The sun is streaming through the windows, Mr Scruff is on the stereo, the England game is this afternoon, it seems like a good time to tell you all how we’re doing.

Good. We’re doing good.

More specifically, we’re doing the following things;

Tom is sitting next to me, he’s currently talking to a printer but he’s also writing code so we can offer international shipping. We’ve got a delivery company lined up, we’ve done a few test shipments, we’ve sorted out the pricing, we’ve just got to get the website working so y’all can order and pay. Which isn’t that easy. Each different order is a different weight which costs a different amount to ship to each country so making that intelligible on the website is a bit of a challenge. Seems to be coming together though. Tom reckons it’ll be finished this week. We’ll have an announcement on here when it’s up and running. Please note, it won’t be the whole world just yet. Just North America and Western and Central Europe for now. Details to follow.

Anne is up in Glasgow answering emails, taking orders and dealing with printers and customers. Getting her involved was one of the smartest things we could have done. Every time Ben or I are inclined to issue sarcastic advice to troubled customers she’s there just in time to stop us. Behind the scenes we’re also working on adding a bunch of community features to Newspaper Club – that’s where Anne will really come into her own.

Gareth’s doing all sorts of CEO stuff at the moment. (He’s not the CEO yet, but we’re hoping he will be soon.) He and I have been preparing investor documents so we can talk to people about raising more money for TOP SECRET PLANS. They must, of course, remain top secret but do not, as heavily rumoured, involve buying the Daily Mail. Gareth’s also been talking to printers up and down the world and we’re getting closer to our holy grail of being able to offer runs of just one paper, in colour. It’s not far now. Maybe a couple of months away.

Ben has mostly been doing designing – he made our lovely new front page. And we’re talking about getting some new templates done and we have a TOP SECRET PLAN to get a font made that’ll be specifically tailored to Newspaper Club purposes. That, of course, is TOP SECRET.

And I’ve been doing all sorts of TOP SECRET THINGS involving getting people to do new and interesting things with newsprint. And if you were to imagine that I was using TOP SECRET THINGS as a cloak for NOT DOING ANYTHING you’d be very wrong.

Ipex is the largest printing technology trade show in the English speaking world, and it’s on at the moment. So I decided to go.

I knew it was going to be big, but nothing quite prepares you for 11 halls of the Birmingham NEC. It’s absolutely huge.

That’s not surprising when you get inside. There are companies that must have relocated their entire industrial operations into the NEC for a week. Vast stands, with massive machines churning out demo print after demo print. Robot arms lifting parcel after parcel of newsprint. Conveyor belts with box after box going round and round. And it’s all shiny, clean and, dare I say, beautiful.

Technology trade shows are the same the worldwide. There are suited men wearing wrap-around microphones demoing hypnotising high-speed lamination machines. Huge bags of publicity materials to avoid. Branded 32MB USB sticks. Prize draws for obscure pieces of technology.

I came away slightly surprised that the technology is still marching towards printing more copies, faster and glossier. I guess that’s valid for certain section of the industry, but that’s not what we’re trying to do.

We’ve made it no secret that we’d like to be able to print one copy of a newspaper, on demand, shipped to you, preferably in colour. If we were called Glossy Magazine Club, we’d be there. But the thinner paper of newsprint is still an issue for many of the short-run machines.

That said, there are a handful of companies making strides, and at risk of breaching our strict “under promise, over deliver” policy, hopefully we’ll be there before too long.

And it made me more excited about Newspaper Club. At its simplest, we wrap all of these amazing technologies and systems in a friendly face; something that the printing industry finds hard to do. And printing is going from strength to strength – presses are still being bought, and they’re getting smaller, less polluting and more efficient.

Overall, despite leaving the NEC smelling of toner, it was a day well spent.

The Engineering Dept are currently on a mini-tour of the US, following SXSW (see previous). Somewhere on a mammoth train journey between San Francisco and New York, they managed to find the time to add a couple of features to ARTHR, which are live now.

First, one of the most requested changes: captions for images.

You can now add captions to images, allowing you to describe what’s going on in them, to provide credit to the photographer or to provide link to the Flickr page, for example.

We’ve also added more image position options (see the hastily sketched diagram below!), and you can now force images to fill 1/3rd or 2/3rds of the page. It’s not ground breaking, but hopefully it’ll give you a little bit more flexibility when laying out your pictures.

And we’ve fixed a couple of bugs that some of you had noticed – especially when changing your newspaper’s cover. As always, if you spot anything amiss, or if something doesn’t work for you, just drop us an email.

We thought it would be a good idea to print a newspaper while we were there and seeing as our panel was at the end of the week we thought we would include content generated during the conference.

Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing contained articles kindly written for us by Matt Jones, Bobbie Johnson, Clay Shirky, Warren Ellis, Dan Hill and James Bridle.

Chris Heathcote made a Buzz Word Bingo for our panel, David McCandless sent us a beautiful infographic, we included some Noticings from the week and we added a Walking Paper for Austin.

But my favourite bit was the centre spread. Foursquare and SimpleGeo very kindly gave us some anonymous checkin data from which Michal from Stamen made this gorgeous map of foursquare checkins during the conference. If you checked in on Monday, this was in the centre spread on Tuesday afternoon.

To make the newspaper we found this little nook inside the conference centre and set up a mini BRIG studio for two days.

The panel seemed to go really well and people seemed to like the newspaper which we handed out at the end.

Because our panel had Spime in the title, Bruce Sterling himself turned up. Luckily Twitter seemed to think he liked it.

One of the things we spoke about was analogue friction. Problems you encounter when making stuff in the real world as opposed to just on the web. We experienced this first hand as we neared the deadline for our newspaper just as Ev Williams started his keynote.

First they nicked Michal’s chair.

Then Engineering started to feel the pressure.

Then we tried to upload the files just as all the @ev’s brought the conference wifi to a halt. Eventually we had to go outside and upload via Michal’s MiFi.

We made it just in time.

We had a great time. Thanks to everyone who helped with the paper and thanks to everyone who came along to the panel.

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.

As always, let us know if you spot any problems.

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.

There are some more pictures over on Flickr.

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.

Our first customer was James Bridle, with a reprint of something we printed before Christmas for him. Immanent in the Manifold City: A Newspaper for Time-Travellers. James will be selling copies of it just as soon as we can get it him.

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.

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.

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.