way of identifying you to others, whilst respecting the privacy of your email address.
So, starting from today, we’re asking everyone on Newspaper Club to pick a username – something they’d like to be known by to others. If you’ve just received an invitation this won’t affect you – you’ll be asked for a username when you sign up. But if you’ve already got an account, when you next visit the site you’ll be asked to pick one before you can continue using the site. It’ll take just a few seconds and you can continue on your way.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks at Newspaper Club HQ. Lots of you will have been receiving your invitations to try out the beta, and we’ve been ironing out bugs in ARTHR and making sure everything is running as smoothly as could be.
The Engineering Dept. managed to squeeze in the time to make a newspaper of their own. It’s made entirely with ARTHR, our online layout tool, as a bit of a demo of what’s possible.
Atoms For Peace is a bit of a collection of articles about nuclear power. Lots of stuff that I’ve been meaning to read, but not got round to yet. I knocked it together in about 90 minutes, over a couple of sittings.
It’s got Eisenhower’s original speech:
An article from Wikipedia about the next generation of reactor designs:
Some pictures from the Library of Congress, found through Flickr Commons:
As you can see, it’s a black and white newspaper, and I printed five of them. The typography is crisp and clean:
And punchy images seem to work quite well:
Most of the articles were imported into ARTHR using the “import from web” function – you simply paste in a URL and ARTHR fetches the web page and grabs the content for you. Then I scoured around Wikipedia and Flickr for images I could use under license to break things up a bit and make the pages a bit more interesting. Such as this Uranium element, from Wikipedia:
Once everything was together, I spent a while rearranging everything and making it flow properly.
And then I went to print. I got in a couple of hours before the Tuesday printing deadline and received it in the post this morning (Friday).
If you’re interested in making something similar, or even entirely different, stick your email on the list and we’ll try and get an invite out to you shortly.
The Engineering Dept. have just got back from a nice lunch (bacon club sandwich; very nice thanks), because we reached a milestone this morning – the first invitations to the beta of Newspaper Club were sent out.
From today, we’ll be rolling out invitations to people who are signed up on the front of our site. We’re doing it slowly at first, making sure the site stays solid and ARTHR has no hiccups, but if you stick your name down hopefully we’ll get to you soon.
It’s lovely, and we’re super excited to see what else people get up to with Newspaper Club.
We know it’s not perfect – we’re sure there are lots of things that need improving, but that’s why this is a beta release. If you’ve got suggestions for things that we could do better, or if you’ve spotted a bug, let us know by emailing support@newspaperclub.co.uk.
One of the things we’ve had in the back of our minds whilst building the Newspaper Club site, is that we want to honour the traditions and aethetic of newspaper production and distribution, but without pastiching or somehow sucking up to it.
Some of our inspiration has come from visiting the printing presses, which have changed relatively little in the last couple of decades. (You can see some photos from our previous visits in Flickr.) But the news-gathering, design and layout process has changed hugely, and it’s a bit of shame that it’s something that we can’t experience first hand anymore.
But still, there are some lovely pieces of footage. A friend watched Absence of Malice the other day, a 1981 film by Sydney Pollack, starring Paul Newman. And whilst watching the opening sequence he thought of us.
Clackity ticker-tape machines! Teletypes! Nasty chemicals! Lots of beeping! If we can evoke just the smallest bit of this feeling, then I’ll be a happy man indeed.
Merry Christmas from the Engineering Dept!
Note to the Sales & Marketing Dept: site does not include repetitive beeping noises.
Yesterday we were locked down inside a meeting room in a secret location in central London.
Like most meeting accommodation, the facilities were mixed. Lacking in biscuits but offering a selection of boiled sweets. We weren’t offered a cup of tea but there was a Starbucks very nearby. Pens and paper were liberally available for ideation.
And best of all it was cheap. Free in fact.
Actually, it was Russell’s house. These details are important when you’re a start up.
The point of this session was to discuss (and hopefully) resolve the ‘What happens when you press ORDER’ question. I’m happy to announce we cracked that. We can’t tell you what happens just yet for confidentiality reasons, but the gist of it is that you’ll get an order number.
We must apologise for bothering you with all this trivial chat about orders and fulfillment, it must be terribly boring for you. It is for us. So, on to more exciting news!
Today we are pleased to announce our initial launch product line up! (Subject to change.)
We want to launch with a variety of products that allows different people to use newspaper club to do different things, but at the same time we want to keeps simple and make it as easy as possible for people to make their own newspapers, hence us offering a 12 page newspaper over certain quantities.
For launch the very low numbers are only available in black and white; 12 pages and 5 copies, 20 copies, 100 copies or 500 copies.
And these are available in full colour; 12 pages and 500 copies, 1000 copies, 2000 copies or 5000 copies.
You could in theory influence this line up by commenting below.
Anyway, we’ve had a good productive week, but now it’s the weekend so we need to unwind.
The Engineering Dept., got captions on images working today which is good. But it ended up being time-consuming, fiddly, and not strictly necessary for this stage in the project. We could certainly have launched without them.
And that’s the goal here – every page, every feature, every line of code has to get us closer to the smallest list of things we can possibly launch with. And when you’re a small, underfunded department like Engineering, it’s especially pertinent.
So, tomorrow morning the department will be making a sweep of the entire site, jotting some back-of-the-envelope estimates and prioritising what needs doing. And then doing it in that order. Onwards.
Honestly, the engineering bit of this project slightly terrified me before we started.
Most of the time when I’ve worked on web projects they’ve been comfortable. The tech is well known, if not by me, then by others I can draw upon. There’s lots of documentation and forums posts about that sort of stuff, and the unknowns are known.
But this is a bit different. Gluing together tools that weren’t designed for this into something that is robust and usable is always tricky. There are quite a lot of unknown unknowns.
That said, we’ve made some good progress. We’ve done the hard bit. One can add stories and pictures to a bucket of content for your newspaper, and then lay them out into spaces in a few different templates. Just the three at the moment, but once we’ve done a bit more design work, we’ll have more.
It feels newspaper like. We’ve got baseline grids, hyphenation, fully justified text and all that.
And I’m less scared now. I can begin to hold the project in my head, and think beyond the engineering, into something that’s usable by the folk that we’d like to use Newspaper Club.
And I reckon that’s pretty good progress for week three.
These are the posts from the Newspaper Club Blog filed under engineering.
We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong. And occasionally smug about where it's going right.
You can stick your name on the beta invite list here.
